Howard Zinn’s many con­tri­bu­tions to the Amer­i­can Left make his sins as a schol­ar for­giv­able — such is the usu­al (and under­stand­ably sym­pa­thet­ic) cri­tique of this icon of revi­sion­ist his­to­ry. But now, on the eve of the 40th anniver­sary of A People’s His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States—with more than 2.5 mil­lion copies in print and its influ­ence con­tin­u­ing to grow — read­ers may want to reex­am­ine how Zinn deliv­ers his message.

'A People’s History' focuses almost exclusively on victimization and tragedy.

Zinn earned his crit­i­cal view of Amer­i­can pow­er after drop­ping explo­sives and napalm over France and Cen­tral Europe from B‑17 bombers dur­ing World War II. Back home, he went to col­lege through the G.I. Bill and stud­ied his­to­ry at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, the base of tow­er­ing lib­er­al intel­lec­tu­als like Richard Hof­s­tadter and Hen­ry Steele Com­mager. In 1959, a year after Zinn fin­ished his doc­tor­ate, he pub­lished his first and only for­ay into exten­sive archival research: LaGuardia in Con­gress, a con­ven­tion­al mono­graph on Fiorel­lo LaGuardia’s pre-may­oral career as a con­gress­man in the 15 years lead­ing up to the New Deal.

But if grad­u­ate school gave Zinn his cre­den­tials, his first teach­ing posi­tion, at the his­tor­i­cal­ly black Spel­man Col­lege, gave him his voca­tion. In the late 1950s and ear­ly 1960s, Zinn host­ed stu­dent activists and par­tic­i­pat­ed in deseg­re­ga­tion efforts in Geor­gia, Mis­sis­sip­pi and Alaba­ma. Work­ing with the Stu­dent Non­vi­o­lent Coor­di­nat­ing Com­mit­tee, Zinn observed reg­is­tra­tion dri­ves in the South and wrote about the civ­il rights move­ment for sym­pa­thet­ic peri­od­i­cals like The Nation, earn­ing him­self an FBI file in the process. Zinn’s role in stu­dent activism led the Spel­man admin­is­tra­tion to fire him (not the last time Zinn ran into prob­lems with uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tion), and he took a posi­tion in the depart­ment of gov­ern­ment at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty, where he stayed for near­ly 25 years.

Was Zinn an activist or a his­to­ri­an? He was not alone in chal­leng­ing the dichoto­my. Like his­to­ri­an and In These Times founder James Wein­stein, Zinn was a bit old­er than many of the activists of the New Left, but he nev­er­the­less belonged to a move­ment of his­to­ri­ans who took Van Wyck Brooks’ ide­al of a ​“usable past” as a mantra for their schol­ar­ship. Young his­to­ri­ans of the Left defined their work in delib­er­ate oppo­si­tion to what they thought of as detached lib­er­al­ism and super­fi­cial­ly objec­tive his­to­ry. Instead of mere­ly inter­pret­ing the past, these his­to­ri­ans want­ed to change the present.

Zinn described his ide­al as ​“val­ue-laden his­to­ri­og­ra­phy” to sharp­en pop­u­lar per­cep­tions of ​“how bad things are for the vic­tims of the world.” The historian’s job was to retell the offi­cial his­to­ry (as writ­ten by the vic­tors) instead as a sto­ry of the oppressed — and wake peo­ple out of their com­pla­cent slum­ber in the process.

Zinn was not alone in his belief that his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tives should pro­voke change, but he broke with oth­er left­ists of his gen­er­a­tion (includ­ing Eugene Gen­ovese, a Marx­ist his­to­ri­an of slav­ery) through his strong com­mit­ment to his­to­ry as a way to move peo­ple for­ward. For Zinn, this goal sup­plant­ed loy­al­ty to any ide­ol­o­gy or pro­fes­sion­al norm. Because the stakes were so high, he thought there was no time to waste.

As the first edi­tion of A People’s His­to­ry, pub­lished in 1980, insist­ed, there was no such thing as val­ue-free his­to­ry — all his­to­ry advo­cates one per­spec­tive or anoth­er; his his­to­ry advo­cat­ed for the 99% against rul­ing elites, from colo­nial­ism to the present day, cen­tered on the plight of the mar­gin­al­ized and the resis­tance of the powerless.

The Nation­al Book Award final­ist stood as an anti­dote to con­ven­tion­al school text­books that left out social move­ment fig­ures and events that cast the polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment in a bad light. ​“It became clear to me,” Zinn said, ​“that the real­ly crit­i­cal way in which peo­ple are deceived by his­to­ry is not that lies are told, but that things are omitted.”

Since its pub­li­ca­tion, A People’s His­to­ry has had mul­ti­ple new edi­tions and spin­offs, a rare feat for any his­to­ri­an and espe­cial­ly for one who pos­sessed no inter­est in telling sto­ries about found­ing fathers or pres­i­dents. Zinn’s nar­ra­tive not only intro­duced many peo­ple to a crit­i­cal per­spec­tive on U.S. his­to­ry, but became an invi­ta­tion to join the resis­tance. The book’s influ­ence is undeniable.

The prob­lem with Zinn’s work, how­ev­er, is that it some­times tries so hard to assault our com­pla­cen­cy that it fails to offer an hon­est account of how polit­i­cal change actu­al­ly happens.

At Zinn’s hand, the pow­er­less are one-dimen­sion­al vic­tims with puri­ty akin to for­mu­la­ic Chris­t­ian mar­tyrs. Hero­ic social move­ments are so egal­i­tar­i­an and ide­al­is­tic that they nev­er actu­al­ly suc­ceed; tem­po­rary vic­to­ries are sim­ply used to build ten­sion before an inevitable defeat.

Con­sid­er how Zinn treats the Pop­ulist revolt of the late 19th cen­tu­ry. A demo­c­ra­t­ic move­ment of black and white farm­ers, the Pop­ulists sup­port­ed rur­al Amer­i­cans against the emerg­ing cor­po­rate-finan­cial sys­tem, from Wall Street and Lon­don to small-town mer­chants in Texas and North Car­oli­na. Along with urban move­ments like the Knights of Labor, the Pop­ulists cam­paigned with far-reach­ing reform poli­cies that includ­ed the reg­u­la­tion of pub­lic util­i­ties and trans­porta­tion, a demo­c­ra­t­ic and decen­tral­ized finan­cial sys­tem, and labor pro­tec­tions. The agrar­i­an rad­i­cals of the Farm­ers’ Alliance (and, sub­se­quent­ly, the People’s Par­ty) formed coop­er­a­tive orga­ni­za­tions and ran can­di­dates for nation­al office in the 1890s. With William Jen­nings Bryan on a fusion­ist tick­et, the People’s Par­ty won some local and con­gres­sion­al races, but dra­mat­i­cal­ly lost in 1896 and dis­solved short­ly thereafter.

Pop­ulists saw their fail­ure — and the 1896 vic­to­ry of busi­ness ally Pres­i­dent William McKin­ley — as a tragedy, and many his­to­ri­ans have since agreed. But elec­toral pol­i­tics is just one part of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal his­to­ry. Many of the ideas the Pop­ulists con­ceived or ral­lied around — from antitrust and inter­state reg­u­la­tion to a decen­tral­ized finan­cial sys­tem and oth­ers — did not sim­ply dis­ap­pear. These pol­i­cy pro­pos­als still exist in mod­i­fied forms. The lega­cy of orga­nized farm­ers remained a per­sis­tent force in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics for nation­al con­trol over eco­nom­ic struc­tures. The con­tin­ued rel­e­vance of Pop­ulism can be found, among oth­er places, in the small oil towns of ear­ly-1900s Kansas or the urban his­to­ry of Pro­gres­sive-era Port­land, Ore.

In Zinn’s nar­ra­tive, how­ev­er, these local and par­tial vic­to­ries, made com­plex by the twists and turns of his­to­ry, are irrel­e­vant; the sto­ry that mat­ters is one-dimen­sion­al and (pri­mar­i­ly) elec­toral. The Pop­ulists were defeat­ed by the cor­po­ra­tions and the press. ​“Even the hint of Pop­ulism” could not be tol­er­at­ed, Zinn wrote, ​“and the big guns of the Estab­lish­ment pulled out all their ammu­ni­tion, to make sure.” Before any con­sid­er­a­tion of the Pop­ulist lega­cy, Zinn has already left the scene for Wound­ed Knee (the ​“cli­max to four hun­dred years of vio­lence that began with Colum­bus”) and the Span­ish-Amer­i­can War (“a way of drown­ing class resentment”).

Con­sid­er, for a moment, labor action dur­ing the Great Depres­sion: A mil­lion and a half work­ers went on strike in 1934. In Zinn’s telling, all they got for their trou­ble was the crush­ing machin­ery of the state through a mobi­lized Nation­al Guard and a paci­fied AFL-CIO. (No seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion is made of the sig­nif­i­cant Demo­c­ra­t­ic gains in that year’s Con­gres­sion­al elec­tion or the pas­sage of the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Act the fol­low­ing year.) As for the New Deal, though the Roo­sevelt admin­is­tra­tion stands today as inspi­ra­tion for the left wing of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, Zinn says there is lit­tle to be learned except that ​“cap­i­tal­ism remained intact.”

Zinn is on his strongest foot­ing as a his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tor in his dis­cus­sion of the civ­il rights and anti-Viet­nam War move­ments, but even there the rise and devel­op­ment of social move­ments is exclud­ed for a parade of protest sto­ries that have been most­ly stripped of con­text. And by the mid-1970s, ​“the sys­tem” went back to work con­trol­ling peo­ple once again.

All his­to­ries, of course, omit some facts and details and rab­bit holes, but A People’s His­to­ry focus­es almost exclu­sive­ly on vic­tim­iza­tion and tragedy. Zinn’s his­to­ry, though bril­liant with pathos and sto­ry­telling, ulti­mate­ly presents an unus­able past; it too often fails to con­sid­er the change that occurs through untidy and often dis­ap­point­ing com­pro­mis­es, human long­ing, unin­tend­ed con­se­quences and sur­pris­ing moments of advantage.

Like his­tor­i­cal change itself, the val­ue of his­tor­i­cal schol­ar­ship is often unex­pect­ed. As in much of the best sci­en­tif­ic research, the his­to­ri­an resists the urge to make their writ­ing over­ly prac­ti­cal or imme­di­ate­ly applic­a­ble to the needs of the present in favor of fol­low­ing the slow and often frus­trat­ing path of the research process. This process fre­quent­ly results in unex­pect­ed twists and new and some­times incon­ve­nient con­clu­sions, pro­vid­ing fresh insights into change.

Zinn’s suc­cess had an unin­tend­ed con­se­quence itself: A People’s His­to­ry quick­ly moved out of the typ­i­cal­ly small envi­rons of a rad­i­cal academic/​activist and became an inter­na­tion­al sen­sa­tion. Its essen­tial mes­sage, that Amer­i­can his­to­ry is a long sto­ry of pow­er­ful elites dom­i­nat­ing com­mon peo­ple, counter-bal­anced the cul­tur­al con­ser­v­a­tive embrace of Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism, which gained spe­cial promi­nence in the post-Rea­gan years. Zinn’s book became a light­ning rod in the cul­ture wars over pub­lic school cur­ric­u­la, and Repub­li­cans in states like Indi­ana and Arkansas have repeat­ed­ly tried to ban the book in schools.

Under­stand­ably, the Left has ral­lied around A People’s His­to­ry and the book con­tin­ues to be regard­ed among some in the activist com­mu­ni­ty as a req­ui­site, if some­what dat­ed, state­ment of America’s dis­or­dered past.

The rhetor­i­cal bat­tles of the cul­ture war rarely lend them­selves to care­ful reflec­tion, and there are good rea­sons to put A People’s His­to­ry away. More­over, much of the schol­ar­ship Zinn relied on has itself been revised. Many of the insights and sto­ries that Zinn col­lect­ed have made their way into con­tem­po­rary text­books that are wide­ly avail­able and serve as good alter­na­tives to the right-wing text­books that Texas cur­ricu­lum com­mit­tees con­tin­ue to insist upon. His per­spec­tive is pal­pa­ble as a mem­ber of a left­ist move­ment that was in quick retreat on the verge of the Rea­gan Rev­o­lu­tion and the decline of New Deal liberalism.

Today, we occu­py a much dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal scene. The social demo­c­ra­t­ic ideas inspired by the New Deal, Pop­ulist and social move­ment tra­di­tions are once again pop­u­lar and stand to influ­ence pub­lic pol­i­cy in sig­nif­i­cant, imme­di­ate ways. Zinn is no longer enough. We need new his­to­ries that are clear-eyed about the chal­lenges of cre­at­ing pos­i­tive polit­i­cal change in a moment when the Left is poised no longer to sit on the mar­gins of politics.