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My history department have used Zinn's book for decades. We assign about 65% of it, so students all buy a copy. By the early 20th century, we found it was largely not so useful since we talked about many of the points he made (the essential conservatism of the Progressives, for example, or of the New Deal which, after all, was mainoly trying to save the capitalist system and improve it, and so on). One thing that was always appealing was that our students absolutely loved Zinn. It required no coaxing and no effort to get them to read even the longer readings (20-30 pages) in Zinn. And the next day, they were bursting at the seams in our discussions. It's important to not assign Zinn in a vacuum. Although it's worth noting that all over the country it's common all to assign traditional, conservative, hyper-patriotic points of view (the kind I was taught), and no one seems to object to that very much. As long as everyone thinks America can do no wrong, you get no complaints. Many teachers choose to play it safe that way -- or maybe they actually think that way. But that miseducates young people who don't learn to think that way. When you assign some left-wing reading, it might disturbs a certain kind of censorious person who suddenly wants to ban that book, but they're just fine with the narrow-minded treacle out there. What exactly are the "benefits" of slavery, Mr. DeSantis? At my school, we expected we might be criticized for using Zinn, but that never happened. But we also assigned lengthy readings from Richard Hofstadter and many other mainstream and more conservative historians. It goes without saying, that nearly all the common U.S. History textbooks strive to be mainstrean-to-conservative to appeal to the largest number of buyers. If a book gets banned in Florida or Texas, two major markets for textbooks, both primed to ban books they don't like lately, you lose a lot of money. So relying on the main textbook to ask controversial or pointed questions is a bad approach for a teacher to take because textbooks almost never do that. Most texts tend to whitewash history, oversimplify it, leave out the awful stuff, and excuse the bad things as "atypical" exceptions to the norm. That's hardly a recipe for a good education. That's a major reason why we adopted Zinn. We found textbooks, even the good ones, too bland, too unwilling to take a position even on issues of gross racism or sexism, that they anesthetized our students' minds. We wanted to show American history good and bad, and discuss that. How can you write about lynchings without at least a little outrage? How can you write about the internment of Japanese-Americans and take no point of view? What does the labor violence of the late 19th century show us about capitalism? Millions of American had no problem with slavery, and after it was abolished, they continued to have no problem with vicious racism? Worth talking about? Then put it in the textbook. If you wrote about the Nazis and the Holocaust, you'd take a strong position, but publishers want their U.S. history textbooks to be "neutral" or patriotic in order to sell more books. That seems a bit sleazy to me. Some of our students are avowedly conservative, even right-wing in their politics, and they have to deal with Zinn, too, which is a good thing just as it is for some left-leaning student to have to deal with conservative points of view. In fact, that's one of the main reasons for teaching history in the first place -- to discuss different points of view. Any course that predetermines a "correct" point of view, and in this country, that is typically the more conservative and traditional POV, is not dong their job. Teaching students to think a certain way is what authoritarian governments do. American students should be able to understand historical arguments and critique them. Discussion is the core of our U.S. History courses. We don't just "go over" history. We explore and discuss history. That's why Zinn is so useful. If you disagree with him or think he's crazy, good. Then let's discuss why you feel that way. What counter-arguments can you make. If somene criticized me for assigning Zinn, I'd ask them if it's okay for us to criticize Zinn. If so, then they need to read him first. That's the best thing you could do for most hard-right thinking students is to teach them how to argue with liberals like Zinn. You can't do that without reading Zinn. And as for "dense and large," I can only smile. It's the least "dense" U.S. History book I've ever read. It's anecdote after anecdote - which is, after all, one of the common criticisms of Zinn that he merely tells you lots of bad things but misses the big picture. We are careful to point out that even a dozen examples might not add up to a typical experience for most Americans. As for "large," all I can say is reading a chapter or part of a chapter in Zinn is easy enough to do because he's so interesting. All those anecdotes, you know. As long as you assign judicious amounts of Zinn and other points of view, it's not a problem. After all, it's how you become educated. Not assigning a book because it has a point of view you don't like is the "appalling" thing. I would never assign "Mein Kampf," but that's more because it's so unbelievably boring and repetitive, and anyway you could accomplish the same thing with a few excerpts. You know what's "appalling"? Communism is appalling. Fascism and Nazism are appalling. And I teach the hell out of these subjects so my students are aware of them. I see no difference with Zinn's socialism, which is hardly "appalling" and since we've gradually adopted many, if not most, of the main socialist ideas of a century ago, that alone makes it worth looking at. More on reddit.com

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It’s good, just don’t have it be the only history book you read. He provides some good ways of interpreting evidence, but he’s telling a story and using the evidence he can find to tell it. More on reddit.com