American Values The American view is often a prideful one. We look at our past and see many fights for freedom from oppressive governments. “All men are created equal,” the Declaration of Independence states. Our pledges of allegiance at every national gathering and in many schools across America and this constant fostering of American pride allows history to be looked at through a biased scope. The implication of such actions? It comes down to a distortion of facts, whereupon history itself is warped past recognition to fit this American pride. Zinn’s interpretation of the American Revolution is a less traditional view and thus dismantles the beliefs of equality and liberty that many Americans believe on which their country was built.
America’s …show more content…
For example, the Boston Massacre is an atypical example of tyranny. During the rising tensions before the actual revolutionary war, the colonies had its own form of tyranny: poor versus the rich. The rich was able to exploit the poor as “mob energy against England.” (65) Zinn believes that the lower classes were frustrated by both the economy and the British, which was able to “explode into mob violence.” (65) The Boston Massacre itself was a product of mob violence. The John Adams film asserts this as the crowd is proven to have thrown rocks and other blunt objects at the soldiers by Adams himself in the demonstration of the soldiers’ trials. How mob violence was controlled is by direct encouragement within itself. This allowed escalations of the anti-British violent actions. About six years later, Tom Paine published a pamphlet titled Common Sense. Common Sense was often read in pubs and taverns, which exposed itself to many lower class people who may have not been able to read. The pamphlet appealed to lower class citizens through three different reasonings: common sense, religion, and logic. Common sense involved examples of nature that were often explicitly clear to the point of everyone’s knowledge , such as, “Even brutes do not devour their young…” (46). Religion involves pointing out the natural large gap between Britain and North America, while logic involves a cause and effect; such as …show more content…
As aforementioned, the Boston Massacre was a mere game of monopoly, where the rich and radicals pushed the lower class’s economic sorrow towards the British and thus morphing it into a great resentment and American pride. Common Sense furthers this as the pamphlet appealed to almost all with its common sense, religious, and logical arguments. Its distribution allowed for the lower class that made up the mob be further directed towards England. This connection between revolutionary tensions and mob control implicates a relationship between national control and American