It's been nearly 30 years since historian Howard Zinn fired a shot across the bow of Columbus' ship with A People's History of the United States (Harper & Row, 1980), a landmark book that viewed U.S. history through the eyes of ordinary Americans and punched holes in some of the nation's most enduring myths: that Columbus was a gallant adventurer, for instance, that class and race divisions have largely been swept away, and that most of the country's wars have served the 'national interest.' The book turned 'revisionist historian' into a rote epithet among many conservatives, and turned Zinn into an oft-struck lightning rod in the culture wars.

Zinn has endured the long storm with grace and perseverance, and now that A People's History has sold over a million copies and been incorporated into more and more classroom curricula, he's no longer easily dismissed as an agitator from the fringe. He still speaks tirelessly, works for social change as an unapologetic activist, and writes in a straightforward style that retains its ability to provoke thought and challenge assumptions ('Can We Handle the Truth?' p. 51). Even history teachers who disagree with Zinn on some matters have found a reliable recipe for vigorous classroom debate: Read a conventional history book. Read Zinn. Discuss. Fireworks are sure to follow.

It's not just the United States, of course, that's wrestling with how its national story is told and taught. In Australia, a disagreement over interpretations of the country's European colonization has morphed into a long-running public battle known as the history wars. Turkey has yet to collectively comprehend its involvement in the genocide of Armenian Christians, while Germany, which has in many ways forthrightly confronted the horrors of the Holocaust, is encountering resistance to Holocaust studies from young members of its Arab and Muslim minorities ('Forgetting Hitler,' p. 54). Clearly, even a nation that has gone out of its way to face the past must struggle to keep its 'revised' storyline credible and to ensure that it is widely shared.

While many of us are reflexively bored when we hear the word history and downright repulsed by the idea of a history book, we flock to period movies and biopics about historical figures, watch the History Channel, and consume shelf-loads of historical fiction and biography. We get interested, it seems, when we explore the human lives behind the cavalcade of events. Astute educators like English professor Patrick Hicks ('In the Trenches,' p. 58) take advantage of this phenomenon to draw connections between literature and history, World War I and the Iraq War, today's college students and yesteryear's foot soldiers. We can only hope that more nonhistorians like him continue to mine the power of art to bring the past alive.