Chronicle of Higher Education:
Let’s not take Daniels’s word that it is “truly execrable” and amounts to “disinformation.” We can instead consult, say, Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton University and a well-known liberal. “What he did was take all of the guys in white hats and put them in black hats, and vice versa,” Wilentz has said about Zinn. The book amounts to “agitprop—but it’s not particularly good history.” Zinn “ceased writing serious history. He had a very simplified view that everyone who was president was always a stinker and every left-winger was always great.”
Or we can consult Michael Kazin, a professor of history at Georgetown University and co-editor of the left-wing journal Dissent. Kazin admires Zinn for his politics (“a dedicated radical”) but not for his scholarship: “Unfortunately, Zinn’s big book is stronger on polemical passion than historical insight. For all his virtuous intentions, Zinn essentially reduced the past to a Manichean fable. …” And “to make sense of a nation’s entire history, one has to explain the weight and meaning of worldviews that are not his own and that he does not favor. Zinn had no taste for such disagreeable tasks.”
