Эротические рассказы

The Politics of History. Howard Boone's ZinnЧитать онлайн книгу.

The Politics of History - Howard Boone's Zinn


Скачать книгу

      14 The Prisoners: A Bit of Contemporary History

      15 Violence: The Double Standard

      16 Hiroshima and Royan

       PART THREE ∙ THEORY AND PRAXIS

      17 Freedom and Responsibility

      18 The Historians

      19 The Philosophers

      20 Philosophers, Historians, and Causation

       Notes

       Index

       Acknowledgments

      To the American Philosophical Society, the Louis Rabinowitz Foundation, and the Graduate School of Boston University for support during the various stages of writing this book. To Ernest Young, Marilyn Young, and Hilda Hein for critical readings of certain sections of the book. To all the Magraws for the peaceful beauty of the Cobbles, where I could finish my writing. To the librarians of Royan for their kindness. To Joan Agri, Marion Lee, and Judith Mandelbaum for invaluable assistance. To Jim Miller, for constant help and encouragement. To anonymous friends for anonymous spiritual support. To Myla and Jeff, for being themselves.

       Introduction to the Second Edition

      In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, we find this brief exchange:

      “‘The horror of that moment,’ the King went on, ‘I shall never, never forget!’

      Yes, we will forget if we don’t make memoranda. But there is disagreement on exactly which moments in history we should make memoranda of, since we can’t recapture all of the past, and profound conflict on how we should treat those moments we decide to remember.

      Two decades have passed since The Politics of History was written, but its concerns remain alive: What are the uses of history? Can historians, should they, be “objective,” “disinterested”? What is the point of teaching or writing history?

      The eighties were a Republican party decade dominated by the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose affinity for the rich went even beyond the normal friendliness of our government toward corporate wealth. His administration seemed to feel no shame in proposing budgets that spent two to three hundred billion dollars for what was already the most swollen military machine in human history, while cutting allocations for health care, children’s lunches, food stamps for the poor, housing for the homeless, and weekly payments to the unemployed.

      This is where history can be useful. For over a hundred years the national government followed conservative policies, beginning in the 1790s, when Alexander Hamilton’s economic program went into effect in the first Washington administration, and lasting until the 1930s, when the New Deal began to interfere in the economy on behalf of the poor by instituting job programs, subsidized housing, social security, unemployment insurance, and minimum wages. During that long period the country was industrialized, fortunes were made by a small number of rich people, but the human cost was atrocious. Hunger, sickness, and poverty were the normal state of large numbers of people in the city and in the country. In the periodic depressions of those years of “free enterprise,” conditions were even worse.

      That depression was barely over when another one came in 1893. This was still the period of government indifference to the poor, glorifications of the capitalist system, the growth of huge fortunes for the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the Mellons. That year, after several decades of wild industrial growth, financial manipulation, and uncontrolled speculation and profiteering, the economy collapsed. The worst hit, of course, were the poor: Of a labor force of fifteen million, three million were unemployed. Neither the federal government nor any state government voted relief to the hungry, but mass demonstrations all over the country


Скачать книгу
Яндекс.Метрика