What Howard Zinn Got Wrong

“What would Howard say?” This question, which Dave Zirin reports being “asked repeatedly” while he was working on his new biography of Howard Zinn , underscores how unusual a figure his subject cut in contemporary American life.

Most historians live and die in relative obscurity.

But 16 years after Zinn’s death, many people still look to him, not just as a scholar but as a kind of sage.

Zinn first became famous—and, in some circles, infamous—after the 1980 publication of his best-selling work A People’s History of the United States .

The book advanced an ambitious and unrepentantly radical reimagining of the nation’s past.

Zinn rejected the conventional organization of history around “the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders” and declared, “I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees.” What emerged was a new grand narrative, one that promised to reveal what mainstream history had long concealed and to offer a new moral framework for the past.

In Zinn’s telling, the powerful were almost always up to no good, and ordinary people were the heroes of the American story.

They courageously built movements for justice and sometimes even won, though it never took long for the oppressors to regroup.

The fight was never over.

Unlike most best sellers, A People’s History never stopped selling.

Each year during its first three decades in print, it sold more copies than the last.

The book’s fans applauded its bottom-up, justice-minded approach to history, while its detractors dismissed it as a leftist morality play masquerading as a story about the past.

No one could doubt that it changed the conversation about American history, not to mention the trajectory of Zinn’s life.

By the time he died in 2010, he was an archvillain for the right and a secular saint for the left.