SOURCE: Kammen, Michael. “How the Other Half Lived.” Washington Post Book World (23 March 1980): 7.

In the following review, Kammen finds A People's History a largely unsuccessful attempt to synthesize the body of revisionist historiography of the 1970s.

Howard Zinn has earned his medals as a radical academic and social activist. He served nobly in the civil rights movement during the 1960s and subsequently became an outspoken critic of our tragic involvement in Vietnam. He is now in the news because the president of Boston University, where Zinn is a professor of political science, is trying to fire five tenured faculty members who led a strike last fall against the president's authoritarian policies. Howard Zinn is one of the “B.U.5.”

Most of his previous publications have dealt with American history in the 20th century, especially southern and black history, our Vietnam fiasco and related aspects of injustice in the...