It was a useful corrective to a nationalist and exclusionary form of US history taught in schools, so in that sense it is quite effective, but as a work of history it's quite unbalanced and generally flawed. Of course, Zinn didn't claim to be writing history so much as a political tract.

Michael Kazin's article on it in Dissent pretty much sums up my feelings.

To borrow a phrase from the British historian John Saville, Zinn expects the past to do its duty. He has been active on the left since his youth in the 1930s. During the 1960s, he fought for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam and wrote fine books that sprang directly from those experiences. But to make sense of a nation’s entire history, an author has to explain the weight and meaning of worldviews that are not his own and that, as an engaged citizen, he does not favor. Zinn has no taste for such disagreeable tasks.

The fact that his text barely mentions either conservatism or Christianity is telling. The former is nothing but an excuse to grind the poor (“conservatism” itself doesn’t even appear in the index), while religion gets a brief mention during Anne Hutchinson’s rebellion against the Puritan fathers and then vanishes from the next 370 years of history.

You should read it, but as a political manifesto rather than social history - which are the terms Zinn set out anyway.

I'd say yes--for a lot of hairy philosophical reasons I won't lay out here. But it is overall a pretty expansive and incredible look at some aspects either totally disregarded or ill-framed by typical historians.

If nothing else (and there's plenty of criticism to be had for Zinn and others like him, i.e. Lies My History Teacher Told Me, etc.) Zinn highlights something that is true of all history writing--it is written from a specific perspective, for a specific audience. And that means that every aspect of it is infused with a particular ideological and political set of assumptions that select, reflect, and deflect reality (thanks, Kenneth Burke). If you really REALLY want to get into the weeds about how the historical sausage is made, you can inflict some serious pain with Hayden White's Topics of Discourse. ...or you can just read Zinn.

Edit: wrods aare tough

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=zinn&restrict_sr=on

sure read as much history as you can and Zinn's book has influenced thousands of (left leaning) historians. Read it interrogate it and move on to works more focused than a survey course book can be. If your question is about how "unbiased" it is that's a different story. It has numerous factual errors and ideologically railroads the narrative over the truth. search through the askhistorians backlog on howard zinn (whose received a lot of pages of comments here over the years). so take some of the things he says with a huge grain of salt.

I'd be interested to hear if any historians agree with the general premise that "History" as we know it is largely the history of the ruling class and that this is the wrong approach to take.

So what did Zinn get wrong? Anything that was a huge flaw or outright wrong? Or are you saying that he shapes the facts in such a way to support his agenda?