A Patriot's History of the United States

"You should read Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. That book will knock you on your ass." So recommends Will Hunting, played by Matt Damon, in the Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting.

As millions of college kids soon discovered, he was absolutely right. First published in 1980, the tale of America as told from the perspective of Native Americans, Slaves, Civil Rights activists, and protesters, was deemed an instant classic and required reading in universities everywhere.

For the first time, young people and minorities had in a historian an actual hero, and all Zinn had to do was publish the things that people who never had a voice actually said. Reading Zinn has since become all the rage.

Last month, Zinn spoke to a captive audience on The Daily Show. A controversial episode of The Sopranos, in 2002, had Tony railing to his son, A.J., simply for reading Zinn's book. And in 2003, a public reading of the book was held to commemorate its millionth copy sold, with the "people's" passages read by Alice Walker, Alfre Woodard, Kurt Vonnegut, Danny Glover, and James Earl Jones.

True to the climate of our times, even this seminal work has been rebutted by a faction of Christian conservatives in the recent release, A Patriot's History of the United States: a re-retelling of our history from the perspective of, well, white guys. Disgusted by the fact that our current textbooks "give more time to Harriet Tubman than Abraham Lincoln," authors Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen have produced a kinder, gentler account of icons such as Christopher Columbus, George Washington, and even Richard Nixon.