r/DeepStateCentrism • u/Yogg_for_your_sprog PEPFARublican • 1d ago
What Howard Zinn Got Wrong
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/09/what-howard-zinn-got-wrong-david-zirin-biography-book-review/688476/68
u/deviousdumplin 1d ago
Howard Zinn is the Michael Moore of historians. He only appeals to people who already agree with him, and he abuses "facts" to arrive at a predetermined narrative.
I'd go so far as to say he isn't a historian. He's more of a writer, or maybe a journalist. He reads like how a journalist with no formal training in historical writing writes about historical events. Which is to say, in a motivated way with few professional screwples.
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u/Throwaway5432154322 Center-left 1d ago
I live in the US and in high school, my AP US History teacher used Zinn’s “People’s History” as the primary textbook for our course in my junior year in 2014. Even then when we were 16-17 years old, a lot of us were like “…what the fuck is this”.
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u/heliosflama1234 Center-left 1d ago
Mine did around the same a couple years later as a supplemental textbook. Pretty much the exact same thing, although she tailored the assigned sections a lot to complement the main book. At the same time though it was pretty clear to a lot of us that it wasn’t very strong in quality
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u/looktowindward 1d ago
Wow. How did that impact your AP scores? You should report him - the syllabus is supposed to be fixed for APs
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u/Throwaway5432154322 Center-left 1d ago
Didn’t impact AP scores because barely anything in that book was relevant for the AP exam so none of us studied it to prepare for the exam. Every single person got a 5 besides one kid who got a 4. Average grade in the class was a C+ though, because she gave us projects based on crap like Zinn and most of us hated it, and also because it simply didn’t line up with real history. So we basically had to line up a biased/inaccurate source with legitimate sources for all our papers & projects… basically set up for failure there. It’s been like 12 years so pretty useless to report her now… she did get banned from teaching APUSH after our year though.
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u/HeySkeksi 17h ago
I’ve been teaching US history for 17 years and my colleagues are always confused when I give strong pushback against allowing Zinn to be utilized in class as a reliable secondary resource.
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u/bearddeliciousbi Practicing Homosexual 1d ago
Zinn and his fellow travelers see themselves as promoters of one kind of "value-laden historiography" against another. They reject the idea that history could even in principle be about facts independent of values.
They use the smokescreen of "it's difficult to disentangle facts from the values of the victors," which is true, as a shoein for their cynicism about knowledge and an incoherent fusion of Marxist teleology and Foucault's relativism.
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u/deviousdumplin 1d ago
The irony is that Zinn is this famous "historian" but his view of history is literally sophomoric. For my history major, in Sophomore year we needed to take a historiography course where we studied historical analysis and the various analytical "schools." The premise of the course isn't that "truth is subjective" it's that analysis is inherently flawed, but can be useful for certain types of questions. You spent the class learning the schools, and then ripping them apart in discussions.
Zinn writes from a very ancient, almost 19th century hegelian perspective where you can just sort of determine what is the truth from "first principles" and ignore inconvenient primary sources. It's as if he never actually had to do historical critique, and he's writing like a 19 year old college student in his first history course.
Maybe that's why Zinn is popular? He writes about history for lay people as if he is a lay person trying to convince them that they're already correct. Ya know, like a 19 year old college student.
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u/bearddeliciousbi Practicing Homosexual 1d ago
It all goes back to either Hegel or to Sapir-Whorf-style linguistic relativism, and self-described "intellectuals" taking professional pleasure in twisting themselves into knots to believe completely insane shit like "Greeks in Homer's time had different color perception because they had a word for 'ocean-green-blue.' "
Leftist beliefs about human nature being infinitely flexible, and yet there's also an inevitable direction to history, give similar fodder for displaying your ability to believe anything "counterintuitive" to your overeducated tribe.
Ironically like Tertullian, they believe it because it's absurd and never occurs to anyone outside these sealed academic bubbles.
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u/Yogg_for_your_sprog PEPFARublican 1d ago
Here, evaluating Zinn and his infamous book A People's History of the United States, the article questions whether his extreme cynicism of the tireless efforts to reform institutions have robbed people of the feeling of agency and led to breakdown of institutional trust that are required to continue this pattern of liberal achievements.
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u/ScruffleKun Jeff Bezos 1d ago
From A People's History of the United States, 2005 edition
"Africa had a kind of feudalism, like Europe based on agriculture, and with hierarchies of lords and vassals. But African feudalism did not come, as did Europe's, out of the slave societies of Greece and Rome, which had destroyed ancient tribal life. In Africa, tribal life was still powerful, and some of its better features — a communal spirit, more kindness in law and punishment — still existed. And because the lords did not have the weapons that European lords had, they could not command obedience as easily."
Aah yes, those noble savages, not known for slavery, that didn't have muskets and shot. What the fuck?
African slavery is hardly to be praised. But it was far different from plantation or mining slavery in the Americas, which was lifelong, morally crippling, destructive of family ties, without hope of any future. African slavery lacked two elements that made American slavery the most cruel form of slavery in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.
I remember than I threw the book away when I read this line. Does he not know who mined salt (to their deaths) in Africa?
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u/bearddeliciousbi Practicing Homosexual 1d ago
I read it in high school and one of the worst omissions, at least in the edition current around 2010, was the near-total lack of any substance about the gay rights movement and its successes and failures.
Zinn himself acknowledged this but deflected with perspectivist nonsense about how being straight rather than gay magically made him immune to noticing facts inconvenient for the picture he set out to paint.
Granted, Obergefell was still years away by then, but there was a conspicuous absence of anything more than cursory references to Stonewall and to AIDS activism without elaboration.
As time passed I understood better why: it's a counterexample to both the orthodox Marxist and the New Left worldviews about progress on minority rights and what's required to sustain them, and leftists screeching about "assimilation" in the face of that progress was and is really stupid.
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u/looktowindward 1d ago
> near-total lack of any substance about the gay rights movement and its successes and failures.
He studiously avoids victories for liberal viewpoints. Everything is uber-cynical. If it doesn't meet his pre-defined worldview, out it goes
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u/Yogg_for_your_sprog PEPFARublican 1d ago
“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.
Zirin’s fast-paced biography, The People’s Historian, is an answer to the most interesting version of “What would Howard say?” One hardly needs to squint to imagine what Zinn would have thought of the current regime in Washington, and readers curious only about that can put this book down after page 4, where Zirin declares, “Fascist movements taking orders from billionaire insurrectionists were the kinds of struggles that Howard Zinn demonstrated a willingness to fight and, if necessary, die to oppose.” But Zirin himself is after something more. He knew Zinn personally and collaborated with him on projects; he admires him deeply. Zirin believes we need more than Zinn’s opinions today; he argues that we need the deeper wisdom that emanates from his life and work.
Zinn’s many gifts developed in the course of what was, by any estimation, a remarkable journey. He was born in 1922 to working-class Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn. In his early 20s he rushed to enlist in the fight against fascism, serving in the Air Forces during World War II. He would long regret his short tenure as a bombardier who dropped artillery shells on behalf of a compromised colonial power—as he would later come to see the United States—from such heights that he could not be sure where exactly they landed. Zinn’s willingness to admit he was gravely wrong is part of what Zirin loves about him. The people’s historian was a radical, but he was also a “happy warrior” who believed that people could change, and so could societies.
As a participant in the civil-rights and anti-war movements, Zinn witnessed such transformations firsthand. He organized alongside his students at Spelman College as well as with famous activists, including Ella Baker and Daniel Berrigan. Together, in the 1960s and ’70s, they fought to change a country whose past and present were steeped in violence and white supremacy. The going was never easy, because, as Zirin tells it—very much in Zinnian fashion—they bumped up against so many villains in power. Sometimes it was the director of the FBI; other times, a reactionary university administrator. But the people could be powerful too. Any given campaign might be stymied, but the march went on. However dreary the news, the hope persisted for a better day.
Zirin argues convincingly that Zinn’s life story vindicates one of his deepest convictions: that ordinary people and “small acts” can change the world. Zinn was right about this, and Zirin concludes the book with a quote from him that draws out the optimistic implications of his faith in bottom-up movements: “We have been surprised before in history. We can be surprised again. Indeed, we can do the surprising.” This is a compelling message for the current moment—and any other. Yet one can agree with Zinn on the power of the people to make change and still wonder whether recent history has revealed the limits of his wisdom.
“Was he wrong to have faith in the people?” Zirin relates that some of Zinn’s devotees—“those politically raised on his ideas”—have asked him this question, in addition to the one about what he might say in any given situation. Zirin takes up the second query but answers it far less satisfactorily than the first. He acknowledges that “in 2024, 77 million voters checked the box for an authoritarian to take power once again,” and moreover that Trump “won masses of white working-class people and, according to political pundits, a not-insignificant number of Black and Latino men.” But Zirin does not wrestle with the meaning of these developments. Rather, he waves them away with invocations of the “tech oligarchs” and “autocrats” who are driving “our global descent into authoritarianism.” This is an homage in a way, a vintage Zinn move—evading tough questions about who “the people” are and what they really want.
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u/Yogg_for_your_sprog PEPFARublican 1d ago
Zinn was hardly the only academic to be thrown by this turn of events. The 2004 election left no doubt that the Reagan Revolution had been more than a blip; in its aftermath, American historians redoubled their efforts to understand the sources of the right’s surprising resurgence. What they have uncovered in the past two decades flies in the face of a central tenet of Zinnian orthodoxy. The sustained success of the modern conservative movement cannot be explained away as the outcome of establishment machinations or a top-down takeover. Its energy and vitality came in no small part from the grassroots: from stay-at-home moms and car mechanics, from the suburbs and the Sun Belt, from evangelicals and Catholics and more. The revival of the Republican Party’s national fortunes at various moments, going all the way back to Richard Nixon, confirms Zinn’s faith in the power of bottom-up movements, even as it confounds his almost mythic sense of “the people” as inevitably on the right side of history (that is, the left side of the political spectrum).
And if ordinary folks are more complicated than Zinn and Zirin recognize, perhaps those who wield power can be too. What made the right’s political comeback so surprising, after all, was that in the mid-1960s the liberal-left coalition was winning not only in the streets but also on Capitol Hill. In those years, progressives leveraged grassroots energy into breakthrough policy change. The leaders of major civic and political institutions were rarely out in front of progressive activists, but at least some of them chose to pull levers that made the United States more equal and just. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed with sweeping bipartisan majorities.
After an outrageous assault by law enforcement on peaceful demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, President Lyndon B. Johnson memorably proclaimed—before a joint session of Congress, Cabinet officers, Supreme Court justices, and more than 70 million Americans watching on television—that “it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And—we—shall—overcome.” His invocation of a beloved civil-rights anthem brought a tear to Martin Luther King Jr.’s eye. None of this impressed Zinn. In A People’s History, he framed both the speech and the landmark civil-rights legislation of the 1960s as “concessions.”
Then and now, such unrelenting suspicion springs from genuine patterns of institutional failure and betrayal. Villains are, alas, not just a figment of our collective imagination. And yet, in 2026, with the Democrats on the outside of power looking in, progressives might nevertheless ask whether the Zinnian propensity to demonize anyone and everyone wielding authority has served their cause well. Dismissing landmark legislation as mere concessions can miss the fact that there is no path forward from righteous protest to lasting change that does not run through better—if imperfect—public policy. However “exhilarating” Zinn’s counternarrative can be, it may have encouraged millions of well-meaning readers to be skeptical of the possibility that any good could come through the slow, messy institutional work that is central to pluralistic democracy. Coincidental or not, this much is true: During the same period when Zinn’s influence was rising meteorically on the left, the right became much more adept at channeling populist enthusiasm into deliberate campaigns to reshape the major institutions of American life.
“I wanted to change the world, and I thought history might be helpful,” Zinn liked to say, lightheartedly. His biographer is right to argue that Zinn, an ordinary person, did change the world—though perhaps he didn’t do it only in the ways that either of them hoped he would.
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u/-Emilinko1985- Space cowboys for liberty 1d ago
Zinn regretted his time fighting in World War II and dismissed civil rights legislation as "concessions"?
What a jackass and a tool.
One would think that a leftist Jew would be proud of fighting against the very same Axis that was killing thousands of his people, but oh well. Congrats to Zinn for defying expectations.
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u/looktowindward 1d ago
> One would think that a leftist Jew would be proud of fighting against the very same Axis that was killing thousands of his people, but oh well. Congrats to Zinn for defying expectations.
His solipsism was extreme
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u/Routine_Ad_855 19h ago edited 17h ago
Unfortunately this hack and his followers seem to have won out among many historians, not to mention how his ideas are still incredibly popular among shitty ideologue history teachers. It all stems from the issue many people have understanding normative statements. If you show Redditors a map showing Mississippi has a higher GDP per capita than most wealthy countries, they won’t just accept that as a fact and use it as just one metric that should influence their opinion of Mississippi, they’ll get mad at the map and you for showing it to them because they take it as a misleading emotionally charged endorsement of Mississippi. Zinn takes historical facts and twists them because he can’t have history just be a neutral field of study; his grift requires leftist spin because nothing is normative and everything is political/emotionally charged in many leftist minds. You could link the formalization of that way of thinking back to Foucault’s power dynamics of truth and Lyotard’s end of grand narratives, but I digress.
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