Thursday, February 04, 2010

Howard Zinn's Mangled History

Well, OBVIOUSLY. It's so mangled that even other leftists recognize it as such:
Much of the criticism of Zinn has come from dissenters on the left. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once remarked that "I don't take him very seriously. He's a polemicist, not a historian."

Last year, the liberal historian Sean Wilentz referred to the "balefully influential works of Howard Zinn."

Reviewing A People's History in The American Scholar, Harvard University professor Oscar Handlin denounced "the deranged quality of his fairy tale, in which the incidents are made to fit the legend, no matter how intractable the evidence of American history."

Socialist historian Michael Kazin judged Zinn's most famous work "bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions."

No comments: