Too many people are gloomy. Granted, we are living in a time when our liberties are threatened, but statists are always on hand telling us to give up more liberty for the security of state control. The secret is to resist those pleas for state intervention. A new history text agrees with that.
In the last month we have had a changing of the guard on America’s textbook of choice. Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States has been superseded in monthly sales by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen’s A Patriot’s History of the United States
Sociologist Howard Zinn, who died last month at age 87, wrote his people’s history thirty years ago, and it soon became the text of choice for the American left. From Columbus through Vietnam, Zinn’s narrative was one of oppression, violence, and unrelieved class struggle. Businessmen were monopolists, always gouging customers and raising prices. American politicians sold out the working class because of fear, power, or money. One wonders, after reading Zinn, why immigrants bothered to come to America by the millions in the late 1800s–and why they stayed in this land of tears and travail.
Zinn’s book is required in history courses throughout the U. S., and its defenders insist the book has sold almost two million copies. Schweikart and Allen’s Patriot History is a response to Zinn and a very different story of why this nation came to be and what it has accomplished in the world. Free people and free markets, these authors say, have created the highest standard of living in the world, and that has attracted more immigrants–eager to enjoy this freedom–than any country, anywhere, any time. Sure, America has its faults, but it also has its accomplishments and Patriot’s History is a great account of the rise of the U. S. What’s even more satisfying is that A Patriot’s History of the United States
