It’s the traditional responsibility of the historian to separate themselves from the public. Their role is to provide the masses with facts and theories. After all, there is the sanctity of neutrality we must uphold. I understood and embraced this position prior to reading Zinn. But my view was changed by his book. “[T]he real choice is not between shaping the world or not, but between doing it willingly or unconsciously” he writes. As a historian, we can either maintain the status quo by relaying forms of lullaby history or we can influence our students by promoting a radical approach to history that shapes the world anew. Or to quote the historian Eric Foner, “In order to create a new future, we must first create a new
It’s the traditional responsibility of the historian to separate themselves from the public. Their role is to provide the masses with facts and theories. After all, there is the sanctity of neutrality we must uphold. I understood and embraced this position prior to reading Zinn. But my view was changed by his book. “[T]he real choice is not between shaping the world or not, but between doing it willingly or unconsciously” he writes. As a historian, we can either maintain the status quo by relaying forms of lullaby history or we can influence our students by promoting a radical approach to history that shapes the world anew. Or to quote the historian Eric Foner, “In order to create a new future, we must first create a new