Both of these readings made me think about how frequently we oversimplify history. If you think about the version you hear about the stories in today’s readings they paint a much different picture than the reality of history. It is so much easier to teach children an oversimplified version of history than the whole story, which makes sense but becomes problematic down the line. A lot of people do not bother to reconsider the stories they have learned and educate themselves more later on. The Zinn reading, in particular, emphasized the fact that there are so many different ways to tell history and it becomes difficult to actually get simply the facts of what happened because every historian comes with a different perspective. When he said, “the historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or national or sexual” it really summed up the issue of different tellings of history. The details you choose to include or exclude do serve a purpose and represent a different ideology.

These readings also reminded me a lot of what we’ve been talking about in my Justice and Civil Society class. The other day in class we talked about patriotism and what that means in terms of accepting American history. There are a lot of negative points throughout American history, so much to the point that it is easy, at least for me, to look at all of it as negative. We talked about how in remembering history it is, from some people’s point of view, important to walk the line between cynicism and sentimentality, meaning it is important to remember not only all the bad parts and not only all the good parts. These readings really made me consider these ideas because they did bring up a lot of the bad parts of American history. It is easy for me to only think about the negatives, which I think you could argue are more important to consider and remember, and view every part of our history is tainted by a negative it is somehow connected to.