As a historian with a doctorate from Boston University, I need to correct a line in Alex Beam’s column on Howard Zinn (“Two-and-a-half cheers for Howard Zinn,’’ Opinion, Nov. 26). Beam cites Jill Lepore “pointedly’’ calling Zinn a political scientist, not a historian. Zinn was housed in the political science department at Boston University for a variety of reasons, but his doctoral degree was in history from Columbia University, and he chaired the history department at Spelman College in the 1960s.

When I was a graduate student in the 1970s, some of my history professors warned me to stay away from Zinn. I walked many a picket line with him, but I agree that much of his history was too simplistic. Yet his importance in countering the ideology many of us were taught, and his presence as a public intellectual, remains critical.

Susan M. Reverby

Cambridge

The writer is a professor emerita in the history of ideas and of women’s and gender studies at Wellesley College.