Hello, I’m Italian and I’m reading what I understood to be a classic in American HIstory. I’m throug 100 pagesi in and I have the feeling that the author is a bit too partisan and unbalanced. Sometimes I feel that he had already decided what happened and then he tries to find facts that confirm his prejudices.
Hence, I’m asking if someone out there knows another book about the same subjecst that is not at all celebratory toward America, actually I’m looking for a book that is very critic and severe toward America, but at the same time that is more balanced. Any advice?
(Sorry if this message could sound confused or badly written, I’m not mother tongue and, also, the feeling toward the book is there but still blurry, but there’s something about this book that doesn’t convince me.)
That is the book that is very critical and severe toward the United States. I think the problem is that that book was written as a counterpoint to the history of the United States we learn in secondary school. If you haven’t learned U.S. history from a U.S. high school history textbook, it is going to feel unbalanced, prejudiced, because you are not the target audience, who has grown up with an uncritical, unbalanced, prejudiced but in the other way, curriculum. I would imagine a book by a European scholar of U.S. history would have more potential to give a neutral outside but critical point of view.
Very much this. I was an exchange student in the US in 2005 and my US history teacher (yes, their history classes are commonly split between us and “rest of the world”) exclusively worked with excerpts from Zinn.
I understood once I leafed through the official textbook. It was about as bad as you can imagine.
So yes, Zinn is far from “objective” or “neutral”. It’s a deliberate choice because
a) it’s supposed to counterbalance the terribly whitewashed school books and b) there’s a case to be made that no text, not even scientific ones, is ever truly objective or neutral because reality is a construct.
The latter is a more philosophical debate, but nonetheless an important one. Since there is no single objective truth, you’ll usually dare better by considering varying interpretations of “truth” before making your mind up.
In other words: you’ll never get the full picture, but if you assemble enough puzzle pieces you increase your chances of understanding the bigger picture, and, more importantly, you’ll gain a sense for when somebody is just off their rocker.