SOURCE: Kazin, Michael. Review of Declarations of Independence, by Howard Zinn. Journal of American History 78, no. 3 (December 1991): 1034-35.

In the following review, Kazin praises Zinn's exposure of the fallacies associated with conventional historical truths despite the weakness of some of his arguments.

Howard Zinn writes the type of history scholars are supposed to disdain. “For me,” he writes, “history could only be a way of understanding and helping to change (yes, an extravagant ambition!) what was wrong in the world.” This book is the committed radical's latest attempt to scour the past for lessons to instruct those who might transform American society. Declarations of Independence is organized as a series of passionate moral arguments with the normative assumptions of contemporary politics—that some wars are just, that “Machiavellian realism” is a proper basis for foreign policy, that the legal system serves just ends, that capitalism rewards hard work...