“I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.Ītlantic senior writer Coates ( The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image the distortion remains. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do-only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy.
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Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans) and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements.
Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian-Zinn posits-has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Spector does an admirable job exploring the tumultuous events of his large canvas, and he is willing to look past the headlines for the underlying reasons, motivations, and dynamics of each conflict.Īn excellent starting point for anyone who wants to understand modern Asian history.įor Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. There would be more violence in the following decades-most notably, the Vietnam War-but by 1955, the political framework was largely established. Gradually, the politics of the region stabilized, sometimes through compromises and sometimes through military victories. China was in a class of its own for complexity and clashes. “It might be more accurate,” he writes, “to say that the Cold War did not spread to Asia it was invited in.” In fact, it is impossible to find a single definitive model, as the conflict ranged from the open warfare of Korea to the insurgency of the Malayan Emergency. In many nations, struggles against colonial rules morphed into civil wars: “Regional, religious, ethnic, and ideological differences turned out to be, in many cases, as potent as the desire for social justice and national emancipation or the struggle against racism and colonial exploitation.” Spector is wary of the view that the violence was a matter of Cold War proxies. The British looked for an honorable way to withdraw while retaining an economic role, but their power was waning. The French and the Dutch tried to reassert themselves, but the colonial game was up. This system was upended by a period of Japanese domination, the end of which created a power vacuum, with many players rushing to fill it. Before World War II, the European colonial powers had enforced stability, overturning old empires and drawing new maps. In this meticulously researched and carefully rendered study of the region in the period between 19, military historian Spector examines the conflicts that engulfed nearly every country, resulting in untold deaths and misery. How a decade of violence in Asia laid the foundation for eventual stability.
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