A People’s History of the United States essay
First of all, I would like to state my viewpoint on what I have learnt about the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. It has surely been a great discovery and a turning point in the history of the United States. I should admit that during the course I had learnt a number of things that I was not aware of before. The most impressive for me was to learn about the treatment of native population of America by the Spaniards. Howard Zinn stated that, “in the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships” (6). In fact, it was so frustrating to learn how evil and bloody the treatment of the native people of the New World by Spaniards was. I wonder if these were the first signs of slavery that would later become customary for the South of America. Was all this for the sake of gold, treasures and prosperity? It seems like it was indeed so. Zinn writes, “many slaves died in captivity” (6). I was really surprised to learn how great the number of the slaves who died for nothing was. So I think that although Spaniards wanted to bring Christian religion to the New World, they failed to follow the basic principles of the Bible.
I was also so much surprised of what I learnt during this semester about slave marriages. I think not many people nowadays know “how high was the incidence of marriage among slave men and women, and how stable these marriages were” (Zinn 161). What I’ve learnt is that slave marriages were characterized with “unusual fidelity” (Zinn 161). Howard Zinn gave a great number of interesting and surprising examples of how married slave couples were devoted to each other and how they loved their children, so that even the separation from children could not destroy this affection. Moreover, Zinn states that, “this family solidarity carried into the twentieth century” (162). All this is so unlike what we have today, as families being sacred social institutions more and more often lose their true meaning and value and we can see that more and more couples nowadays face conflicts and lack of loyalty or even get divorced.
I have also learnt much about the social classes within the United States and it was new for me to learn that different classes have not only different educational opportunities, but also different attitudes to studying. In fact, it appears that children from low-income families tend to achieve more success in educational sphere than those coming from well-to-do families. Loewen states that “teachers are often surprised and even distressed when poor children excel” (198). Personally I think that in modern days more and more teachers stand for the equality of opportunities and quality of education disregarding the social class a child belongs to. Reading of Loewen’s study made me think that the poorer a child is the more he or she relies only on his or her own efforts in order to succeed in the future and that is why poor children try to achieve the best possible results in education so as to get a good job and become a more or less qualified worker.
To conclude, all of the readings I studied during the semester were of much value to me. And although Loewen states that, “history is the only field in which the more courses [high school] students take, the stupider they become” (2), I consider that the history course I went through enriched my knowledge of history and other related issues with much valuable and simply interesting information.
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