Requiem for the Defeated: Howard Zinn's People's History.

This article aims at clarifying meanings, methods, and the problem of objectivity of 'the history for the suppressed' as philosophically constructed and demanded by Walter Benjamin by means of Howard Zinn's "People's History" as a case study. Zinn's 'history from below' has several philosophical meanings. First, it claims to find the other half part of historical truth which had been until now ignored and concealed by the general history. Second, it claims to provide a balanced perspective for the perception of history so long as it does not wholly exclude winners in history. Third. it claims to extend human possibilities by recording the story of people's resistance movements. Fourth, it aims to educate and train an independent corps of citizens by building up the principle of civil disobedience. Fifth, it helps us to look at history from an angle of 'change' because it bears in mind a dialectical interaction of victory and defeat. Sixth, it represents an act through which a historian declares his own ideological position. On the basis of these meanings Howard Zinn now proceeds to elaborate methods for the reconstruction of the people's life story: the selection and analysis of available materials, the elimination or correction of various distorted and falsified facts of history, the critique of the established history and of the American historical profession, and the formation of a new interpretation model. Above all the removal of various historical distortions and falsifications must be recognized as a golden rule for all historians. But Zinn then gives up the objectivity of history, and tries to substitute for it his own partiality under the name of 'justice'. He regards this partiality for the suppressed people as an alternative objectivity, or the only path to the historical truth. In this sense Zinn's historical truth will not deny the post-modern standpoint (pluralism) and develops the viewpoint of E. H. Carr (presentism) in the direction of the Rankean mind (historicism). Howard Zinn's 'grassroots history' (Eric Hobsbawm) is born from all these meanings and methods, and as a result the losers of history are reborn as the winners of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]