[Kranar]

I made what I think is a good faith effort to review the link you provided, but I don't see any indication of factual errors Howard Zinn makes. It appears the criticism of him is that he is biased, he makes heavy use of secondary sources (a quantifiable claim which as best as I can tell is false given that Zinn's sources are enumerated and mostly primary) and engages in something called "presentism", which is to make moral judgements of historical acts based on modern moral standards, a claim I don't have any particular issue with but even if I did it has no bearing on the factual content of his work.

At no point have I seen anyone point out a factual error that Zinn has made, only that people don't like the conclusions he draws from those facts. Another commonly repeated point is that there are other historical works that do a better job than A People's History. That is almost certainly true as well, but that claim is no more relevant than pointing out that there are better scientific works that do a better job than Einstein's "Relativity: The Special and General Theory".

Having read A People's History, the very beginning of the book explicitly states that he is biased, that bias is something very hard to escape in almost any social study and is present among almost all historical literature whether the author admits it or not, and that the difference between his book and other historical works is that he makes the conscious decision to be biased from the point of view of the people who were conquered as opposed to writing from the point of view of the people who did the conquering.

Certainly Zinn has likely made some errors, but none of them are in the link you provided (as far as I could tell).

[jahaja]

This is also very similar to the criticism Noam Chomsky have received. He has been very accurate for decades but is still handled as an outcast.

Come to think about of it actually, it's also similar with the criticism of David Graeber's (RIP) book "Debt", which usually focus on "well, he wrote something really wrong paragraph about Apple, so you can't believe anything he writes really"

[UncleMeat]

> factual errors

This is not the limit of criticism of history scholarship. Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism isn't considered dated because of factual errors but instead because it over-represents a particular narrative and analysis style that fails to paint a detailed picture of things.

History scholarship is absolutely not a list of facts. It is the construction of a narrative from source material. A text that is 100% truthful to fact can still be entirely bogus scholarship (I'm not saying that Zinn's is).

[jolux]

I will accuse Zinn of many things but not constructing a narrative from his facts is not one of them :)

I happen to disagree with a lot of his political opinions but I think it's very important that APHUS exists.

[UncleMeat]

Sure it is a relevant book, especially in leftist history work. The problem scholars have with it is that it is held up as the text by some laypeople. It is not unique in having narrative issues. That's true of all history. It is just frustrating to see people say "well, he didn't get any facts wrong so all criticism is invalid".

[jolux]

No, I would never say all criticism is invalid. I think it's a relevant and important text to read, along with criticism of it. Nothing should be taken in isolation, scholarship is ultimately a conversation at a high level between knowledgeable parties, and it's a pretty dated book in a lot of ways. Nonetheless it was extremely influential and solid as a basic leftist history text, and he even acknowledges its bias in the preface and title as I've mentioned. I don't by half think it's a perfect book and I have a lot of criticisms of Zinn.