![]() ![]() It’s not just that no subsequent single-volume history has penetrated the national psyche the way Adams’s and Zinn’s did it’s also that, textbooks aside, few major US historians have attempted the feat. Indeed, after Zinn the once-crowded field grew bare. Seeing the country as divided between oppressors and oppressed, he made little room for common cause, for shared dreams, for even a common history. ![]() Yet Zinn’s book, perhaps the most successful single-volume history of the United States, also drove a stake through the heart of the enterprise. Stanford University’s Sam Wineburg, an expert on history education, says that it “has arguably had a greater influence on how Americans understand their past than any other single book.” Though decades old, A People’s History still cracks Amazon’s list of the 50 best-selling history titles. Like The Catcher in the Rye, it’s a they’re-all-phonies book that, despite itself, now appears regularly on high school syllabi. Zinn sought to provide a defiant riposte to the traditional flag-and-freedom histories, but his book has entered the canon. ![]()
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