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Howard Zinn History Is The Memory Of States Sparknotes

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The purpose Howard zinn had in writing this book was “in telling the history of the United States: that we must not accept the memory of the states as our own. Nations are not communities and never has been.The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners”. From this quote I concluded that Howard Zinn was going to write this book from both sides in history …show more content…

The viewpoint is wrong because it is written from the the point of view of the upper class and ignores millions

Howard Zinn shows of the whole columbus not just the european side of history of him. We see the slatter not just the glory we see the human toll not just the conquest. We see the colonisation of the Americas and all the blood that was shredded for it. Columbus was even quoted in saying as soon as he got of the ship he was forcing the natives to tell him what they had and to give him all of their possessions. Howard zinn says history books as an explorer and the cause one of the world's worst genocides in history. Columbus also justified all of his actions by god by saying “god would have wanted this way”.

Chapter 2
In the beginning African Americans were brought to Virginia to be servant’s. It was considered normal and accepted by the communities to have African Americans to be your servants. In any case slavery become the norm and the superiority of whites and the inferiority of blacks was the social norm. There was also the pressure to keep the superior and inferior social classes. With it developed racial feeling, this accompanied the inferior position of blacks in America for the past 350 years--the combination of inferior status and derogatory thought is what we call racism. (Page

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