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Zinn Howard Questions Ch 1-6

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Zinn Howard Questions Ch 1-6
AP U.S. History Summer Work
Zinn Study Questions

Zinn Chapter 1: pp.1-11
Columbus, The Indian, and Human Progress

1. Zinn’s main purpose for writing A People’s History of the United States is to show history from the viewpoint of others. 2. This is Zinn’s thesis for pages 1-11: These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by religion of popes, the government of kings, and the frenzy for money that marked Western Civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus. 3. According to Zinn, Columbus is portrayed as a holy character that was brave enough to sail into the unknown in traditional history books. 4. Zinn disputes Henry Kissinger’s statement: “History is the memory of the states, “because he believes that history is the memory of the people and how they were in the American countries of today. 5. Howard Zinn’s basic criticism of historian Samuel Elliot Morison’s book “Christopher Columbus, Mariner “was that Morison used too many dangling participles. 6. The major issues that Bartolome de las Casas brings up regarding Spanish expeditions in the Carribeans was that he witnessed the Columbian oppression of the native peoples of the Americas. Also after witnessing it, he returned to Europe and became a priest. 7. Columbus’s early motive and subsequent motive that led him to oppress indigenous peoples was explained when he arrived in the west indies, on the first island he had found and took the natives by force in order to learn and gather information of these new lands he had found. 8. The ultimate fate of the Arawak Indians was extinction because over the centuries, they were subject to hostile take-overs, diseases, enslavement, and damage to food supplies by the Europeans.

Zinn Chapter 1: pp. 2-22
Columbus, The Indian, and Human Progress

1. The significance of the Quetzalcoatl was that he was a God that was supposed to come back in human form to his

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