Howard Zinn starts his ground-breaking book, A People’s History of the United States, with the story of Christopher Columbus. In the very first chapter he focuses on those upsetting details most people do not learn about Columbus, especially his brutal treatment of the Indians. From the start, Prof. Zinn questions “Euro-centered history” as a biased story that does not tell the whole truth.
The details provided about Columbus are historically valid and sometimes shocking, but Prof. Zinn has another purpose as well. His book addresses the way schools teach American history to students: not just the white-washed story of Columbus as super-hero but many other aspects of America as well. In the past, teachers and writers have often ignored or minimized the hardships and oppression of women, Native Americans, African-Americans, and other minorities.
What about ordinary people going through K-12 education? They have been spoon-fed a romanticized version of events concerning Columbus—but what about America itself? Are we able to see beyond self-serving myths to examine more closely what life was really like for conquered races, oppressed minorities, and yes, even ordinary working people? I believe Zinn’s opening chapter on Columbus is intended to wake the reader up. If so many students and teachers can have such a glorified but utterly mistaken view of Columbus, then what about American history?
Howard Zinn is asking the college student (and you the reader) to seek out real truth and ask the hard questions. Can the great discoverer really be the same man under whose authority Native Americans were routinely enslaved, punished, maimed, and murdered? If much of what we were taught about Columbus is historically false, what else is wrong regarding the sanitized manner in which American history has been taught to us?
Sometimes students must “unlearn” before they can learn; sometimes they must recognize that “established facts” are slanted to create a false view of people and events. Your job, as students, is to get closer to history’s substance and not accept what you are being told at face value. Learn to dig deeper! Don’t stop until you are satisfied that you have found the truth. Keep learning all you can until you are confident that you won’t be tricked into believing half-truths and falsehoods as readily as past generations have been so tricked, so miseducated.
Unlearn the falsehoods–in order to better learn the real truth!
