popular
My favorite popular history
02/10/2010 08:33
My nomination is Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. This was the first book I read that got me interested in doing history (the other one was an SF novel). I remember being surprised by the stridency, but really intrigued by all the doors he opened to events and people who I’d never heard of before. I thought, “okay, even if some of this is over the top, there’s a lot here! Why hasn’t anyone ever said anything about this stuff before?”
Looking back on it after reading more popular history, I think Zinn does a pretty good job with the facts, and a pretty good job with the narrative. And he doesn’t necessarily go for the simple “heroes and villians” characterization. For example:
“The complexity of Populist belief was shown in one of its important leaders in Texas, Charles Macune. He was a radical in economics (antitrust, anticapitalist), a conservative in politics (against a new party independent of the Democrats), and a racist.”
Zinn can easily be faulted for telling only one side of the story. I’ve been listening to two audiobooks this week on my drives (to AAS). One is Matt Damon narrating Zinn’s excerpt on the 20th century. As I’m listening to the civil rights story, what strikes me is how surprising it is, in the face of little girls getting blown up in churches, that blacks in the South didn’t grab the guns and gas cans. Zinn’s style in this section is understated but suggestive. And his foreword, where he says it’s not about projecting our anger into the past, but using it to change the present/future, is cool.
The other audiobook I’ve been listening to is Joseph Ellis‘ Founding Brothers. I’ve only listened to the (really long) introduction and the chapter on Burr and Hamilton, so maybe it changes. So far, I find myself thinking, “he’s deliberately making this into an academic exercise, to make it as irrelevant as possible to my life.” The language and the professorial narrative intrusion are a real turn-off to me. And, if anything, the stories seem less real than Zinn’s. Ellis’ embellishments (the heavy fog on the still water as Burr and Hamilton are being rowed across the Hudson) are novelistic -- but from the type of novel I’d never read. A Bulwer-Lytton “it was a dark and stormy night” type of thing, with lots of adverbs. Several times I found myself thinking, “you couldn’t possibly know that.” Maybe these things are documented in someone’s journal -- seems like the author would want to say so, unless he’s so convinced of his narrative authority he expects the reader to believe anything he says.
That’s the difference for me, I guess, between Zinn and Ellis. Even if the perspective is radical, Zinn at least talks about his sources. Note to self...
