In general I find that Americans are pretty good at acknowledging long ago wrongs, not so good about more recent ones - but that's normal. So the horrors of slavery or the ethnic cleansing of the Indians is pretty much the consensus view these days, while things like the atrocities in Vietnam or Latin America are either unknown, denied, played down, or relativized.
Germans are quite good on the Nazi period, but pretty ignorant about other things e.g. Southwest Africa. It took the French a good four decades to come to terms with Vichy, many still haven't done so with their colonial past. Your average Pole goes into denial regarding their past mistreatment of Ukrainians or Jews. Russians, as we have seen on this site, seem to have a few problems acknowledging their own historical misdeeds. The Japanese seem to have serious problems with WWII. Turks rather obviously don't want to think about what they did to the Armenians. Not sure how much the Spanish think about what they did in Morocco or the Americas (Migeru?, kcurie?) and many still seem to just want to forget about the Civil War and its aftermath. How much do Italians learn about their actions in the Balkans during WWII or Africa in the thirties (de Gondi?)
As for Zinn - can't stand him. To me he seems to be only marginally better than his polar opposites of the rah, rah, America popular history crowd - just as one sided and simplistic and thus equally bad history, though given the choice I dislike the complete focus on the bad a bit less than I do the whitewashing of the past due to the respective politics of both stances.
In the last five years that changed, I think. There was much talk about the Hereros. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
The big difference between the US and other countries seems to be that the mythology of Manifest Destiny is still very active in the national psyche. Hence the false belief that the US really is a land of endless opportunity and its inhabitants are more free than anywhere else in the world - when in reality on objective measures of quality of life, including press and other freedoms, the US scores relatively poorly for a first world nation.
This is a huge problem for the rest of the world. The obvious effects aren't just the kind of adventuring that we're seeing now in Iraq. But they're also visible in the way this same mindset underlies the Smithite Marketistas who believe that the Anglo-Saxon model is the only possible way for the rest of the world to do business.
I have a suspicion that the 'special relationship' between the US and the UK is based on the UK side on a kind of secret remnant of the kind of imperial superiority that the US is known for. The British won't admit it, but being involved in things that the US lets the UK get involved in feeds the British fantasy of still being a major player on the world scene. Smithite fantasies are another expression of that, based partly on quaint historical beliefs, but also partly on a kind of historical inertia, because free-marketism has been blocked historically, but it has never really been deconstructed and debunked as an ideology.
I'm not suggesting the rest of the world doesn't have similar latent nationalist or imperialist issues. But the difference is they seem more latent - which is possibly a function of influence. I'd like to think the mythology of Europe is cleaner and gentler, but until Europe is as influential as the US is today, it's hard to be sure if that's true or not. China and India and the other usual suspects seem to have similar tendencies, so it's not exclusively a US-only issue.
But the point seems to be that these are all live and current and not historical issues. It's the mythology that defines the perception of history, not the other way around. And even people who are historically literate get very little training in questioning the mythologies that are most active around them now, as opposed to a century or two ago.
The primary newspaper here (www.gazette.com) is a typical broadsheet with an ultra-conservative editorial page, plenty of stories about soldiers (we have a number of military bases here), and the same cross section of local and national news articles as in every other big newspaper. Daily, 200,000 circulation.
The alternative newspaper (www.csindy.com) covers local events, and has editorial comment (that permeates every article) that is pretty well aligned with, say, DailyKos. And it is very widely read: Weekly, 36,000 circulation.
There are also the usual selection of "Worker's World Weekly" sorts of things available at coffee shops and bookstores. You can print pretty much anything you want.
What other source of news would be suggested?
