Anyone read this one? I bought it a couple weeks ago. Like most lefties, I read the Howard Zinn original in college. It changed my life, because before then I had this notion that only black people struggled. I knew a bit about women's suffrage, but very little about the labor movement. That said, I've grown a lot more skeptical toward explicitely polemical tellings of history. It's all polemical, to some extent. But I worry when I see it on top. And in the title.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
That said, I've grown a lot more skeptical toward explicitely polemical tellings of history. It's all polemical, to some extent. But I worry when I see it on top. And in the title.
The justification here seems pretty analogous to the justification for Black History Month et al: if we take it as a given that "history" as taught to us by schools and the media is history from the standpoint of the (white) establishment, then there's a legitimate place -- and in fact, a desperate need -- for history told from other viewpoints.
Haven't read it -- still working on Battle Cry of Freedom. As far as agendas in history are concerned, there's a pretty good case to be made that every history beyond a bullet-pointed list of dates and times has an agenda, and that's it's helpful to have it up front and out in the open, rather than couched in terms like "objectivity."
As Hayden White and his ilk have demonstrated, even a bullet point list of events has a bias because it #1: Constructs a narrative frame (there is a beginning and an end) and #2: Selectively chooses which events to list. Still, as a historian I'm willing to get past that and there is an absolutely fantastic essay by William Cronon (one of the best historians of the "New Western History") that addresses those issues titled "A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative" in "The Journal of American History" (Vol: 78, No. 4 March, 1992). It's a little long (29 pages), but I highly recommend it for those people who are interested in a well-written response to the postmodernist critique.
Correction noted on the bullet-pointed list.
I'm somewhat interested in the article you mention, and it looks like I should be able to download it online. I'll give it a look. It was written 17 years ago -- has Cronon followed up on it? Have there been responses to it in the field?
Well, Cronon has continued to work and write (in fact he's quite prolific). I'd say his most recent contribution on that front is: "Why the Past Matters," Wisconsin Magazine of History, 84:1 (Autumn 2000), p.2-13. You can find that, and "A Place for Stories" on his website (http://www.williamcronon.net/articles.htm).
Nevertheless, I would read "A Place for Stories" if you're going to read anything. Last year I was assigned that article on three separate occassions in my graduate seminars, so I would assume that the consensus is that it's a fairly important one. Plus, it's quite well written and very interesting.
As far as responses go, there have been some (I think Mansur's "Challenges in American History"), but for the most part the early 90's were the high tide of the tensions between the historian and the postmodernist. Now, many of the best historians have integrated a number of the postmodernist critiques (the best historians aren't quite as arrogant now as they were circa 1950's), but for the most part the profession seems to have agreed that while we can never be true what we say is the ultimate truth, the little that we can "know" is still worth exploring.
Yeah, I'm skeptical of the "People's Histories" too, not least because it's such a franchise (this series on the Civil War, Revolution, etc., the graphic edition, the book of people's reactions to the original). It's hugely important to tell the infrequently told stories, of course, but not with one's conclusions already drawn every single time. Having a point of view is inevitable--urban or rural, liberal or conservative, believing in objective truth or not--but personally I like reading history where that point of view is a starting point, not the foregone conclusion of the argument, and the author makes some attempt to get out of his/her own skin.
Maybe this one is better, though, if its focus on a single period allows for a deeper analysis. I don't know.
Don't know this particular work, but generally, polemical works are just fine -- healthy, even, if the scholarship behind them is solid. There are many ways to interpret historical events; where one gets into trouble is to assume that this or that author's personal exercise in axe-grinding is the only valid one.
If you have seen it, I'd strongly recommend the late Barbara Tuchman's Practicing History, an anthology of essays one her experience in developing her craft. Among other things, she pretty thoroughly skewers the notion that the historian can be purely objective; the historian's personal biases are much better left exposed to the reader -- where they can be taken into consideration -- than hidden.
Also, maybe I'm the last one to find out about this, but I never realized that Howard Zinn (the author of the original), was a professor (and leading activist) at Spelman College during the first few years of the Civil Rights Movement. In addition, he was fired for being too active (the administration adopted the "wait and see" approach and wanted the courts to figure it out). I thought that was interesting.
plus he's a man who actually flew in bombing missions for the United States in World War II before he became a historian in contrast to too many popular idea merchants today who get aroused by militarism and imperial force and partly earn their keep by glorifying hell from the distance
I read this when it came out, though by the end I was probably half-reading, half-skimming. It's pretty much exactly what you'd expect: many of the individual stories and portraits are fascinating and are generally given short shrift in other books, but he's definitely got an axe to grind and in my opinion he constantly and drastically overstates his arguments. Also, admittedly, I find his basic argument to be unintentionally and uncomfortably close to the standard Southern apologist argument.
As someone said above, all histories are subjective to a degree, but I think you can tell the difference between someone who's trying to be evenhanded and someone who's openly hiding and obscuring any info that doesn't fit their ideas.
All in all, as a collection of historical sketches, it's well worth reading. As a history, meh. But if you're going to read 10 books on the civil war, this should definitely be one of them.
Everyone has a point of view, an ideology, and it's when you pretend you don't have one that you're most blinded by it.
That said, there's a difference between a humble, well thought-out perspective on the world, and a blunt instrument used to smash events to fit your preconceptions.
So I don't think having an ideology, or being open about it, is really a problem. The problem arises when your ideology is too rigid or based on nonsense.
They're out of print -- so it's off to the library or other good sources -- but the People's History of the United States series by Page Smith is very good. They're all door-stoppers, and I will confess that I haven't read the first two, on the Revolutionary era. But the third is about the young republic, ending (iirc) with the deaths of Madison and Jefferson on July 4, 1826, and it was eerie seeing how many of the same issues are still open today. The Civil War volume (book 5) will round out McPherson a little bit, but he's tough to beat as a general framework. The Nation Comes of Age gives you the pre-Civil War era (haven't yet read What Hath God Wrought, which is the Oxford History of the same period), and The Rise of Industrial America picks up after Reconstruction. The whole series is not nearly as polemical as Zinn, but does have that open-to-possibilities feel that more than justifies his use of the moniker People's History.
It should have been called "A Marxist History of the United States." Not bad in itself, but unless you get a different perspective, you would think America really is The Great Satan.
Jews, first and foremost, belong to their own nation - the nation of Israel. This allows them to critique whatever country they live in with a more critical, detached eye. I guess this is useful, but it does get annoying when it is accompanied by a kind of tsking moral superiority.
I'm actually wary of a "People's" anything - I always think of Orwellian harbingers of nightmarish oppression like the "Democractic (ha!) People's (ha!) Republic (HA!) of Korea". That said, Zinn's point of view is an important one to be aware of. I mean, I was assigned Paul Johnson's historical tome about the Modern World in college, and despite its transparent biases - a small example is the part about the end of British colonialism in India, which was practically an apologia for atrocities like Amritsar and something I found appalling - it's still a valuable work.
(Oh these intra-Western battle lines; either standalone(!) 'Western culture' is the Root Of All Evils and Cause Of All Sorrows, or The Pinnacle of Human Achievement and Most Superior Thing Evar.)
Strangely enough, for another history of the civil war and reconstruction, I would point you to Robert Caro's third installment in The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate. Tucked (if anything can be tucked into a book of ~1100 pages) into this biographical history is a 200 page detour through the history of the Senate. The legislative history of that body and consequently the country is lensed through various procedural rules and realities (states growing and shrinking the southern block, the fashion of legislative independence waxing and waning in favor) and Caro lavishes time on the body, the people and the place.
Not quite a response to the question, but a good book on the subject regardless.
While a book like this is informative reading, you have the ongoing problem of people who read it as the story of the period rather then a story of the period. So, some people avoided war service and made big bucks profiteering? Should that be a shock for any educated American reader? This bit of knowledge is part of America's cultural heritage, and is one of the reasons why the majority of Americans (at least traditionally) have a healthy cynicism towards jingos and warmongers.
From the Union side, it does take some ingenuity to describe a war as a capitalist conspiracy when it was fought by several million volunteers, almost all literate, fighting in armies led, for the most part, by their own legislators, congressmen, and community leaders. Per the Confederacy, the slave-owning elite had several decades to con the White underclass into believing that their personal welfare depended on keeping the Black underclass in chains. Even so, there was a literate White middle class in the South, and they also went to war led by their own elected and social elites.
This is unrelated to the Civil War, but might be of interest to those who have read Zinn and/or Chomsky:
UNUSED AUDIO COMMENTARY BY HOWARD ZINN AND NOAM CHOMSKY, RECORDED SUMMER 2002, FOR THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (PLATINUM SERIES EXTENDED EDITION) DVD, PART ONE OF TWO
UNUSED AUDIO COMMENTARY BY HOWARD ZINN AND NOAM CHOMSKY, RECORDED FOR THE RETURN OF THE KING (PLATINUM SERIES EXTENDED EDITION) DVD, PART ONE OF FOUR