Rethinking America's Past

No introductory work of American history has had more influence over the past forty years than Howard Zinns A Peoples History of the United States, which since its publication in 1980 has sold more than three million copies. Zinns iconoclastic critique of American militarism, racism, and capitalism has drawn bitter criticism from the Right, most recently from President Donald Trump, who at his White House Conference on American History in 2020 denounced Zinn as a Left propagandist and accused teachers aligned with Zinn of indoctrinating students to hate America and be ashamed of its history. Rethinking Americas Past is the first work to use archival and classroom evidence to assess the impact that Zinns classic work has had on historical teaching and learning and on American culture. This evidence refutes Trumps charges, showing that rather than indoctrinating students, Zinns book has been used by teachers to have students debate and rethink conventional versions of American history. Rethinking Americas Past also explores the ways Zinns work fostered deeper, more critical renderings of the American past in movies and on stage and television and traces the origins and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of A Peoples History in light of more recent historical scholarship.