Skip to main content

In A People's History of the United States, how did Howard Zinn describe why he wrote his book?

Howard Zinn's popular text A People's History of the United States, attempts to be what the title claims it as--a people's history.  Released in 1980, it was meant to include women and minorities in American history since they were often left out of mainstream works, especially for undergraduates.  Zinn gathered material for the book over a twenty-year teaching career and he wanted something that was not only relevant to the young men and women in his class, but something that would get mainstream historians' attention.  Zinn's work has been considered controversial especially given his liberal politics, but the book remains popular in that its a history of America which serves all.  Just like Zinn's undergraduate classes, it does not pretend to be neutral.  Zinn's work popularized using race and gender issues to study American history and today many textbooks at the high school and university level have more material about these issues.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...