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