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| Categories | Americas |
| Author | Howard Zinn |
| Publisher | Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reissue edition (November 17, 2015) |
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 784 pages |
| Item Weight | 2.31 pounds |
| Dimensions |
5.31 x 1.25 x 8 inches |
I. Book introduction
THE CLASSIC NATIONAL BESTSELLER
“A wonderful, splendid book—a book that should be read by every American, student or otherwise, who wants to understand his country, its true history, and its hope for the future.” –Howard Fast
Historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States chronicles American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official narrative taught in schools—with its emphasis on great men in high places—to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace.
Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, itis the only volume to tell America’s story from the point of view of—and in the words of—America’s women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As Zinn shows, many of our country’s greatest battles—the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women’s rights, racial equality—were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance.
Covering Christopher Columbus’s arrival through President Clinton’s first term, A People’s History of the United States features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history. This edition also includes an introduction by Anthony Arnove, who wrote, directed, and produced The People Speak with Zinn and who coauthored, with Zinn, Voices of a People’s History of the United States.
About the Author (Howard Zinn)
Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010) was an American historian, playwright, philosopher, socialist intellectual and World War II veteran. He was chair of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, and a political science professor at Boston University. Zinn wrote more than 20 books, including his best-selling and influential A People’s History of the United States in 1980. In 2007, he published a version of it for younger readers, A Young People’s History of the United States.
Howard Zinn described himself as “something of an anarchist, something of a socialist. Maybe a democratic socialist.” He wrote extensively about the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and labor history of the United States. His memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Beacon Press, 1994), was also the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn’s life and work. Zinn died of a heart attack in 2010, at the age of 87.
II. Reviewer: A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
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1. MICHAEL FINOCCHIARO reviews for A People’s History of the United States
This is one of the most eye-opening books I have ever read. The late Howard Zinn takes off the filters with which American history is taught in schools and takes an unflinching look at how the US has not been the benevolent protector of democracy that propaganda would like us to believe. Not that the founding principles were wrong – they were ideal then and with some modifications re slavery and women’s rights are still relevant today – but American domestic and foreign policy has been held hostage by Big Capital and Old Money for over two centuries. It should be made essential reading for high school seniors and college freshmen to avoid the kind of knee-jerk reactionism that resulted in Drumpf’s election in 2016. The US is not a perfect country and has its share blood on its hands and conscience and ignoring that ensures that we will repeat the same errors resulting in the deaths of innocent people again and again. An absolutely critical read.
Especially in the current hagiography of praising America’s past as the if there was some lost utopia to which Drumpf, Inc wants to return to “Make America Great Again”, Zinn’s open-eyed, factual, and documented history reveals that this is all pure right-wing propaganda. All corporate and imperialistic entities commit atrocities in order to rise and maintain power, and the US is no exception to that. Yes, there is an ideal of freedom but it is one that has to be fought for generation after generation or it will be lost forever – THAT is what Zinn’s book is all about and why it is important now!
The news just gets worse every day and the truth ever more elusive. Zinn’s book remains a critical assessment of American history and a reminder that all of our rights from the Constitution to Social Security to Civil Rights to the Great Society were paid for with blood and sweat and must be preserved despite the constant attacks by Drumpf and his Republican cronies.
2. ALWAYS POUTING reviews for A People’s History of the United States
I had wanted to read this for quite a while and I was finally able to borrow it from the library only to realize its 700+ pages. I felt really anxious about finishing it before I had to return it so I spent the past few days reading and not doing any of my work. I need to come up with a plausible lie to tell my boss tomorrow about what I’ve been working on. I also still have 15 days left before I have to return the book so I kind of feel dumb now.
At this point I’ve heard most of what’s covered in this book before. I think if it had been my first time reading about these things I would’ve been moved more deeply and I would be one of those people who tells others how great this book is and how they have to read it.
I personally think it’s important for us to contend with the history of this country, to even allow ourselves to feel angry or bad about the things that have happened while also not feeling like it’s some sort of attack on us personally. I think it’s also okay to just acknowledge that our government does a lot of shitty things that we may sometimes benefit from and that we can be somewhat culpable for. I also am not that sensitive to being critiqued or told I’m a piece of shit so maybe that’s why I think its an overreaction when people get so viscerally angry at books like this for painting the country in a bad light. It’s also kind of weird in my opinion to tie your identity so closely to your country but to each his own.
Anyways I enjoyed the book, probably because it has politics similar to mine.
3. P.J. SULLIVAN reviews for A People’s History of the United States
History is about power, said Eugen Weber. Who has it, who uses it, who loses it. This one is about the powerless majority, the humble members of society. The farmers, mechanics, laborers. The Native Americans dispossessed of their land. The slaves dispossessed of their liberty. The women and children, the rent payers, the downtrodden. This is the flip side of the elitist history you learned in school. It is not about kings or presidents, founding fathers or saviors or statesmen. It is “disrespectful of governments and respectful of people’s movements of resistance.” Always on the side of the people, it does not claim to be a “balanced” account of history. It IS the balance. It provides what is missing from other histories. A must read if you want a balanced understanding of American history.
This book is class conscious, not nation conscious. It discusses America’s major wars, but only to challenge their legitimacy and decry how they supplanted class issues with nation issues. This book is populist. It celebrates examples from American history of powerless groups that organized to protect themselves from the powerful. This book believes in the virtue of disobedience. It calls for and hopes for non-violent revolution in an America that is “a system in deep trouble.” “Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.” Alienation is spreading upward.
A brilliant interpretation of American class struggle from the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the 1980s.
4. JUERG MERKI reviews for A People’s History of the United States
Excellent written and brutally honest book
I’m perfectly aware that there are lights and shadows in every aspect of any nation’s history. I’m a big supporter of USA.
What I found in this definitely critical book at a look at the American history fascinated me. I never looked from this angle at Columbus’s discovery of a new continent. Especially the genocide on the First Nations. It is a fact that the Europeans came for conquering. Not for trade nor for discovering.
The founding fathers stated clearly in the second paragraph of the United States Declaration of Independence ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’. In the context of history, especially in the early years, that meant white, rich and old man. Excluded were women, black people and Native Americans.
The cruelty and dehumanization of slaveholders is a dark spot in history. It proves once again that a cheap labor force, in this case the slaveholders didn’t pay their ‘workforce’ at all, is, to this day, a competitive advantage unbeaten.
The breach of various contracts with the Native Americans, and consequently the deportation of them in reservations remains a sad fact. This continent already had a rich culture and history destroyed by the European settlers. It was not empty land to conquer by Europeans, but someone was already there.
The end of the book covering the Bush Presidency is, in my opinion, too short.
A good eye-opening book can highly recommend not only for Americans but also for Europeans. As most of the early East Coast settlers had European roots.
The land of the free and home of the brave still remains the form of democracy I want to live in!
5. YASMINE MYERS reviews for A People’s History of the United States
So important to read
Within since 2016 and a republican was elected unfortunately I live in Florida. I say unfortunately because they have not only banned the greatest books but they are erasing the truth. I believe in the truth and I also believe in knowing the history of what was a country of freedom and I think books learning the facts of the past is important for not raising fear and not to repeat the ugliest things in our country so we will not repeat the mistakes and learn to love each other as we move into the future. 💜🦋 be kind not to yourself but to those who want the same thing especially in the stranger who may look or do things differently embrace all of it. For you become the best version of yourself. ✨️
6. T J GANSKI reviews for A People’s History of the United States
A Deep Look At Other Sides
Take any issue of the day such as the war in Ukraine, the January 6 attack on the capital, the FBI exercising a search warrant on the home of former President Trump, climate change, economic ups and downs, the George Floyd protests, BLM, Proud Boys, etc. Can you come up with multiple perspectives on each of those stories? Sure you could and each would have some validity whether you agree or not. If you can’t, your sources for info are likely an echo chamber, and your mind narrowed as result. You could go to Fox News, CNN, network news, digital news sources, social media, individuals who were involved, and court and congressional records in most cases. Through these multiple sources, you would come away with very different perspectives on the same issue. You could make the effort to meld these sources into a multi-faceted, balanced view while still concluding the impetus of the issue, the actions taken, the outcome, and the impact on the trajectory of our country. But, it seems most of us are too lazy to expose ourselves to various sources and perspectives. We have become fanboys of a particular point of view, media outlet, or even personalities, and we stop our fact-finding there. If you are such a fanboy, Zinn’s book will give you anxiety, but just let it be and read on.
Conservatives are threatened today because they are having to contemplate THE REALITY that our history is more nuanced and in some cases profoundly different than the one we were all spoonfed and bought hok-line-and-sinker as the infallible history of our country. If as is said the victors write history, Zinn’s book is about the story of our history from other than the victors. It is so laden with references of all sorts, it cannot be claimed Zinn does not use an abundance of references from all sorts of people both the powerful and the oppressed. In fact, sources are so much a part of the text that it can be difficult to get through the book. Does Zinn likely have a bias given his political activity during his life? Absolutely! But isn’t that the case for every historian and journalist? It is up to the reader to be wary of bias and take what they will from the telling. However, it is inescapable that in the reading you will be exposed to perspectives you never knew existed.
Bias or not, this book will surely leave you questioning how we have told ourselves, or how we have been told, our history. For old farts like me who were raised in an era with much more limited access to sources to gain a well-rounded version of history, be mindful that you may be criticizing a book because it is presenting a side of history to which you may have had little to no exposure. This does not mean it is an invalid telling. It may mean that you have more to learn than you thought. Learning comes from tension. Try not to react to the tension you feel as you consider whether the history you were taught was any more fully true than the history you will read in Zinn’s book.
7. ANDREW GALINDO reviews for A People’s History of the United States
A colossal History of The People.
One of the most important books I’ve read. Marxism validates my intuition and past experiences quite elegantly. It reflects my own feelings that The People, the “Proletariat,” the working class (which in the U.S. is comprised of black, Latino/Chicano, women, Native American, LGBTQ+ communities) should always take precedent to profit. America is driven by profit by any indiscriminate means. Not unlike the Mob. The only thing that the United States is certain to do, especially in matters of foreign policy, is take. For the benefit of the few. That is, after all, what capitalism is. Thank you Mr. Zinn, for this colossal History of the People.
8. JESSAKA reviews for A People’s History of the United States
This book should be required reading in high school.
I finally get it. The rich always want to get richer at the expense of the poor. The object of the game is always control. If you want certain rights or freedom you always have to fight for them because they are not going to give them out of the goodness of their hearts. And that is history in a nut shell.
9. EMILY reviews for A People’s History of the United States
People who don’t approve of Zinn’s equal opportunity perspective of history love to call him an America hater. I’m sure that George W. Bush would say that he’s an enemy of freedom. But the thing that I love so much about Zinn and this book is his consistent ability to portray the United States (as defined by its history) as so much more than a static, monolitichly motivated country. Traditional approaches to history tell a student that our country was founded by white Christian men with lots of money and connections and that since then everything of value that has gone on here was contributed by those men. It tells us that you must be one of those men to be significant, to be a worthwhile citizen of the United States. Zinn and his colleagues of other inclusive historians fight against exactly that idea. They write about women, Native Americans, labor activists, homosexuals…all these groups of people who have long been considered insignificant in the forming of our more perfect union. Zinn isn’t an America hater, he’s a man who wants to tell its true story, one that fleshes out the beauty and mistakes of our national past, portraying a much more dynamic country than traditional history allows.
Written in the 70’s, this book admitedly now lacks some of the radical quality it possessed when it was published. Still, it’s in that list of books that truly changed out country and the way Americans think and I love it for that.
10. BRIAN reviews for A People’s History of the United States
Nobody likes to look in the mirror and see a big zit. Zinn makes us do so and a lot of people don’t like that (it’s not polite to point out zits). America has seen itself as perfect for a long time and we are taught that all the way from grade school through college (and every day on Fox News). People say Zinn blames America for everything. Honestly the bull shit has been so steeped the other way for so long, it forced his hand to go over the top in pointing our our flaws. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but without making people take a look at the horrors committed, the overwhelming ideology of America right or wrong will continue. Howard loves America and hates what our government has done in our name, from the beginning to the present.
III. A People’s History of the United States Quotes by Howard Zinn
The best book quotes from A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
“My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.”
“In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.”
“I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don’t want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.”
“The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.”
“The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.”
“Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals the fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such as world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.”
“What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor–inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing–permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own. I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children.”
“The prisons in the United States had long been an extreme reflection of the American system itself: the stark life differences between rich and poor, the racism, the use of victims against one another, the lack of resources of the underclass to speak out, the endless “reforms” that changed little. Dostoevski once said: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
It had long been true, and prisoners knew this better than anyone, that the poorer you were the more likely you were to end up in jail. This was not just because the poor committed more crimes. In fact, they did. The rich did not have to commit crimes to get what they wanted; the laws were on their side. But when the rich did commit crimes, they often were not prosecuted, and if they were they could get out on bail, hire clever lawyers, get better treatment from judges. Somehow, the jails ended up full of poor black people.”“In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.”
“The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased. There is no system of control with more openings, apertures, leeways, flexibilities, rewards for the chosen, winning tickets in lotteries. There is none that disperses its controls more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media–none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty.”
“The Constitution. . . illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it serves the interests of a wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics and farmers, to build a broad base of support. The slightly prosperous people who make up this base of support are buffers against the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites. They enable the elite to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law–all made palatable by the fanfare of patriotism and unity.”
“Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.”
“Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is.”
“They were not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they were absent in the Constitution and they were invisible in the new political democracy. They were the women of early America.”
“I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.”
“We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism.”
“The democratic principle, enunciated in the words of the Declaration of Independence, declared that government was secondary, that the people who established it were primary. Thus, the future of democracy depended on the people, and their growing consciousness of what was the decent way to relate to their fellow human beings all over the world.”
“But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world – by a teacher, a writer, anyone – is a judgement. The judgement that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts, omitted, are not important.”
“Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?”
“Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites. This bought loyalty. And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality.”
“When economic interest is seen behind the political clauses of the Constitution, then the document becomes not simply the work of wise men trying to establish a decent and orderly society, but the work of certain groups trying to maintain their privileges, while giving just enough rights and liberties to enough of the people to ensure popular support.”
“Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. . . .”
“The inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation–all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the Revolution. With the English out of the way, it could now be put on paper, solidified, regularized, made legitimate by the Constitution of the United States.”
“To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves—unwittingly—to justify what was done.”
Excerpted from A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
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