The other day we linked to two remembrances of the late historian Howard Zinn. One was a paen to the man's benevolent influence and the other was an acerbic dismissal of Zinn as essentially a fraud. Which you think he was will depend largely on your ideological point of view, but what cannot be gainsaid is that the man exerted great influence on several generations of American students. His People's History of the United States is the most widely used history text in American public schools and colleges, having sold over two million copies.
I wanted to bring Zinn up again because I've come across a column at National Review Online which explains in more detail why conservatives see his influence as pernicious and leftists see it as salutary. Roger Kimball argues at NRO that the People's History is filled with distortions and misstatements of fact that give a very misleading impression of the history of the United States. In Kimball's words, reading People's History is like offering to take someone on a tour of Versailles but stopping at a ramshackle shed on the outskirts and saying, "See? Pretty shabby, isn't it?"
Anyway, read Kimball's essay. It's important.
RLC
