History is a story. We read the story to learn who we are as humans -- to learn how we've acted in the past so that we can better understand how we should act in the future.

But it's not that simple.

Academics routinely complain that popular historians oversimplify the story of history to make it more palatable for a general audience. Do the life stories of a handful of well-to-do, middle-age men really explain the American Revolution? The retort is that university scholars have gotten so focused on the minutiae of past days -- the baptismal records in rural British hamlets, for instance -- that they've lost the ability to tell the story of what happened and to explain the broader meaning.

In recent years, though, a new sort of book has begun appearing on bookstore shelves, one that works knee-deep in the nitty-gritty facts of history but also fits those facts into a tale that makes clear their importance.

Consider "Facing East From Indian Country: A Native History of Early America" by Daniel K. Richter (Harvard University Press, 336 pages, $17.50), originally published in 2001. It's a history of colonial America and the American Revolution -- but it's told from the vantage point of the people who were here when Europeans began arriving.

Early on, Richter, a University of Pennsylvania historian, describes his method as trying "to peer eastward over the shoulder of a Wampanoag woman hoeing her corn." It's a difficult task, he admits, because of the scarcity of documentation. So, he brings to bear his imagination -- never fictionalizing, but, like a detective, looking at the context (details on the religion, eating habits, housing and other aspects of Indian culture) and teasing out an understanding of how the European incursion would have changed and ultimately shattered the Native American way of life.

Often, books of this growing genre are interdisciplinary in approach. Some may not even seem, at first blush, to be about history at all, such as the delightfully odd "Rembrandt's Nose: Of Flesh & Spirit in the Master's Portraits" by Michael Taylor, just now arriving in bookstores (D.A.P., 168 pages, $27.50).

The nose? What could be sillier? Yet, Taylor shows the eloquence that Rembrandt brought to his depiction of his own nose in self-portraits and to the noses of his other sitters, and he taps into that eloquence to tell the story of the artist's life and his inner joys and turmoil....

[Reardon goes on to note several other historians including Richard White.]

... White, a professional historian at the University of Washington, has an even deeper purpose in telling this story of his mother's birth in Ireland and immigration to the Southwest Side of Chicago. He wants to examine the interplay of memory and history, to see how the stories his mother told him of her upbringing and life travels mesh with the documents and records that are a historian's stock in trade.

In some cases, the documents and records help spark further memories in his mother. In others, they seem to show that the scenes she recalls from the past are distorted. Yet, however inexact those recollections are at times, they have their own weight, their own validity as an expression of how his mother felt and thought....

Does Alan Wolfe know what he is talking about? That is the question posed by Paul Gottfried of Elizabethtown College in a blog post on Taki's Top Drawer. Gottfried is writing in response to an essay by Wolfe in The New Republic in which he critically explores the legacy of the conservative luminary Russell Kirk.

Not surprisingly, Gottfried is not alone in denouncing Wolfe. Jeffrey O. Nelson, president of the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, writes on the National Review Web site: "One could write a thesis on Wolfe’s misreading of Kirk’s understanding of American constitutionalism, but it would make dull reading, since Wolfe is a minor figure and his errors are so obvious." And over at The American Scene, Daniel Larison of The American Conservative asks, "Does anyone care what Alan Wolfe thinks?"

To the Editor:

Walter Kirn’s review of my book “A Young People’s History of the United States” (June 17) attributes to me the belief that “telling the truth is not Job 1 for historians.” The reviewer seems to hold to the l9th-century von Ranke idea that there is one truth to be told. Most historians, and most intelligent people, including bright 12-year-olds, understand that there is no such thing as a single “objective” truth, but that there are different truths according to the viewpoint of the historian. Kirn is intent on giving a sinister ring to what is common sense.

Kirn is irritated because his “truth” is not mine. His truths — built around veneration of the “great men” of the past: the political leaders, the enterprising industrialists — add up to exactly the simplistic history fed to young people over the generations, which my book tries to replace. His kind of history produces a submissive population, always looking for saviors on high. I prefer that readers of history, including the young, learn that we cannot depend on established authority to keep us out of war and to create economic justice, but rather that solving these problems depends on us, the citizenry, and on the great social movements we have created.

My history, therefore, describes the inspiring struggle of those who have fought slavery and racism (Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses), of the labor organizers who have led strikes for the rights of working people (Big Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, César Chávez), of the socialists and others who have protested war and militarism (Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, Cindy Sheehan). My hero is not Theodore Roosevelt, who loved war and congratulated a general after a massacre of Filipino villagers at the turn of the century, but Mark Twain, who denounced the massacre and satirized imperialism.

Kirn is annoyed at my refusal to go along with the orthodox romanticization of Lincoln. I suspect he has not read the chapter on Lincoln in Richard Hofstadter’s classic, “The American Political Tradition,” in which Hofstadter brilliantly punctures what he calls the “Lincoln legend.”

Kirn says: “Writing about abolitionism, Zinn leaves the impression that freeing the slaves was not enough.” It seems he does not know of the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Eric Foner, who document the betrayal of the freed slave after the Civil War.

I want young people to understand that ours is a beautiful country, but it has been taken over by men who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties. Our people are basically decent and caring, and our highest ideals are expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which says that all of us have an equal right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The history of our country, I point out in my book, is a striving, against corporate robber barons and war makers, to make those ideals a reality — and all of us, of whatever age, can find immense satisfaction in becoming part of that.

Howard Zinn

Auburndale, Mass.

The conventional wisdom about Brown holds that it was more responsible than anything else for the integration of schools. “Brown really did transform society by stopping de jure segregation, and without Brown, schools would look very different,” says David J. Armor, a conservative scholar at George Mason University.

But some liberal scholars have challenged that heroic assessment. In “From Jim Crow to Civil Rights,” Michael J. Klarman argues that it was a political commitment to integration in the 1960s, not the Brown decision in the 1950s, that led to meaningful integration.

“Brown didn’t transform society very much, and to the extent that it did it was indirect,” says Mr. Klarman, who is a law professor at the University of Virginia. “Brown brought out the worst in White Supremacy, and Northerners were appalled by the police dogs they saw on television, and that advanced the civil rights movement.” He argues that meaningful desegregation didn’t occur until the Johnson administration’s Justice Department became committed to enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare threatened to cut off financing to school districts that refused to integrate.

Professor Klarman said he believed that just as the court couldn’t bring about integration on its own in 1954, so it won’t be able to mandate colorblindness on its own today. “Just as Brown produced massive resistance in the South and therefore had little impact on desegregation for a decade, this decision is going to be similarly inconsequential,” he says. “This affects only the tiny percentage of school districts that use race to assign students, and even in those districts, like Louisville and Seattle, it won’t be consequential because there are so many opportunities for committed school boards to circumvent it.”