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Zinn’s book is an extremely popular work of American history. But despite the book’s mainstream popularity, it is not without problems. Many historians have challenged the purported facts Zinn lays out. In a review published in the journal Reviews in American History, Robert Cohen cites a survey conducted by the History News Network that polled 600 historians. The result was that A People’s History was ranked the second least credible work of history still in print. (The Jefferson Lies by David Barton edged out Zinn’s book by nine votes.) And in a 2019 op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal, Naomi Schaefer Riley argued that Zinn’s book is an abdication of the responsibility of a teacher or historian to be rigorous in their approach and to confront readers with the complexity of history rather than to provide an ideologically driven narrative that twists facts to fit the theory.
Cohen wrote about his conflicted views regarding Zinn’s first chapter. The book’s description of Native American society is built on poorly sourced material about native life. To work this period into his broader argument, Zinn misrepresents Indigenous societies as pacifistic, idyllic, and utopian when these societies were plagued by social ills prior to contact. That being said, when Cohen assigned the book in one of his courses, he reported that many of his students were captivated by the chapter’s negative depiction of Columbus, a narrative they had not encountered in their other history courses.
Zinn is sometimes sloppy in his use of sources and his portrayal of facts. Stanford Professor Sam Wineburg wrote in a 2012 review that, in his quest to revise the historical narrative, Zinn is at times uncritical of the sources he uses, and at other times he fails to contextualize sources and quotes for the reader. For example, when Zinn discusses the bombing of Japan, he argues that Japan was willing to surrender to the United States in 1945; but the United States, unwilling to waste the money it spent on the atomic bomb, continued the war. To prove this thesis, Zinn quotes from a diplomatic cable written by the Japanese ambassador to the Soviets discussing possible terms. But Zinn does not quote from subsequent cables in which peace negotiations were rejected. In addition, a tremendous amount of scholarship has been written since 1980 that has used Japanese sources to explain the context of Japan’s decision to surrender when it did.
Likewise, Zinn’s chapter on the Vietnam War is based largely on a small number of secondary sources. Zinn misstates some statistics such as the number of American soldiers in Vietnam during the Easter Offensive; he uses a much higher number than was the case to argue that Richard Nixon was against troop withdrawals. And Zinn ignores data from the very sources he quotes when it contradicts the point he wishes to make. Zinn argues that African Americans were opposed to the war, and to prove this he cites a 1969 book titled Rebels Against War. But the same book suggests that 24% of Vietnam volunteers were African American and only 4.5% of objectors to the draft were Black, a rate much lower than any other race. Zinn’s argument in this section is indeed contradictory. On one hand, he argues that the peace movement successfully forced the government to abandon the war in Vietnam. On the other, he maintains that Nixon refused to cave into the peace movement and that he protracted the war rather than cater to domestic opinion.
In an article published in the Atlantic in 2012, Chris Beneke and Randall Stephens compare A People’s History to The Da Vinci Code. Both are told in a compelling way, and both are about discovering facts that have hitherto been concealed from the reader. For both books, “the message is that you, dear reader, know something that the vast majority of unenlightened chumps do not.” This style makes Zinn attractive to readers, as Cohen described. Many people who pick up A People’s History may not have looked deeply into any of the things Zinn discusses. Many of his examples, a great litany of strikes, unions, and movements, might be unknown to the reader. Most readers will not have the background knowledge to evaluate Zinn’s claims and might take them at face value. His argument suggests that the reader is being let into hidden knowledge that contradicts what they learned in school.
In this context, Zinn’s book can appear quite attractive, especially if the reader is otherwise sympathetic to Zinn’s political and ideological bent. But accepting Zinn uncritically will lead the reader to the same endpoint as if they had accepted uncritically the narrative of the establishment Zinn is trying to subvert. A People’s History is best read as an introduction to American history not as an endpoint. It can familiarize the reader with persons, movements, and events, but as with all works of history it needs to be accompanied by a spectrum of works to arrive at truth, however messy and unsatisfying that may be.
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By Howard Zinn
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