Norviel's View on A People's History of the United States

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

1. I personally could not quite figure out a clear view or thought that the author was attempting to convince the reader of. For the most part I thought the writer mostly just stated how things were, which I guess is what he is trying to convince us of. Zinn is mainly just wanting us to see that just because the American's were superior to their slaves and servants, there was still a fear of them they felt.

2. Howard Zinn's writing was done so in a way as to make us see what they American's thought as they were establishing themselves, along with the harsh conditions that they imposed upon their slaves. He showed us the inhumanly ways in which we bestowed upon the African slaves such as treating them as if they were no more than livestock, buying and selling them for our own profit and labor. Along with that, the slaves were put in such terrible conditions that only 1/3rd of the African Americans taken from their home to be sold as slaves actually made it there! They were packed tightly together in small spaces where they were forced to reside with their own feces and with corpses of other slaves. Once again, we are shown how we are the ones who acted savagely, when we accused people of other cultures who did far less savage things as being savages.
Zinn also talked about at the beginning, how we were not all powerful as we tried to be. The Indians knew more about the land and how to survive that what the Americans did, and they were not overpowered by the American's weapons or confidence. In the reading when it talks about how the Americans would just kill the Indians I think it was out of frustration, that they were embarrassed that they were unable to live as successfully as the Indians could, who they thought so poorly of. In order to try and get their dignity back they would murder the Indians to try to show their dominance over them.

3. This reading made me wonder what would have happened if the slaves and the white servants would have been successful with their attempts to overpower and overthrow their "owners"? I also have wondered if the blacks were in the position that the whites were in, if they were the ones who were thought to be superior and more powerful, would they have done the same thing? Would they have enslaved the whites for their own good?

4. I found Zinn's writing to be somewhat biased. He talks negatively about the American's the entire time. I'm sure there were some whites who did not treat their slaves as horrible as others, and I'm sure there were some who did not even believe in owning slaves but rather worked their own land. Overall the reading was easy to understand, but seems somewhat redundant to what we have been reading. For the most part Zinn did not add anything to his writing that we have not heard before.

I originally posted this in the wrong blog!!