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Howard Zinn The Politics Of History Summary

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History is the foundation of everyone alive and deceased. Everyone in this world leaves a piece behind and marks the world in their own way. In history, important people who have done horrible and good things in this world have been recorded and displayed to children in schools. I mostly agree with the “The Politics of History by Howard Zinn” because it displays the fact that nearly every event in history has been done with a motive and has had consequences. A quote from Zinn’s work represents this is, “History is not inevitably useful. It can bind us or free us. It can destroy compassion by showing us the world through the eyes of the comfortable” (Zinn). This quote illustrates that actions that have consequences and are not always clearly …show more content…

Howard Zinn makes a statement that is a powerful analogy regarding this, “I assume that history is not a well-ordered city (despite the neat stacks of the library) but a jungle… we who plunge into the jungle need to think about what we are doing, because there is somewhere we want to go” (Zinn). This quote represents that people thinking about their actions are required for a metaphorical, world peace and harmony. If those people think about their actions before they act upon them, then they will realize they might have a future before wrecking a historical time period. A prime example of history repeating past historical events is the Rwanda Genocide in respects to the Holocaust. The Holocaust developed as the Nazi’s killed Jewish people because they were the inferior race. The Rwanda Genocide developed after the Rwandan president’s plane was shot down in Kigali, the country’s capital, in 1994. This caused the Hutu to kill nearly 800,000 people that opposed their ideals. The Rwanda Genocide relates to the Holocaust because they both killed thousands of people due to a belief or race. This signifies that history repeated a similar genocide and did not learn from the Holocaust about the consequences. These events relate to the quote from Zinn because of the lack of thinking about previous events and their negative

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