Howard Zinn is a distinguished debunker of American textbook myths, a radical historian who interrogates “received versions” and illuminatingly digs into the gritty popular layers of life where history is really made. Zinn unearths inconvenient evidence and forgotten episodes, always taking a hard look at the elitist travesty too many scholars have made of the past. Fearless critics rarely are honoured in their own lands and so, like kindred spirit Noam Chomsky, he is better known abroad. (During the Vietnam war, though, Zinn, Chomsky and a handful of others became steady moral compasses for a new generation of activists and scholars.) What one cracks up against when challenging dominant views are unquestioned, or inadequately questioned, bedrock assumptions. One doesn’t undertake this daunting work lightly inasmuch as it always rouses fierce and devious defenders of the status quo. “Even [American] liberals,” as Zinn glumly observes, “are conservative by global standards.”
