When Howard Zinn died in 2010, US historians were divided over his legacy. Michael Kazin, Jill Lepore, and Sean Wilentz all reflected that Zinn's forthright and praiseworthy political commitments had hampered his ability to write anything other than, in Wilentz's words, “agitprop,” which could not be considered “serious history.”Footnote ¹ From another perspective, however, Paul Buhle, Eric Foner and Christopher Phelps, whilst admitting some failings in Zinn's work, nonetheless judged his most famous book, A People's History of the United States (1980), to be a valuable contribution to American historiography.Footnote ² Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left is a biography written by another professional historian, Martin Duberman. The book is narrated in sympathetic, personal terms, but its author is not afraid to question his subject's ideas and actions where necessary.

Born in 1922 in Brooklyn, Zinn served in the US Air Force during World War II, before taking a GI Bill-sponsored BA at New York University. In 1956, two years before he completed his Columbia doctorate, Zinn was appointed chair of the History Department at Spelman College, a black women's university in Atlanta. Relocation to the South provided the backdrop for the first of Zinn's major political commitments: his engagement with the civil rights movement as a senior adviser to SNCC. The historian conducted reports for the organization and attended demonstrations. He also spoke out against black separatist thinking, arguing that only regular contact and conversation between the races would provide the “universal detergent” needed to wash away prejudice (66). In 1964, Zinn moved north to work at Boston University, where he befriended Noam Chomsky and became involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement. He argued that the conflict was the logical outgrowth of a liberal political system that allowed for racial injustice at home, whilst perpetrating acts of imperialist violence abroad (142). After the war, Zinn gradually withdrew from day-to-day activist commitments, but continued to speak in solidarity with various campaigns, such as those against South African apartheid, US intervention in Central America, and, later, the post-9/11 escalation of the national security state.

As well as Zinn's activism, Duberman discusses his major historical works, from the text that grew out of the historian's PhD dissertation – LaGuardia in Congress (1958) – through the two books most obviously influenced by his civil rights activism – The Southern Mystique (1959) and SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964) – to the historiographical reflections of The Politics of History (1970). The author also dedicates a chapter to A People's History, arguing that it marked the culmination of Zinn's commitment to an “engaged” scholarship, and suggests that the book provided an important synthesis of the research published during the 1960s and 1970s by the radical historians of the New Left generation. These factors, Duberman argues, created a compelling narrative thread: “that the American experience from start to finish has essentially been the story of how the powerful few have deceived and dominated the many” (229).

Whilst Duberman's book provides some timely insights into the relevance of Zinn's activism and scholarship, it is not without its flaws. The author is too keen to draw stark and moralizing distinctions between apparently honourable “radicals” such as Zinn, Chomsky and Staughton Lynd, and untrustworthy “liberals” like C. Vann Woodward and David Riesman. With some irony, the book also falls foul of a critique Duberman himself aims at Zinn's memoir – You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (1994) – which he describes as reflecting “not nearly enough of Zinn the person,” and disparages for providing repetitive accounts of “already familiar events” (279). The relative lack of personal detail in Duberman's book is excusable, given Zinn's decision in the final years of his life to expunge all relevant material from his archives. However, its lengthy, derivative descriptions of postwar US race relations and foreign policy regularly interrupt its flow. Did Duberman and his editors think that the book's audience would not already be familiar with this basic material? Perhaps the most important problem, though, is that whilst Howard Zinn draws upon previously unavailable archival sources, the vast majority of the biographical details it provides have already been covered in the historian's memoir, not to mention Davis D. Joyce's 2003 biography, Howard Zinn: A Radical American Vision. The latter book, as far as this reviewer can tell, is not even cited in Duberman's endnotes. Ultimately, then, Zinn's contributions to postwar American political activism and historical writing still require the systematic historical treatment they deserve.