The New Criterion

The last time we checked, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States was in its twenty-fifth printing and had sold some 500,000 copies. It is probably more widely used in American classrooms than any other survey of the subject. This is a pity, for the book should really be titled “An Anti-American History of the United States.” Although published long before the term “political correctness” gained currency, Howard Zinn’s opus is a perfect specimen of political correctness on everything from the depredations of supposedly genocidal Europeans who forged the nation and deprived the noble, peace-loving Indians of their happy hunting grounds to the Vietnam War as a prime example of American imperialism and beyond.

Pick a topic, any topic, and you can be sure that Zinn is there with the standard-issue, off-the-rack left-wing cliché to explain it. Take t ...

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