The political direction of the country may be up for grabs until November, but the right has scored an interim victory — if that’s the word — in a weeklong contest to determine “the least credible history book in print” just concluded by the History News Network.

After a week of voting by readers, David Barton’s “The Jefferson Lies” won with some 650 votes, narrowly edging the left-wing historian Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States,” which received 641 votes.

Trailing far behind were Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s “Killing Lincoln” (which argues that Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton was complicit in Lincoln’s assassination); Thomas DiLorenzo’s “The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War”; and Gavin Menzies’s “1421: The Year China Discovered America.”...