Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010) was an American historian, most famous for his book, A People's History of the United States. The book has sold over a million copies and gives a far-left interpretation of political history.

It does not incorporate the newer theories of history, but provides an energetic heavy-handed attack on conservatives, business, and white men. His book is stuck in 1950, methodologically, and does not appreciate the scholarship of the last 4 decades in the "new" intellectual, political, economic, diplomatic, military, cultural or social history. His "newest" ideas are that the white male "working class" -- as well as blacks, Indians, and women -- are victims of capitalism, a stock notion of 1930s socialist philosophy regarding workers.

Michael Kazin, Professor in the Department of History at Georgetown University states that

A People's History is bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions. Zinn reduces the past to a Manichean fable", whose failure to adequately explain why most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic "is grounded in a premise better suited to a conspiracy-monger's Web site than to a work of scholarship."

Historian and author John Fea of Messiah College states that,

Zinn writes well and is quite inspiring, but his book is bad history. In fact, I would not even call it history. A People's History of the United States is a political tract that uses the past to promote a presentist agenda...Zinn's book violates virtually every rule of good historical thinking.