Critical Essay | Critical Review by Oscar Handlin

Critical Review by Oscar Handlin

SOURCE: Handlin, Oscar. “Arawaks.” American Scholar 49 (autumn 1980): 546-50.

In the following review of A People's History, Handlin refutes the accuracy of many of the historical facts presented in Zinn's book.

This is a book about Arawaks.

Once upon a time, people remarkable for their belief in sharing and for their hospitality lived blissfully without commerce; they relied exclusively on the natural environment for sustenance. They valued the arts, and accorded each sex freedom and dignity. Ages before the Arawaks, the Mound Builders, also devoted to the arts, had occupied the same continent. And from across the ocean came blacks out of such idyllic communal groups that they hardly needed law; even slavery was benign. Then the destructive white strangers arrived—and after that it was downhill all the way.

Such is the story Zinn purports to unfold. He ascribes the topsy-turvy quality of his description to its perspective—the Constitution...
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