A People's History of the United States

Zinn’s book is an extremely popular work of American history. But despite the book’s mainstream popularity, it is not without problems. Many historians have challenged the purported facts Zinn lays out. In a review published in the journal Reviews in American History, Robert Cohen cites a survey conducted by the History News Network that polled 600 historians. The result was that A People’s History was ranked the second least credible work of history still in print. (The Jefferson Lies by David Barton edged out Zinn’s book by nine votes.) And in a 2019 op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal, Naomi Schaefer Riley argued that Zinn’s book is an abdication of the responsibility of a teacher or historian to be rigorous in their approach and to confront readers with the complexity of history rather than to provide an ideologically driven narrative that twists facts to fit the theory.

Cohen wrote about his conflicted views regarding Zinn’s first chapter. The book’s description of Native American society is built on poorly sourced material about native life. To work this period into his broader argument, Zinn misrepresents Indigenous societies as pacifistic, idyllic, and utopian when these societies were plagued by social ills prior to contact.