Question

What is Zinn attempting to say about historians? Do you agree or disagree? Support your answer as best as you can.

"It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map. My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the map- maker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual. Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker's technical interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation for short-range, you'd better use a different projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations." Howard Zinn

Answer 1

Zinn explains that historians´ accounts are influenced by ideology and different perspectives can serve specific interests and become instruments for contending subjects.

Step-by-step explanation:

I agree with Zinn. “History is Written by Victors,” they say, and that´s enough to understand that critical thinking is needed when studying historical accounts. That´s why historical revisionism has developed, to be able to reinterpret a historical record and even research for new evidence.