Historical Writing and Audience Construction

Walter Ong's "Audience is Always a Fiction" deals with many different genres of writing, from fictional stories to diaries. One section that immediately resonated with me was his section discussing how historians create their audience. My mind went to the forward of Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States."

In it Zinn discusses why he has chosen to write about the events he has, why he has separated the chapters as he has, and most fundamentally, why he has chosen these particular viewpoints on events. His history is different from most because he writes from the "losers" perspective instead of the "winners." Christopher Columbus is treated by Zinn as more of a war-criminal than a national hero, and his chapter on the Vietnam War gives attention to showing how successful some socialist governments have been throughout history.

I think Zinn would agree with Ong that "...what is 'significant' depends on what kind of history you are writing---national political history, military history, social history, economic history, personal biography, global history. What is significant and, perhaps even more, what is 'interesting' also depends on the readers and their interaction with the historian," (Ong 18). Zinn recognizes the significance in challenging nationalist history, and was successful in guessing that readers would find the People's perspective on history to be interesting and important. It is clear through his text's focus that Zinn is addressing both an absence of the experiences of certain (often minoritized) groups, but in order to do this in a relevant way he had to anticipate what his audience thought nationalist history was missing.