I have gotten into arguments through the years over the good and bad points of being “politically correct.” I have always contended that, despite eliminating some obvious hateful or historically hurtful terminology, political correctness is too often just a political grab for the conscience of the country and upsets as many people as it coddles. But my real argument with political correctness is when it is applied to historical events, documents, pronouncements, usually accompanied by the inane insistence that “they should have known better back then.”
… former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels sought to remove Howard Zinn’s work from state classrooms just weeks after the historian’s death in 2010. … Daniels wrote, “This terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away.” After he described “A People’s History” as a “truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page,” Daniels asked: “Can someone assure me that it is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?”
A Celebration of Reading 