Response to Zinn, Stearns and Becker

All three articles, Zinn, Stearns and Becker, discussed several values of history that I was able to relate to.  In the Zinn article, I agreed a lot with his discussing of teaching from the ‘other’ point of view.  For instance, Zinn uses the Mexican War as an example by saying we are often taught the big battles fought by heroic generals where we should also be focusing on the Mexican soldiers and citizens who took part in and were affected by the Mexican War.  I also really like how Zinn asserted that history not be taught chronologically but taught by continuously jumping back and forth between time periods to make connections.  Making history interactive this way is much easier and much more useful.

Becker’s article was my least favorite but I still found value in a few of the points he made.  I do agree, for the most part, that history is the memory of things said and done.  If there is no memory of things said and done then how can anyone be sure they were said and done in the first place?  I like how he claims that we are all historians in our everyday lives.  I think many people feel history contains too much reading and researching and is far too dense to be worthwhile but when we consider what Becker says, it’s true we do all sorts of historical research every day. 

My favorite of the three, and that which I took the most value from was the Stearns article.  Stearns claims that the greatest value of history is the fact that it acts as experimental data when attempting to understand how and why people and society are the way that they are.  Stearns also says history is a way to understand change.  I really agree with this point because how do you know how far you’ve come if you haven’t got a clue where you began?  One of the most important values Stearns points out, in my opinion, is the skills that can be acquired from studying history.  At the end of the day, no matter how much one argues that history is useful, some people are just not going to like it.  However, just because one doesn’t like history doesn’t mean that that person can’t gain from studying it.  Stearns argues that a student of history can learn to assess evidence, conflicting ideas and examples of change in the past.  These analytical skills can prove useful in any discipline, not just history alone.