Реферат: The Opressed Essay Research Paper The Oppressed

The reason that this book might be better titled A Proletarian?s

History of the United States is that Zinn?s main focus on the book

besides the actual history is the effect of the history on the common

people and the workers, or proletarians as Marx and Engels referred to

them. While most history books focus on the dominating Europeans, Zinn

focuses on the dominated Native Americans, who Zinn holds to be at least

as advanced as their European masters. He writes that

?Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness,

but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe

itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more

egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women,

children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any

place in the world.

?They were a people without a written language, but with their own

laws, their poetry, their history kept in memory and passed on, in an

oral vocabulary more complex than Europe?s, accompanied by song, dance,

and ceremonial drama. They paid careful attention to the development of

personality, intensity of will, independence and flexibility, passion

and potency, to their partnership with one another and with nature?

(21-22).

In the middle of the first chapter, Zinn uses the historical treatment

of Columbus to explain his own view on teaching history.

?Thus began the history, five hundred years ago, of the European

invasion of Indian settlements in America. That beginning, when you read

[Bartolom? de] Las Casas… is conquest, slavery, death. When we read

history books given to the children in the United States, it all starts

with heroic adventure — there is no bloodshed — and Columbus Day is a

celebration? (7).

He goes on to vituperate historian Samuel Eliot Morison for his brief