Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The social movement consequences of leaving unchallenged the politically prevailing narrative of supposed US victory in the Cold War that ended 30 years ago are far-reaching. They include politically effective attacks today on progressive activism, including condemnations of counternarratives that challenge domestically white patriarchal supremacy, e.g., conservative denunciations of cultural pluralism include a focus on trends in the post-New Left public education system curriculum. They claim a leftist bias generally characterizing the academy and those teachers produced by it. The popularity of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States among educators as assigned reading is frequently cited as evidence of this bias. A high-profile example is the critique by Daniel J. Flynn, former executive director of Accuracy in Academia. This organization first gained national media prominence during the Reagan administration, seeking, it claims, to rectify this alleged leftwing bias. Flynn writes, Who is the most influential historian in America? Could it be Pulitzer Prize winners Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. or Joseph Ellis or David McCullough, whose scholarly works have reached a broad literary public? The answer is none of the above. The accolade belongs instead to the unreconstructed, anti-American Marxist Howard Zinn, whose cartoon anti-history of the United States is still selling 128,000 copies a year twenty years after its original publication. Many of those copies are assigned readings for courses in colleges and high schools taught by leftist disciples of their radical mentor.” Flynn focuses his ire also on the academy which tends to favor Zinn’s work.

Presenters

Benedict Edward DeDominicis
Professor of Political Science, School of International Studies, Catholic University of Korea, Gyeonggido [Kyonggi-do], South Korea