GSE professor Sam Wineburg weighs in on a call by former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels to prohibit the use of Howard Zinn's ‘A People's History of the United States” in school classes.
JConline.com (Journal & Courier, Lafayette, Ind.)
Dear Mitch, I hope you don’t mind the informality. I’ve felt like we share something in common ever since learning that you not onlyread my article about Howard Zinn but quoted from it approvingly in your press release.
Now that you’re a college president, it had to be embarrassing whenthose emails you wrote as governor came to light. You must’ve really hated “A People’s History” to put this request to your staff: “Can someone assure me that it is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?” I know you tried to spin it differently now that you’re a university president. But I gotta tell you, it sounds like censorship to me.
Back to us, Mitch. Despite your attempts to cozy up, we still have issues. When I criticized Zinn, my beef was with his certainty for conclusions where the evidence just wasn’t there. That’s what I teach my college students (same goes for high school students): That you evaluate an interpretation not by asking if it matches what you already think, but on the basis of its evidence. In my teaching, I pair Zinn with “A Patriot’s History of the United States.” I force my knee-jerk liberal Stanford students to contend with David Barton’s claims about America as a Christian nation, or Glenn Beck’s claims that Woodrow Wilson was the devil incarnate. Over and over, I ask students the same question: Does the evidence warrant the conclusions? I hope that if I assigned “Keeping the Republic” (I might, you’re a great writer), you would want me to ask the same question.
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