SOURCE: O'Neill, William L. “Optimistic Activist.” Progressive 37, no. 6 (June 1973): 57.

In the following review of Postwar America: 1945-1971, O'Neill contends that there is little that is new in Zinn's revisionist history of the postwar years.

This book demonstrates how important timeliness is to a polemic. Few readers of The Progressive are likely to disagree with political scientist Howard Zinn's description of American foreign policy, or his denunciations of racism, sexism, militarism, and assorted other blights. But neither are they likely to find much that is new to them. The revisionist histories such as those by Gabriel Kolko and Lloyd C. Gardner have made us familiar with the often sordid motives underlying American diplomacy. Thanks to Gar Alperovitz and many others we know that even if the decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan was right (which Zinn disputes), it was arrived at wrongly. And what literate person can now...