OBIT – AT 7:36 P.M. ET:  Howard Zinn has died.  He was left-wing royalty.  Presumably a "historian," Zinn was more a propagandist, yet his "history" is taken seriously by the gullible, especially the gullible who reside in Hollywood mansions.  There was recently a History Channel documentary based on his work.  He influenced Oliver Stone.  Zinn taught at Boston University, whose former president accused him of "poisoning" the academic environment.  Sadly, many people ignored that warning.

The New York Times runs an AP obit, which plays it relatively straight:

Howard Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose book “A People’s History of the United States” became a million-selling leftist alternative to mainstream texts, died Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 87 and lived in Auburndale, Mass...

...“A People’s History” told an openly left-wing story. Professor Zinn accused Christopher Columbus and other explorers of committing genocide, picked apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and celebrated workers, feminists and war resisters.

He was one of the founders of the modern "America is terrible" movement.

Even liberal historians were uneasy with Professor Zinn, who taught for many years at Boston University. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once said: “I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian.”

In a 1998 interview with The Associated Press, Professor Zinn acknowledged that he was not trying to write an objective history, or a complete one. He called his book a response to traditional works, the first chapter, not the last, of a new kind of history.

A response?  Is this a game?  If it's a response, and written by a man teaching in a history department, shouldn't it adhere to high standards of accuracy?  Apparently not, for this is a "new" kind of history.  From what I've seen, a number of people writing for the mainstream media bought that line.

Say nothing bad about the dead.  I was not an admirer.  I certainly think there's a place in universities for alternative points of view, well argued.  That's what the Great Conversation is about.  But some carried it too far, and their influence was not helpful to the expansion of democracy.

January 28, 2010