SOURCE: Scialabba, George. “U.S. History: By the People, For the People.” Christianity and Crisis (13 May 1991): 155-56.

In the following review, Scialabba dismisses Declarations of Independence as “mostly authorial commentary.”

The erudite essayist Walter Benjamin once proposed writing a book that would consist entirely of quotations. Fifty years later, in 1980, the earnest activist Howard Zinn actually wrote something approximating such a book. But while Benjamin envisioned an exquisite collage, cunningly composed and intricately ironic, Zinn produced an immense, ingenuous epic, a monumental saga of human brutality and bondage: A People's History of the United States.

I don't know how Benjamin's book would have turned out, but Zinn's beyond praise, a masterpiece of social criticism. In form, it is a national history narrated from the viewpoint of the victims: Indians, slaves, workers, women—not an entirely original idea, even in 1980. Its materials are standard, or at any rate easily...