SOURCE: “We're Just Wonderful People,” in Commonweal, March 27, 1998, pp. 22–23.

In the following review, Appy offers a negative assessment of A History of the American People.

Conservatives seem to believe that left-wing “revisionists” are winning the historical culture wars. If so, the revolutionary consequences are surprisingly hard to identify. Most of my students flock to places like Wall Street, Amgen, and Hewlett Packard, and very few are demanding workplace democracy or joining radical history book clubs during their hours of leisure. In the public arena, left-wing dominance is equally difficult to document. Witness the 1995 decision by the Smithsonian Institute to abandon an exhibit that raised historical questions about the necessity and morality of dropping atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. Editorials raged against the museum for “dishonoring” U.S. veterans “whose lives were saved by the bomb,” an ironclad faith the exhibit would have questioned. The Senate voted unanimously to...