Here’s a letter to the Times from a few days ago, responding to a predictably tendentious eulogy by Bob Herbert:

To the Editor:

Bob Herbert suggests that the fact that the late historian Howard Zinn was viewed as a dangerous radical by some people is a sad commentary on American intellectual life.

I could not disagree more. I never met Mr. Zinn, but I have seen, as a history professor as well as in my research on French anti-Americanism, the awful effect that “A People’s History of the United States” has had on several generations of students. In Mr. Zinn’s effort to tell “the other side of the story,” he dramatically distorted events on both sides and reduced the complexities of international politics to a struggle between good and evil.

An excellent raconteur, he was, however, determined to write history as a story of American malfeasance. The result, among students who embraced his ideas, is a sort of facile cynicism posing as sophistication, and, perhaps worse, the tragically fatalistic idea that American history is little more than a conspiracy against humanity.

Seth Armus
Long Beach, N.Y., Jan. 30, 2010

The writer is an associate professor of history at St. Joseph’s College and the author of “French Anti-Americanism, 1930-1948: Critical Moments in a Complex History.”