[In the following review of Zinn's account of the postwar era, Patterson faults Zinn for neglecting various aspects of social and cultural history, among them issues involving women and families, religious developments, ethnic conflict, and urban problems.]

No self-respecting publishing firm these days can hold up its head unless it tries to capture the college market (students, that is) by promoting a series of short books on American history. Howard Zinn's book is part of such a series, billed as the History of American Society. The editor of this venture, Jack P. Greene, says that the volumes will “outline in broad strokes … the main thrust of American economic, social, and cultural development and the interaction between that development and American political and public life” (p. x).

Zinn, an activist who makes no pretense of objectivity, does no such thing. Instead, he starts with a New Left critique of American foreign policy and follows with sharp assaults on American political and judicial institutions. He concludes by calling for a humane new socialism, the demise of the nation-state, the abolition of prisons, and the end of authoritarianism in personal and familial relationships. Though he is ambiguous about the role to be played by the federal government, he appears to hope that direct action, such as the strategy employed by the civil rights movement, will force a way to change.

This polemic may reassure activist students. Though repetitive and occasionally dull, his book may assist professors who are seeking examples to document the nasty side of postwar American life. Zinn may also shock the few students, if any, who have never before encountered his point of view.

Teachers looking for social history should turn elsewhere. Zinn devotes but three pages to the status of women, none to family life, marriage and divorce, juvenile delinquency, or other demographic trends. He barely mentions religious developments, and says nothing about postwar ethnic relations. Cultural trends, despite the editor's promise, are ignored. Zinn says almost nothing about internal migrations, about immigration, or about the nature of life in northern cities and suburbs. Astonishingly, Zinn, a veteran advocate of civil rights, ignores class divisions within the black community; and he apparently prefers to forget about the severe racial tensions which rent the civil rights movement in the 1960s. CORE, he notes carelessly, was a “newly formed” organization in the 1960s (p. 205).

In place of analysis, Zinn relies on unbalanced assertions or on time-worn phrases. America's inequities, he concludes, stem from nationalism, the profit motive, and a faulty political system. But what nation is free of these? Are these “faults” becoming more or less serious? Is it true that “all major episodes of American foreign policy in the postwar period show the same fanatical anti-communism” (p. 51)? Should the Supreme Court's Barenblatt decision of 1959, which most authorities regard as a temporary swing to the right, be emphasized as characteristic of the court's postwar record on civil liberties?

One yearns also for a wider time perspective. Is postwar America different from what went before; if so, why; if not, why not? Is the class structure more or less equitable than it was in 1900, or 1940? Are blacks better or worse off? Is affluence a myth? Have federal programs meant as little as Zinn claims? Readers will not find analyses of these questions. To Zinn, it is not the past but the future that counts.