Alex WellersteinVerified account

I’m not a fan of Zinn & have never taught the book (as usefully provocative as he was, the work is too simplistic & doesn’t model careful historical reasoning)—but... I do teach a lot of college students & if any had read Zinn, that’s far from their biggest problem.https://twitter.com/jonathanchait/status/1043904365025726467 …

For students with an advanced high school history curriculum, the problem is most are taught to the AP tests, which are nothing like what (or how) you learn at the college level. Many are turned off by memorizing dates & facts & learn little about interpretation or epistemology.

These advanced students come to college thinking they get history, consider it boring, and take other things, never realizing they only learned one (generally uninspiring) way, but are never required to try other approaches.

(My department is trying a pilot program to recapture some of these great students who just need to get exposed to what we do to realize how exciting and important history is.)

But FWIW, much as I don’t like Zinn, he does tend to excite students, which is great as long as he’s not the last book they ever read.

I think Zinn is overly simplistic BUT he makes the argument that "history is important and history is powerful" more persuasively than the "memorize these facts" textbooks do.

I've looked at a number of supposedly very good high school history textbooks — aside from being deadly dull, most are full of the most agonizingly incorrect or ideologically skewed information, too. At least as bad as Zinn's sins (hey, that rhymed).