1. When A People's History of the United States was published in 1980, ColumbiaUniversityhistorianEric Foner, reviewed it in The New York Times:
"Professor Zinn writes with an enthusiasm rarely encountered in the leaden prose of academic history, and his text is studded with telling quotations from labor leaders, war resisters and fugitive slaves. There are vivid descriptions of events that are usually ignored, such as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the brutal suppression of the Philippine independence movement at the turn of this century. Professor Zinn's chapter on Vietnam--bringing to life once again the free-fire zones, secret bombings, massacres and cover-ups--should be required reading for a new generation of students now facing conscription."
"Blacks, Indians, women and laborers appear either as rebels or as victims. Less dramatic but more typical lives — people struggling to survive with dignity in difficult circumstances — receive little attention." ..."A People's History reflects a deeply pessimistic vision of the American experience." Foner called for "an integrated account incorporating Thomas Jefferson and his slaves, Andrew Jackson and the Indians, Woodrow Wilson and the Wobblies.
2. Taking a less forgiving view of the book, HarvardUniversityhistorianOscar Handlin wrote in a review in The American Scholar:
"Hence the deranged quality of this fairy tale, in which the incidents are made to fit the legend, no matter how intractable the evidence of American history. It may be unfair to expose to critical scrutiny a work patched together from secondary sources, many used uncritically (Jennings, Williams), others ravaged for material torn out of context (Young, Pike). Any careful reader will perceive that Zinn is a stranger to evidence bearing upon the people about whom he purports to write. But only critics who know the sources will recognize the complex array of devices that pervert his pages... On the other hand, the book conveniently omits whatever does not fit its overriding thesis... It would be a mistake, however, to regard Zinn as merely Anti-American. Brendan Behan once observed that whoever hated America hated mankind, and hatred of mankind is the dominant tone of Zinn's book... He lavishes indiscriminate condemnation upon all the works of man-- that is, upon civilization, a word he usually encloses in quotation marks."
3. Writing in the Washington Post Book World, reviewer Michael Kammen, a professor of American History, wrote:
I wish that I could pronounce Zinn's book a great success, but it is not. It is a synthesis of the radical and revisionist historiography of the past decade. . . Not only does the book read like a scissors and paste-pot job, but even less attractive, so much attention to historians, historiography and historical polemic leaves precious little space for the substance of history. . . . We do deserve a people's history; but not a simpleminded history, too often of fools, knaves and Robin Hoods. We need a judicious people's history because the people are entitled to have their history whole; not just those parts that will anger or embarrass them. . . . If that is asking for the moon, then we will cheerfully settle for balanced history.
4. Writing in The New York Times, columnist Bob Herbert wrote:
Mr. Zinn was often taken to task for peeling back the rosy veneer of much of American history to reveal sordid realities that had remained hidden for too long. [...] What was so radical about believing that workers should get a fair shake on the job, that corporations have too much power over our lives and much too much influence with the government, that wars are so murderously destructive that alternatives to warfare should be found, that blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities should have the same rights as whites, that the interests of powerful political leaders and corporate elites are not the same as those of ordinary people who are struggling from week to week to make ends meet?
5. Writing in Dissent, GeorgetownUniversity history professor Michael Kazin argued that Zinn is too focused on class conflict, and wrongly attributes sinister motives to the American political elite. He characterized the book as an overly simplistic narrative of elite villains and oppressed people, with no attempt to understand historical actors in the context of the time in which they lived. Kazin wrote:
The ironic effect of such portraits of rulers is to rob 'the people' of cultural richness and variety, characteristics that might gain the respect and not just the sympathy of contemporary readers. For Zinn, ordinary Americans seem to live only to fight the rich and haughty and, inevitably, to be fooled by them.
Kazin argued that A People's History fails to explain why the American political-economic model continues to attract millions of minorities, women, workers, and immigrants, or why the socialist and radical political movements Zinn favors have failed to gain widespread support among the American public.
6. Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Christopher Phelps, associate professor of American studies in the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham wrote:
Professional historians have often viewed Zinn's work with exasperation or condescension, and Zinn was no innocent in the dynamic. I stood against the wall for a Zinn talk at the University of Oregon around the time of the 1992 Columbus Quincentenary. Listening to Zinn, one would have thought historians still considered Samuel Eliot Morison's 1955 book on Columbus to be definitive. The crowd lapped it up, but Zinn knew better. He missed a chance to explain how the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s have transformed the writing and teaching of history, how hisPeople's Historydid not spring out of thin air but was an effort to synthesize a widely shared shift in historical sensibilities. Zinn's historical theorizing, conflating objectivity with neutrality and position with bias, was no better.
The critics would be churlish, however, not to acknowledge the moving example Zinn set in the civil-rights and Vietnam moments, and they would be remiss not to note the value ofA People's History, along with its limitations. Zinn told tales well, stories that, while familiar to historians, often remained unknown to wider publics. He challenged national pieties and encouraged critical reflection about received wisdom. He understood that America's various radicalisms, far from being "un-American," have propelled the nation toward more humane and democratic arrangements. And he sold two-million copies of a work of history in a culture that is increasingly unwilling to read and, consequently, unable to imagine its past very well.