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I know nothing of Howard Zinn but I thought someone would find this interesting.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/08/paul-gottfried/an-astounding-comeback/

By Paul Gottfried

A recently posted commentary of mine on the deceased far Left historian Howard Zinn (1923-2010) refers to a critical study by Hamilton Institute research scholar Mary Grabar. In her exhaustively documented monograph Debunking Howard Zinn, Dr. Grabar demonstrates the gross misrepresentations of the American past, starting with Columbus’s voyages down to the Vietnam War, which abound in Zinn’s People’s History of the United States (1980). Especially in the introductory chapter, Grabar’s work dwells on the enormous celebrity that has accrued to Zinn and his work. It has been featured in movies like Good Will Hunting, been fervently endorsed by Democratic politicians, and has sold over two million copies since the book went on the market almost forty years ago..

Although professional historians, including some with impeccable leftist credentials, like Michael Kammen and Eric Foner, have scoffed at Zinn’s claims to scholarship, his People’s History has obtained the status of a sacred text among progressive intellectuals. The drooling endorsement that this shoddy work received in the Chronicles of Higher Education in 2003 was almost impossible for this reader to get through without feeling slightly nauseated. In my earlier remarks, I may have missed the extent to which  Zinn’s anti-American screed continues to generate fans among American educational, journalistic and entertainment elites. Mary is clearly right on this point; and I may not have been sufficiently aware of Zinn’s enduring popularity among our chattering classes.

But I am a bit puzzled as to why Zinn enjoys this degree of popularity given what seems to me the almost passé quality of his leftism. Zinn was an angry revolutionary hoping to incite American blacks and Native American activists into overthrowing what remained of the capitalist system and replacing it with his own brand of socialism. There is little evidence that Zinn moved from this frozen Marxist posture into support for feminism and LGBT causes.  Perhaps if he lived a bit longer, he would have followed his look-alike Bernie Sanders (who is also a native New Yorker and veteran Marxist of Eastern European Jewish descent) into espousing what has now become the fashionable form of the Left, one that blends elements of Marxist socialism with intersectional themes.

Mary’s work on Zinn causes me to reflect further on something that I have been thinking about for decades: Why does today’s Left, which focuses on gender and lifestyle victims, continue to glorify an older Marxist Left, which didn’t really care about today’s victim groups, except to whatever extent it could use some of them to make an economic revolution. Obama worshipfully paid court to the Castro family although the Cuban Communist regime threw homosexuals into concentration camps. Mark Bray in his Antifa Handbook celebrates Communists of the 1930s, although it’s highly unlikely that those whom he worships would have had anything but contempt for his pro-gay, pro-feminist, open-borders politics. Although the Left that now exists is rather different from the older Communist Left, it continues to pay tribute to the older Left, as can be seen from the hefty sales of Zinn’s book among today’s leftists…

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