Via New York Times:
After a week of voting by readers, David Barton’s “The Jefferson Lies” won with some 650 votes, narrowly edging the left-wing historian Howard Zinn’s“People’s History of the United States,” which received 641 votes.Some quotes about each of the top 5 books.
4 comments:
Jon Stewart does an extended interview with David Barton and promotes the book. Barton definitely sounds like he has an agenda, but does not come across as unreasonable enough to write the "least credible book of history."
Interesting. I'll check out the clip.
I'm a little taken aback at the news that Howard Zinn gets tagged with a "least credible history" designation. When he died in 2010 at the age of 87, the news was full of gushing complements for the guy. For just one example I share Noam Chomsky's remembrance: "Even more influential in the long run than Howard's anti-war writings and actions was his enduring masterpiece, A People's History of the United States, a book that literally changed the consciousness of a generation. Here he developed with care, lucidity and comprehensive sweep his fundamental message about the crucial role of the people who remain unknown in carrying forward the endless struggle for peace and justice, and about the victims of the systems of power that create their own versions of history and seek to impose it." The point was that Zinn's history was mostly free of all the distortions of the victors and, for once, we got the unvarnished truth. See Remembering Howard Zinn.
More on Barton and Zinn: Lies the Debunkers Told Me: How Bad History Books Win Us Over
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