>>RIP Howard Zinn.
>>
>>http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/us/28zinn.html
>>
>>He probably did more damage in more history departments than anyone else I can think of and his propagandistic presentation of "history" was like crack for those who got their politics from Holywood stars and John Lennon songs, but he really believed in what he did and lived a good life.
>>
>>I only met him once, in the 60s, but I liked him. He was on the right side of a lot of things that mattered. A terrible historian, but a good man.
>
>But, of course, this assumes that history is knowable as a set of objective facts. I come more and more to the conclusion that history is the subjective interpretation of a combination of factual events, presumed events, assumed events and imagined events all combined and then explained as a story through time, a sequence of causes and effects, which itself can fall foul of the narrative fallacy.

I kind of like that, though I am wary of drinking Derrida deconstructionist Kool-aid <bg>

Sure, interpretation can be quite subjective, but there are factual events in that certain things actually happened and other things did not and if one is attempting some kind of objectivity one does not start at an ideological "truth" and "reason" backwards ( the Hegelian fallacy, certainly )

Zinn was a propagandist, but he saw it as legitimate as he saw the accepted historical narrative as, itself, propaganda, and to some extent of course he was right. But college freshmen aren't in on the joke and don't see the balance. I would be happy to have dinner with Zinn and Paul Johnson and Hoffstader and Beard and Turner and let them shout it out, but I wouldn't want them to frighten the children <s>

To me, the first whiff of the polemicist is the stench of the assumption that uncovering bad-guys reductively defines the "good-guys".

There is an adolescent sweetness and perversity in thinking one has discovered "truth" by finding clay feet without yet understanding the complexity of the ground they had to walk.

But as I always say (or at least I think I do - I forget ) you should never curse a man until you walk a mile in his shoes - because by then you're a mile away - and you've got his shoes !