Rethinking America's Past: Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States in the Classroom and Beyond [Paperback]

Robert Cohen (Author)
ROBERT COHEN is a historian of social protest, African American history, and student politics, who has written extensively on 1960s America. His most recent book, Confronting Jim Crow: Race, Memory, and the University of Georgia in the Twentieth Century won the Lillian Smith Book Award. His other works on racism and anti-racist protest in the South include Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Civil Rights, Sit-ins, and Black Women’s Student Activism (Georgia) and Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s, coedited by David J. Snyder. He lives and writes in New York.

Sonia E. Murrow (Author)
SONIA E. MURROW is an associate professor of the social foundations of education and adolescence education in the School of Education at Brooklyn College. Her research interests include the history, policy, and practice of urban education and the teaching of history to adolescents. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

No introductory work of American history has had more influence over the past forty years than Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which since its publication in 1980 has sold more than three million copies. Zinn’s 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 America’s Past is the first work to use archival and classroom evidence to assess the impact that Zinn’s classic work has had on historical teaching and learlS4