In Chapter 16 of Zinn's book, he attempts to portray Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as innocent. Even if we take for granted Zinn's perspective that they did in fact look innocent from where he was writing in the 1970s, many subsequent revelations have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were guilty Julius was not only involved in the theft of atomic secrets, but was at the center of a larger spy ring which went after non-atomic technical intel. Ethel was not quite so involved as once thought, but was certainly a willing accomplice. Khrushchev wrote about the Rosenbergs guilt in his memoirs, which have been public for decades. A once classified US government program called Venona was declassified in the 1990s, resulting in the release of Soviet cables from the 1940s and 1950s showing conclusively that Julius Rosenberg was a spy. In 2008, an accomplice of Julius Rosenberg named Sobell finally admitted, at the age of 91, that he had in fact been a spy, as had Julius. Three days later, the Rosenberg's sons made a public statement to the effect that they had come to terms with the obvious guilt of their parents. A New York Times reporter asked Zinn what he thought about the revelations and he mostly just shrugged. Despite all these revelations, not a single word has been changed in Zinn's book, despite having now gone through 5 editions, with the latest in 2005.

There are two big reasons why few, if any, deliberate refutations of the book exist. One, as you pointed out, historians take for the granted the book is lousy. They are not going to spill gallons of virtual ink pointing out to each other all the rather obvious flaws in the book of a notoriously mediocre historians. Anyone who is interested in his book, almost by default thinks its a great book. If you don't, you just move on. Two, the problems with the book often require refutations much longer than the original passage they attempt to refute. It is very quick and easy to misrepresent history. To put everything into context and correct the historical record, on the other hand, is often quite time consuming. That said, I'm going to run through a handful of errors. Then I'll point you to additional reading on Zinn's book, then recommend some better books.

An obvious bias is the opening paragraphs of the book. Zinn tells the story of Columbus scamming a sailor out of the pension promised for being the first to spot land in the New World. The passage has no historical value. It serves only to begin priming the reader for the narrative which follows - that all people in power, all leaders, all noteworthy players from history have been lying, cheating, scum and all the normal people through out history have existed merely to be duped and abused by the powerful, the noteworthy, and successful. The trouble with the opening story is we have no way of judging if Zinn's perspective on the matter is historically accurate. Certainly, Columbus claims to have seen indications of land approximately four hours before the sailor. Once we are primed with Zinn's narrative, we find Columbus' side of the story dubious. But, just retell the story in your head, with the roles of Columbus and the sailor reversed. Sailor sees sign of land at 10p.m., points it out to several people, then keeps an eye on it and makes a big speech to the whole crew about land being near. Then at 2a.m., Columbus comes out and sees land and claims the pension. Columbus' side again seems doubtful. Why? Because we are primed to believe the underdog.

In the opening chapters, Zinn makes several confident assertions about the nature and origins of slavery in North America. Virtually all of his claims are either unsubstantiated or refuted by the established historical record. In Chapter 2, Zinn writes "Everything in the experience of the first white settlers [from Britain to the New World] acted as a pressure for the enslavement of blacks." He then draws a connection between the Portuguese and Spanish slave trades in South America to the later British slave trade in North America. Zinn says "it was natural" for the British to "consider imported blacks as slaves" because "a million blacks had already been brought... to the Portuguese and Spanish colonies." This sounds compelling enough. After all, today we think of Europe as a relatively culturally homogeneous continent, and it doesn't seem all that far fetched that a few hundred years ago, economic developments in Spain/Portugal would have would spread north to Britain. The trouble is this narrative directly contradicts the historical record. While it is true that the Spanish slave trade was impacting British attitudes towards slavery, both in the colonies and back home, it was not in the direction Zinn implies. Spain's harsh treatment of both the Natives and imported slaves was actually turning Britons off to slavery. Francis Drake ventured around South America freeing Spanish slaves. These exploits were heralded back in Britain and the North American colonies. Men such as John Raleigh and Richard Hakluyt nurtured visions of racially egalitarian settlements in the New World. This is not to say these men were not also driven by power and profit. Certainly there was that aspect as well. But Zinn's tight narrative of Britons adopting slavery because they saw it working so well for their Spanish cousins down south does not comport with the historical record.

Also in Chapter 16, Zinn misrepresents the views of African Americans towards World War 2. Sam Wineburg, a Stanford University History Professor, has done a great job of breaking down the problems with Zinn's narrative.

Here is a link to the original article by Wineburg: http://www.amfer.org/reviews-of-a-people-s-history.html

And here is Wineburg's treatment of the issue:

"Consider the question of whether World War II was a “people’s war.” On one level, as Zinn has to admit, it was. Thousands suited up in uniform, and millions handed over hard-earned dollars to buy war bonds. But Zinn asks us to consider whether such support was “manufactured.” Was there, in fact, widespread resentment and resistance to the war that was hidden from the masses?

Among the military, Zinn says, it is “hard to know” how much resentment soldiers felt because “no one recorded the bitterness of enlisted men.” Zinn instead focuses on a community in which he can readily locate resentment: black Americans.

The claim stands to reason. Domestically, Jim Crow laws were thriving in the North and the South, and overseas in the segregated armed forces. To fight for freedom abroad when basic freedoms were denied at home was a bitter contradiction. In fact, the black press wrote about the “Double V” – victory over fascism in Europe, victory over racism at home.

Butt Zinn argues something else. He asserts that black Americans restricted their support to a single V: the victory over racism. As for the second V, victory on the battlefields of Europe and Asia, Zinn claims that an attitude of “widespread indifference, even hostility,” typified African Americans’ stance toward the war.

Zinn hangs his claim on three pieces of evidence: (1) a quote from a black journalist that “the Negro… as angry, resentful, and utterly apathetic about the war”; (2) a quote from a student at a black college who told his teacher that “the Army jim-crows us. The Navy lets us serve only as messmen. The Red Cross refuses our blood. Employers and labor unions shut us out. Lynchings continue”; and (3) a poem called the “Draftee’s Prayer,” published in the black press: “Dear Lord, today/I go to war:/ To fight, to die,/Tell me what for?/Dear Lord, I’ll fight,/I do not fear,/Germanys or Japs;/My fears are here./American!”

These items seethe with hostility. Many readers will likely conclude that they represented broad trends in the black community. But just as we can find instances that embody resentment, so too can we find expressions of African American patriotism and support for the war. Nor do we have to go very far. In the same journal that voiced the resentment of the black college student, one finds the words of Horace Mann Bond, president of Georgia’s Fort Valley State College and the father of civil rights leader Julian Bond, who was asked by the editors to address the question, “Should the Negro care who wins the war?”

Bond bristled at the query’s implicit racism – the insinuation that blacks were apathetic to America’s fate: “If a white person believes that a Negro in the United States is indifferent to the outcome of a great national struggle, that white person conceives of that Negro as divested of statehood… The Negro who is indifferent to the outcome of the struggle has stripped himself of allegiance to the state of which he is a native.”

To array dueling anecdotes – three for hostility, three against – is not a very sophisticated way to make claims about a community that, to quote Bond, numbered “nearly thirteen million human beings of every variety of opinion, intelligence, and sensitivity.”

The three anecdotes Zinn draws on come not from digging in an archive or reading microfiche from the black press. Everything he cites was drawn from a single secondary source, Lawrence Wittner’s Rebels Against War (1969).

The evidence Zinn uses appears on two adjoining pages in Wittner’s 239-page book. Also appearing on these pages is key information Zinn omits. Wittner lists the total number of registrants eligible for the war as 10,022,367 males between the ages of 18 and 37. Of these, 2,427,495, about 24 percent, were black. Wittner then lists the number of conscientious objectors enrolled by the Selective Service: 42,973. If the number of conscientious objectors were proportional for both blacks and whites, there would have been over 10,000 African American conscientious objectors – even more if there was as much hostility to the war among blacks as Zinn claims.

What we learn instead is that the total number of black conscientious objectors was a mere 400. “Even draft evasion remained low,” Wittner adds, “with Negro registrants comprising only 4.4 percent of the Justice Department cases.” He concludes: “Surprisingly few black men became C.O.’s.”

The form of reasoning that Zinn relies on here is known as asking “yes-type” questions. According to historian Aileen S. Kraditor, yes-type questions send the historian into the past armed with a wish list. Because a hallmark of modernity is to save everything (and this was certainly the case by the mid-20th century), those who ask yes-type questions always ends getting what they want. Kraditor explains: “If one historian asks, ‘Do the sources provide evidence of militant struggles among workers and slaves?’ the sources will reply, ‘Certainly.’ And if another asks, ‘Do the sources provide evidence of widespread acquiescence in the established order among the American population throughout the past two centuries?’ the sources will reply, ‘Of course.’”

So it is here: will we find pockets of resistance and reluctance among blacks – or, for that matter, among whites, Hispanics, Italians, gays, lesbians – no matter how just the cause of any war? The answer is “Certainly.” To objections that it is biased to ask yes-type questions, Zinn might respond (and did, often) that all history is biased, that every historian choose which facts to highlight or discard. Find and good, provided that a crucial condition is satisfied, a condition again specified by Kraditor: that “the data the historian omits must not be essential to the understanding of the data included.” To generalize to nearly 13 million people by citing three anecdotes, while at the same time ignoring data about 2,427,495 eligible black registrants, is a yes-type question in its purest form."

One of the themes woven through out Zinn's opening chapters is that of the noble savage: pacifists, feminists, egalitarians. This portrait fits into Zinn's broader historical narrative of white Westerners as uniquely anti-progressive in the history of mankind. In Zinn's world, even the supposedly uncivilized Native Americans had more thoroughly developed progressive moral codes. As part of this narrative, Zinn draws a picture of the Native Americans as gender egalitarians, even feminists. In Chapter 1 he writes "Women were important and respected in Iroquois society." In Zinn's telling, the women "took general charge of village affairs" and "had some control over military matters." Where in other parts of the book Zinn lets the reader make inferences about the meaning and implications of such passages, here Zinn is more explicit. Quoting Gary B. Nash, Zinn concludes "Thus power was shared between the sexes and the European idea of male dominancy and female subordination in all things was conspicuously absent.”

But, let us now compare that to the analysis of Edmund Morgan writing in American Slavery, American Freedom. Regarding the Native Americans in Virginia he writes, "nearly any activity that could be designated as work at all was left to the women. They were the principal means of production in Indian Virginia, Having acquired a wife (for whom he may have had to pay a bride price), a man counted on her to support him."

Morgan is not some consensus historian whom Zinn would have dismissed. Zinn himself quotes Morgan repeatedly in A People's History. What's more, Zinn and Morgan do not disagree on the facts of the matter - the men primarily hunting, while the women did all the domestic work and the farming. Where they diverge is in their interpretations of the significance of these gender roles. For Zinn, it's a sign of the progressive gender egalitarianism of these tribes. For Morgan, who writes of the risk of a man from these tribes "losing his dignity" if he he worked too hard, such gender roles might be more appropriately considered a consequence of "male privilege" than "gender equality."