Much of the hostility toward Christopher Columbus can be traced back to Howard Zinn's popular book of polemical history, "A People's History of the United States."

Attacks against statues of Christopher Columbus and calls to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day have become a Columbus Day ritual in recent years. This year they began early, shortly after the May 25 death of George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police, as protests against police and "systemic" racism quickly turned into riots. This year's riots differed from others, such as Watts in 1965 and Ferguson in 2014. This summer's destruction rippled outward beyond the communities where the alleged police brutality took place. Symbolic vengeance for what was seen as the murder of a black man by white police officers was exacted in the widening desecration, destruction and removal of public historical monuments: first, statues of Confederates, then Columbus and, finally, an increasingly indiscriminate sweep of figures from American history, including even abolitionists, black Union soldiers, and the commander of the Union Army, Ulysses S. Grant. Much of the hostility toward Columbus can be traced back to Howard Zinn's popular book of polemical history, "A People's History of the United States," in continuous publication since 1980. The claims in this book are now widely accepted as conventional wisdom. Wikipedia, for example, attributes this summer's wave of attacks on and removal of more than 30 Columbus statues to the explorer's "enslavement of and systemic violence against the indigenous people of the Caribbean, including the genocide of the Taino people."

"A People's History" is used increasingly as a core history textbook in schools. The Zinn Education Project offers lessons based on Zinn's book, as well as "Abolish Columbus Day" kits. Zinn, ten years after his death, remains an icon of the political left and a profound influence in shaping unwary students' understanding of our national history. What happened in New Haven, Conn., this summer provides a case study. A statue of Columbus had stood in the city's Wooster Square Park since 1892. But on June 24, 2020, the statue, defaced with red paint, was taken down by workers, as fights erupted between supporters and opponents of the removal. Randall Beach, New Haven Register columnist, used Zinn's book to advocate for the statue's removal in a June 25 column headlined "With the Columbus statue gone, let the healing begin." Beach described the fights as occurring between Black Lives Matter members and opponents. One man told Beach he wanted the statue to stay because Columbus was not "a murderer and a rapist." This unnamed man echoed letter-writer Frank Mongillo, III, who objected to the removal of the statue, which had been funded by donations from "a group of Italian societies" and which, he said, symbolized pride and helped "build a sense of connection between the Italian community and America's history." Beach wrote that he had asked the man in the park "if he had read the historian Howard Zinn and his 'People's History of the United States' … Zinn used Columbus' journal and the observations of a writer-priest to amass extensive evidence that Columbus committed atrocities. …"

Beach was repeating claims from his June 18 column, which relied on the famous opening pages of Zinn's book, which, as demonstrated in my own "Debunking Howard Zinn," Zinn actually plagiarized from a book for high school students by his fellow anti-Vietnam War organizer, Hans Koning, a novelist. Zinn also quoted deceptively from Columbus' journal. One of these deceptive quotations cited by Beach formed the basis for a scene in "The Sopranos." The teenage A.J., doing homework, reads from Zinn's book: "They would make fine servants. … With fifty men we could subjugate them and make them do whatever we want." The passage, A.J. says, is proof that Columbus was a "slave trader." Television viewers did not see the ellipses, and they should not have needed to, for ellipses are used to eliminate short, nonessential passages. Zinn's, however, leave out pages — two days' worth of the explorer's log entries, including such sentences about the native inhabitants he encountered as: "I know that they are a people who can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith more by love than by force."