Wilfred (Bill) McClay
speaker
209 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Jul
Wilfred (Bill) McClay’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And I think young people want to read Zinn.
But I think Zinn did something.
And, you know, the historians all hate him.
The most negative reviews of Howard Zinn were written by Michael Kazin, the longtime editor of Dissent magazine.
And they recognized and they wanted historians to acknowledge that he was a bad historian.
Five million copies of the people's history later, I don't know that the message has really gotten through.
But as history, it's not good.
As history as story, it's very good.
Well, and I do it early on because he's so connected to the roots of what's distinctive about American civilization, about American political systems.
I think it's a crime of omission
not to bring up how complicated he is in this way.
He owned slaves, but he wrote against slavery.
He even wanted to have, as you probably know in the original draft of the Declaration, he fulminates
against the king for being responsible for this institution, which George III can't be blamed for that.
And you don't have to get into that depth in, say, the fifth grade, which is when most students in most states first encounter U.S.
history.
But I think you have to acknowledge that
Slaveholding was a common practice among particularly the Virginians, but not just them.
Benjamin Franklin had slaves.
He eventually changed his mind dramatically on the subject and became a proponent of abolition.
Showing 41–60 of 209 · page 3 of 11
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