"Zinn will blow your hair back." Thanks Matt Damon. This book was long, drawn out and boring. Do I really care to learn about every single union leader and strike in America? No, but most U.S. History Teachers think you do. Do yourself a favor, pick an interesting sentence in the introduction and write a paper about that. Save yourself a lot of trouble.

“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.”



Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States answers the question from (a much later novel by) Yaa Gyasi, “We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing?" Zinn presents a sort of parallel history of the United States and the people who form that history, but somehow never made it into the history books. They are on the losing side of economic revolutions and protest movements. They are not part of the ruling class or the elite.

Zinn approaches history through a civil rights/anti-war/view from the downtrodden lens that some may see as biased (and maybe is), but that really only makes it more clear that constructing history has long been an ideological endeavor. While not neatly divided up into wars and presidents, I see A People's History as still relevant in discussions on how we should approach a history of this country.

“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.”

I finally finished this after slogging through it for two weeks, and it was definitely worth it. Besides being a good refresher in U.S. history, particularly from a non-nationalist perspective, I learned a lot about people's movements, and the ways that people (as opposed to 'the great men of history') have created change in our country.

It's good to know that some of what Zinn covers in A People's History, even though unorthodox at the time he wrote it, has already filtered into public education. For instance, it was very clearly taught in my high school U.S. history course that Columbus was not the genteel 'discoverer' of the Americas but rather the wealth-obsessed leader of a genocide against indigenous people in the Caribbean.
However, we didn't cover the fact that even as late as the 1960s and '70s the U.S. government was supporting violence against American Indians. Or that 'equal protection' under the 14th amendment was granted to corporations many decades before it was granted to women. (Literally, judges declared that corporations were considered 'persons' - just as they had finally said black men were persons and not just property - and then they later ruled that the term didn't apply to women.) And we certainly didn't cover the continuous use of military forces by both corporations and government against worker protests, events like the Ludlow Massacre (a strike by miners against the Rockefeller family's Colorado Fuel & Iron Corporation), where first the Rockefeller's own hired thugs, and then the government's attempts to bring in strikebreakers, did not break the determination of the workers, and eventually the National Guard launched machine gun fire on a tent colony of workers and their families. And while we maybe mentioned the death of civilians at Hiroshima, we didn't talk about the millions of civilians killed by U.S. troops in the Philippines, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and both directly/indirectly in numerous Central and South American countries.

The gist of Zinn's book (and this is a long gist, but it's a long book): the U.S. was founded to protect the interests of the wealthy, and continuous class conflict has been suppressed regularly through the creation of nationalist sentiment, as well as through the pitting of oppressed social groups one against the other (for instance, poor blacks against poor whites, or the lower class against the middle class). Furthermore, as we have accepted 'history' as it has been given to us in school textbooks, we've allowed ourselves both to believe the myth that 'the people' are actually represented by the government, and that we have democracy, while allowing a rich elite to maintain power and help create the continuous war economy we now live in, in which we continuously say we cannot afford to provide people with jobs, food, or education, but yet somehow shell out trillions to military contractors to create weapons we should never even be thinking about using.

Some of this I had already picked up here and there, but Zinn's book is a sort of a thick concentration of it all, a thorough look at who "we" as the United States really are. While certainly not a pretty self-portrait, it does end on a hopeful note: 'the people' have created change, and we can do it again.
The catch: change has always been achieved by direct action (violent and non-violent). It has never been achieved by voting.

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.

enjoyed this a lot more than i expected, but also had some real issues with it on bases of history and presentation. the absence of footnotes was very disappointing. at least a dozen times, i read something i had a hard time believing or wanted to see in its fuller context, and couldn't get a clear pointer to even Zinn's secondary sources (A People's History does not, as a rule, rely on primary sources). if you're going to throw a polemic textbook alternative into the ring, a grand challenge to the existing authorities, it seems to me you have a greater burden of proof, and footnotes would have helped take certain passages much more seriously. Zinn is at his best when building up history from the bottom (labor movements, guerrilla efforts, etc.) and at his most embarrassing when alluding to conspiracy in high places (the World War II chapter is particularly nauseating). with that said, as someone who rocked out his AP American exam and has read a few hundred volumes of history since (but very definitely an amateur), there was a lot of fascinating material here i'd never heard. Zinn was writing in the early 80s, and his motivating words about textbooks of that era seemed to have been largely addressed even by 1997; nonetheless, we might have covered the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the Molly Maguires, but early Populism certainly seems shortchanged looking back.

is it a suitable text for a general AP or undergraduate american history class? i think not--there's simply no coverage of far too many basic concepts and facts--but it'd be a fine companion volume, best for excerpting. the material on ante- and postbellum workers' movements is better than anything i've ever come across.

this book was worth reading, but sorry Good Will Hunting, it hardly knocked me on my ass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2cSB...

ps: the reviewer is an obnoxious Libertarian, pretty ideologically opposed to Zinn's anarchosocialist beliefs. i read this book to see what it had to say, tried to do so receptively but also with a critical eye, and feel i learned a good number of things, but certainly didn't have my outlook on the world or government deeply changed.

It's appropriate that I finished this on the day of the first 2016 Presidential Debate, because tonight we'll witness the apotheosis of the greed, falsehoods, and willful ignorance that this work sought to expose. This audiobook was in 35 segments, each on average an hour long. Some people I had spoken with said that they found this book tedious, but I was mostly enthralled. If anything, maybe hearing about American colonization, genocide, rapine, and corruption only felt more blunted as the blows came.

If there's one word that this book made me feel, it is "ashamed." I grew up in a patriotic somewhat liberal family, and yet nary a whiff of any of this was present in the childhood in which I was encouraged--in school, by the media, by friends and by family--to honor and revere the United States and its vaunted, idealistic provenance. I guess in my pre-law school politics it was always enough to focus on the future and how we are handling things now, but Zinn's masterwork shows the startling, shameful roots of our current system in the depraved dealings of our past.

In this work, Zinn de-bowdlerizes a history made out of whole, faux-patriotic cloth. It is absolutely indispensable for any student of American history or for anyone wishing to understand the current state of American society.

The ratings on this book tend to be polarized here on Goodreads, with lots of people giving it 5 or 4 stars, and quite a few giving it 1. This is because this book is upfront about where it stands politically: Howard Zinn runs with the notion that poor people tend to be exploited by rich ones. (GASP!) If you agree with this general human tendency, yet STILL believe we should teach the NERFed version of American History--where Columbus is a swell fella, the Native Americans were using the land wrong anyway, and rich people have no advantages over poor ones--I'm not sure how you can reconcile these ideas.

One common critique of Howard Zinn is that this book, if taught by itself, will present a skewed version of history that inspires a general hatred of rich people. So, I fully expect these reviewers to give low ratings to every history book, including those that pretend to be objective. By giving a low rating to only the books that point out flaws in the U.S. government, these people are essentially admitting the direction of their own bias. Of course, we're all biased, whether we're writing history books or reviewing them. If I weren't politically biased towards LIKING this book, I'd probably give it a four-star rating because there were some topics I wish Zinn would've gone into that he didn't.

All historians have an agenda, so the obvious solution is to teach from two or more textbooks with conflicting views. There. Problem solved! Moving on...

I'm gonna talk about the book itself now, so that I remember to do so. Then, I'm going to get into political rant mode, because I want to talk about why Zinn and the Tea Party SHOULD be best friends if people were more rational than they are.

The Part Where I Talk About the Book:

Zinn, in the newest versions of this book, discusses U.S. history from its origins all the way up to Bush Jr.'s presidency. Throughout, he pulls no punches, questioning the motives of those in power regardless of their political party, because there's really not that much difference between the right and the left. He covers a whole lot, even considering the length of the book, and has done a lot of work since the book's original publication to add sections addressing the plight of those segments of our population that were ignored in the earliest printings. Keep in mind as you're reading this that there really WASN'T anything like this book when it was written. Before Zinn, no schools taught history from the perspective of the lower classes...in fact, most of them STILL don't. I know mine didn't. So, I think we need more historians like Zinn, willing to challenge the assumptions we make about history. Like every academic field, history should be evolving and growing more nuanced over time.

I should've known I'm incapable of actually FOCUSING on the book.

The Part Where I Talk About Other Stuff:

As those who have talked to me about politics know, I have a lot of frustration with the tea party. First off, some of them don't realize how batshit nuts Sarah Palin is. That's bad. And, that's not nearly as bad as the fact that they don't realize how batshit nuts GLENN BECK is.




But, more importantly, the so-called Tea Party developed at the same time that a democrat entered office, developed under the leadership of republicans, yet developed saying they were independent from this big-business-focused party, and that they were all about lowering taxes. Pardon me while I take that with a VERY BIG grain of salt. I'm still willing to be proven wrong, though, if it turns out that the tea party actually DOES want to cut taxes, and not just assist the federal government in deep-throating big business a little bit more. Until SOME political party is willing to come right out and say, "Guys, we're spending more than 500 billion THIS YEAR on the military. We could pretty much kill everything alive a few times over with the weapons we have stockpiled. Maybe it's time to think about cutting part of THAT spending instead of complaining about health care expenses." Until someone comes right out and says that, I'm not declaring my allegiance to any party.

I have yet to hear anyone willing to challenge the importance of the military industrial complex...anyone in politics, that is. A lot of normal humans think this is a pretty fucking solid place to cut spending.

The government can only be improved if we as citizens are willing to call it out when it acts in ways that are unethical. The notion that patriotism is connected to a blind faith in the current version of the political structure is foolish. Those who really believe in freedom will recognize that freedom applies to everyone, including those of us who want to examine whether or not the government is operating in our interests. After examining it, a lot of people are convinced it isn't.

That said, we're all gonna get along better when we stop focusing on the issues that we don't agree on, and focus on what we think a government should do. When we say the government is "of the people, by the people, and for the people," I think "the people" includes everyone who lives here, including those of us who didn't make any money on the bailout, and those of us who don't want to help finance murder abroad through "Overseas Contingency Operations." I would think pro-lifers would agree with me on that.

Anyway, I'm going to climb off my soap box now, but I give this book my recommendation. Read it if your American history education hasn't included enough skepticism.

In a country famous for its historical ignorance, Howard Zinn sold two million copies of a 700-page history book. In a country famous for its allergy to the left, Howard Zinn wrote a best-seller from a staunchly left-wing perspective. Every evaluation of his book must begin and end with this achievement. Whatever you like or dislike about Zinn, clearly he did something right.
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As you set out to judge this book, you must first decide whether it is a work of inquiry or of advocacy. This distinction has worn thin in our postmodern age, as we have become hyper-aware of the inescapability of bias. Nevertheless I think the distinction holds good in theory, however blurred it may be in practice.

An inquirer searches for the truth, even if the truth contradicts her original opinion; an advocate attempts to motivate people, to bring about some action, even if the action is somewhat vague or far-removed. An inquirer will risk dense and dry writing to get her point across; an advocate will risk simplification and generalization to get her point across. An inquirer will highlight information that her thesis doesn’t account for, and will include counterarguments and consider their merits; an advocate will minimize inconvenient information and will knock down strawmen of counterarguments.
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This book is clearly a work of advocacy. And it is important to remember this, since as a work of inquiry A People’s History of the United States has almost no merit whatsoever. Zinn mostly relies on secondary sources, and makes no attempt at addressing counterarguments or at accommodating different viewpoints. His aim is not to explain American history, but to use American history to spark outrage.
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Granted that this book is advocacy, we must then ask two more questions: whether it is responsible or irresponsible, and whether it is altruistic or selfish. Responsible advocacy uses careful research, seeks out unbiased sources, and acknowledges those sources; irresponsible advocacy uses lies or severe distortion of facts, or simply lies by omission. Altruistic advocacy acts on behalf of a wide swath of people, not just a narrow interest; selfish advocacy does the opposite. As an example of responsible, altruistic advocacy, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring addresses an issue of broad concern using careful research. On the other hand, the cigarette industry’s fight against the researchers who uncovered the negative health effects of smoking was an example of irresponsible, selfish advocacy, fighting on behalf of a small group using outright lies.
tt
It is worth noting, by the way, that these two values can come into conflict. In these situations the advocate is faced with a choice: What is better, to distort the truth for a worthy cause, or to tell the truth at the expense of that cause? You might say that, if dishonesty is required, the cause can’t be worthy; but the fact remains that careful scholarship is often at odds with popular success—and popular success is what advocates aim for.
tt
I think Zinn faced just this dilemma in this book, forced to choose between a work that would satisfy academics and would sell well, and he chose popularity. Granted, given the constraints of a popular book, I think he is decently honest with his sources. And it is worth noting that Zinn is frank about his political biases and goals. Nevertheless, I think it is obvious that he relies on books—again, mostly secondary sources—that are broadly sympathetic with his views; that he selectively quotes those who aren’t; and that he questions the motivations of any who disagree with him. What we must ask, then, is this: Does Zinn’s moral aim excuse this approach?
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I think, on the whole, it does. At the time Zinn first wrote this book, history books used in public schools were unabashedly nationalistic, omitting labor movements, women’s movements, civil rights movements, and pushing aside the atrocities committed against the Native Americans. In other words, the history commonly taught and known was a history of presidents and elections, wars and victories, a history that ignored large swaths of underprivileged people. Of course Zinn didn’t change this single-handedly; he was the beneficiary of an entire academic movement. But his book, by its popularity, played an important role in changing the status quo. By the time I went to school, we had units on women’s movements, labor movements, and the barbarous mistreatment of blacks and Native Americans. It is also largely thanks to Zinn, I believe, that there is a growing movement against the celebration of Columbus Day (a person who I don’t think we ought to celebrate).
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It is eminently right that the injustices and oppressions and inequities of American history be laid before the public. For history is never a neutral series of facts. Every political ideology relies on some historical narrative. Thus, systematically omitting episodes of history is equivalent to squelching certain political views. And even though I am not always in agreement with its ideology, I think that the United States suffers from its lack of a strong leftist movement.
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Just recently, the political power of history has been dramatically demonstrated through the conflict over Civil War statues. More and more people are coming to the conclusion, I think rightly, that having statues of Confederate generals is not politically neutral. Of course we must learn and commemorate history. But it is impossible to remember and commemorate everything. We are always faced with a choice; and this choice is shot through with ideological questions. What we choose to remember, and how we choose to remember it, is a moral issue; and I think Zinn is right to remind us of the struggles of the unprivileged and powerless against the privileged and powerful—not for their sake, but for ours.
tt
This, in brief, is why I generally approve of this book. But I do have many criticisms.
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Most superficially, I think this book suffers from a lack of organization. Many chapters feel like hasty cut-and-paste jobs, jumping from topic to topic, summarizing and quoting from different sources, without anything more than a sense of outrage to tie it together. In this way, the book is bizarrely reminiscent of a a Bill Bryson work: a hodgepodge of stories, thrown together in a loose jumble. I also think that Zinn should have highlighted more individual stories and condensed some tedious lists of movements, if only for dramatic effect.
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More seriously, I think that Zinn commits the moral error of many on the left: by holding people to a stringent standard, the important moral differences between groups are minimized. This was most noticeable on his chapters on the Civil War and World War II, in which Zinn goes to lengths to undermine the moral superiority of the North and of the United States. I absolutely agree with Zinn that the North was hardly a utopia of freedom and equality (racism was almost universal), and that the United States was hardly a shinning beacon on a hill (think of the Japanese internment camps, the Dresden bombing, or the nuclear bombings). Nevertheless, I think that, with all their inequities and injustice, the Union and the United States were clearly preferable to the slave-owning Confederates or Nazi Germany. Minimizing this difference is dangerous.
tt
I also object to the way that Zinn makes it seem as though the United States is controlled by a vast conspiracy, or that all the elements of power work together in one seamless ‘system’ (one of Zinn’s favorite words). He does, at one point, acknowledge that this system arose unconsciously, through necessity and in stages, and is not, for the most part, used intentionally by the powerful. But this, then, leads to the question: What is the difference between an unconsciously developed and unintentionally used system of control, and no ‘system’ at all?
tt
Or consider this paragraph:

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 a small number who are not pleased.

Zinn’s message is clear: that this is an unjust situation created by powerful people. But think about what he is saying: The United States is a country where most people are content and where the discontented are allowed to express themselves. Phrased like this, the observation looses its outraged and semi-conspiratorial edge; indeed it doesn’t seem so bad at all. I cite this only as an example of Zinn’s use of rhetoric and insinuation to make political points, a dishonest habit. Another bad habit is his tendency to question the motivation of the people he intends to criticize. Every reform or government action aimed at equality is, for Zinn, just a concession aimed at promoting the long-term stability of ‘the system.’ Again, this leads to the question: What, in practice, is the difference between a self-interested concession and an honest attempt at reform?
tt
I also want to note that Zinn’s effort to write a “people’s” history became, at times, a thin pretense. This was obvious whenever the general opinion didn’t match his own. Zinn was not simply chronically “the people”; he consistently chooses to focus on those who shared his ideals, whether they represented the majority or a small minority. This was most obvious in the chapter on the Second World War, which focuses on the small group of people who disapproved of it. But it was a tendency throughout. Here is a typical passage:

After the bombing of Iraq began with the bombardment of public opinion, the polls showed overwhelming support for Bush’s action [Bush Sr.], and this continued through six weeks of the war. But was it an accurate reflection of the citizen’s long-term feelings about war? The split vote in the polls just before the war reflected a public still thinking its opinion might have an effect. Once the war was on, and clearly irreversible, in an atmosphere charged with patriotic fervor … it was not surprising that a great majority of the country would declare its support.

This is special pleading at its worst. The people’s opinion, when it disagrees with Zinn’s opinion, is of course not really their opinion; it is just manipulation. But when the people do agree with Zinn, it is of course their “true” opinion.
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This, by the way, is another nasty habit of the left: a pretense to knowing the true interests of the unprivileged, even if the unprivileged themselves disagree with the left and among each other. Thus all the differences that divide the unprivileged—racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia among the poor—are both excused and then dismissed as being superficial differences that mask a true unity, perhaps even instilled by the powerful to divide the poor. In a way this is a disrespectful view of “the people,” since Zinn apparently thinks that most people are far more easily manipulated than he is himself, and thus should be judged by a more lenient standard than the crafty powerful.
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I am heaping a lot of criticism on Zinn; but I do think that, despite all this, Zinn is almost always on the morally right side: for equality, for pacifism, for democracy. And even though, largely thanks to Zinn, many of the episodes he covered in this book have made their way into school curriculums and the national awareness, I still learned a great deal from reading this. Both the Mexican-American War (which, to protest, Thoreau spent a night in jail) and the Spanish-American War (which resulted in prolonged, brutal fighting in the Philippines), two American power-grabs, still receive scant coverage in classrooms. And the long, ignominious history of U.S. intervention throughout the world, propping up dictators and plotting to topple governments, is still not widely known—and it should be.
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I think Zinn has already been quite successful in changing people’s perception of history. But is this book inspiring or motivational? On the one hand, Zinn is a powerful writer whose every line carries a sense of justified outrage; and outrage, as Zinn shows, is what motivates many to fight for change. On the other, Zinn portrays movement after movement trying and failing—only about one in ten even partially succeeds, it seems—which can easily create a fatalistic cynicism. I was often reminded of the Onion article: “Humanity Surprised It Still Hasn’t Figured Out Better Alternative to Letting Power-Hungry Assholes Decide Everything.”
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It’s a joke, I know, but I do wonder about this. In a way this is the issue raised—heaven help us—by Game of Thrones: Is it really better, morally speaking, to be an idealist like Ned Stark, if that leads to your defeat at the hands of less scrupulous parties? This is one of the oldest questions in politics; and the way you answer it determines, to some extent, where you fall on the political spectrum. Zinn represents one answer, and I think it is one we too often forget in our cynical age.

Few “history” books open so jarringly. Arawak tribesmen, native Americans, see the European ships of Columbus in harbor. Columbus and his men demand to be taken to gold. So begins the injustice. In the process submit the tribes to slavery, torture and death. Zinn writes “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”.

Zinn’s opus is all about emphasizing the victims, the minority, the repressed, the enslaved, the beaten, the “un-American”. Paddling through some 500 years of American history (1492-2000), Zinn presents history in a very charged, and very political manner.

How you respond to the book, may have a lot do with whether or not you see this as a historical or activist literature. Read as a historical book, the problems are many. Zinn’s scope and aspirations are admirable, but he spends disproportionate amount of time on subjects and chapters of history. There is little to no discussion of the great depression. America’s involvement in WW2 is limited to Japanese interment camps and the nuclear weapon deployment. Embarrasingly written, Zinn meshes the presidencies of Carter, Reagan and Bush into the same chapter, giving attention to 5th graders poems, and obscure activists.

If you can put politics aside and approach the book from a readability perspective, it’s still a muddled mess. Consider Chomsky’s work “Hegemony or Survival”, which examines American imperialism in a critical manner; Chomsky writes with detail and logical structure that is persuasive and thought provoking. The point is that there is material here to work with, but Zinn's biased wording and selective historical stories undermine his own goals. Zinn lacks the finesse and structure to really earn any reader’s trust.

Reading the book from an aspirational/activist view point, you may get something more out of the text. Zinn’s world is decidedly black and white. There are elites and the masses. There are the voiceless and the powerful. The European invaders and the natives. Zinn is at his finest when he portrays “The Other Civil War”, and discusses the rise of unions and worker’s rights. The first hand accounts are rousing, but the issue becomes when Zinn tries to tie pretty much everything to class struggle and oppression.

An aperture to Zinn’s perspective is written toward the end where he states, ““I wanted in writing this book, to awaken a greater consciousness of class conflict, racial injustice, sexual inequality and national arrogance. (p.686). Clearly the book does give voice to overshadowed tragedies such as the Native American genocide and Civil Rights activists . But for readers who demand an author be accountable to facts, be accountable to context and be accountable to fairness, this book simply fails to deliver.

What a book. Life changing may be hyperbole but it's not too far from the mark. So little of this is widely known by the people of America, and it shows.

Howard Zinn saw a problem in the world, a great bias in our understanding of history, a history written by the winners--by tyrants and industrial magnates and warmongers--and so he did something about it: he created an equally flawed and opposed bias, just as carefully constructed to prop up his own one-sided conclusion, in an act which always calls to my mind Bob Dylan's line:
n  

"In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand. At the mongrel dogs who teach. Fearing not that I'd become my enemy. In the instant that I preach."

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A staunch idealist, Zinn's standard method is to throw out the baby with the bathwater: he finds an imperfection in a plan or event, and declares that, since it it not perfect, it should be rejected, outright. There is no pragmatism, no sense of compromise, no utilitarian notion of 'the greater good' for Zinn--if there is a flaw in an action, then that action must be condemned.

He has come out as saying that war is never a solution, that since people died, the conflict of World War II is not excusable, that the cessation of the Fascist war machine was not worth the cost. Of course, this beggars the question: what else? Is there some better solution to the problem, is there anything else that could have been done to prevent it?

Likewise, he has rejected US intervention in Korea, despite the fact that when we look at the split Koreas today--the North a wasteland of violence, malnutrition, and ignorance, the South a modern nation with a thriving economy--it is difficult to argue that, despite the deaths in that war, the intervention was not, overall, a positive.

Certainly, I am not of the camp who believes the US to be some sort of 'World Hero', that we are justified in policing the world, or in enforcing our ideals upon other nations, but neither do I buy the image Zinn paints of the US as a hand-wringing Disney villain that ruins everything it touches--the real truth of the matter is somewhere in between.

Some things which the US has done, such as our interference in Afghanistan--well on its way to becoming a modernized, self-sustaining nation in the mid-20th Century--tearing down its government, arming its warlords, and making it the staging ground for our Cold War battles with Russia--are awful examples of selfishness forced upon the world. The actions of our government and intelligence community there were not for the greater good, they were at the expense of the Afghans to our own benefit, and there are many such damning examples, but to focus solely on them is just as bad as ignoring them entirely.

Zinn has received much credit for revealing truth, for reinvigorating our education system and our view of history, but honestly, his work was a bit late for that--already, such diverse perspectives were emerging, and while it took some time for them to trickle down to Middle Schools and the public consciousness, nothing in his book was a revelation to devoted students of history.

Even those historians who were sympathetic to minority experiences and opposed to the white-washing of history tended to condemn Zinn for cobbling together a poorly-researched work which took only those parts that were convenient to his thesis and left out all else--and beyond that, twisting and misrepresenting his sources to his own ends.

But his work is sensationalistic, and work of that sort has a way of finding its way into popular discussion, whether it is accurate or not. His opponents can cite him of an example of 'all that is wrong with that point of view', while his supporters are attracted by the fact that his work tends to cast as the true heroes of history the uninvolved thinker, the academic who talks a great deal, attends protests, but does not get his own hands dirty, since in Zinn's approach, to interact directly with the imperfect world is to sully one's self.

It's hardly surprising that, in the modern age of 'Entertainment News', as represented by the vehement spewing of incoherent bias, figures like Zinn and Chomsky should become elevated. Zinn's book is like the 'documentaries' n  Zeitgeistn, or n  What the Bleep Do We Know?n, like Daniel Quinn's n  Ishmaeln or Hesse's n  Siddharthan, or the writing of Bell Hooks--all works that are fundamentally more concerned with the author's prejudice than with anything resembling fact.

In college, it's not uncommon to find folks who are devoted to all of the above--and if there's a better way than that to say "I have relatively little capacity for critical thought, but need constant confirmation of my own specialness', I don't know it. But then, such works are liable to spark off movements--not because they are accurate or well-written, but because they flatter certain preconceptions in the person who reads or watches them--meaning that the movements they inspire are not far removed from cults, centered as they are on philosophies which do not correspond to reality.

It is truly sad that, in the end, the common state of politics can be boiled down to a question like 'Do you follow rush Limbaugh, or Kieth Olbermann?', when in fact both of them are equally sensationalistic purveyors of half-truths delivered by way of ideology-filled rants. One sometimes wonders what we might achieve if we were able to think of the world in terms other than false dichotomies--but since I, unlike Zinn, am not an idealist, I shall have to accept the fact that it's simply how the human mind works, and do my best to work within that system.

Howard Zinn could easily have saved himself the trouble of writing 752 pages by stating on a single page that white people and the western civilization that they created and brought with them to other countries was the cancer of human history.

If we are to believe Howard Zinn's version of history, pre-Columbus Native American Indians lived a peaceful and idyllic Garden of Eden type existence, where they lived in harmony with one another and nature. Then the mean old evil white people came with their diseases and warfare and subjected the poor peace loving red man to slavery, disease, and death. In actuality, Native American Indians were distinct tribes that fought as savagely and brutally among each other as the whites did in Europe. Long before the white men, Indians slaughtered each other and weren't always sparing of women (yes they were raped and killed too) and children. From Lawrence H. Keeley's "War Before Civilization": "...at Crow Creek in South Dakota, archaeology found a mass grave containing the remains of more than 500 men, women, and children who had been slaughtered, scalped, and mutilated during an attack on their village a century and a half before Columbus's arrival (ca. A.D. 1325). The attack seems to have occurred just when the village's fortifications were being rebuilt. All the houses were burned, and most of the inhabitants were murdered. This death toll represented more than 60 percent of the village's population, estimated from the number of houses to have been about 800. The survivors appear to have been primarily young women, as their skeletons are underrepresented among the bones; if so, they were probably taken away as captives. Certainly, the site was deserted for some time after the attack because the bodies evidently remained exposed to scavenging animals for a few weeks before burial. In other words, this whole village was annihilated in a single attack and never reoccupied." While Zinn is pointing out how barbaric and evil whites were for desecrating the graves of Native American Indians, he conveniently forgets to mention that Native American Indians did the same to the grave sites and corpses of enemy tribes. When he describes gleefully and in minute detail starving white settlers resorting to cannibalism, he forgets to mention archaeological digs that have proven that Indians have done the same thing, and not always out of necessity because they were starving; Indians have practiced ritual cannibalism. Zinn's story of America is one sided and biased, by his own admission.

In the introduction, Zinn openly admits that his objective for writing this book wasn't to tell the truth as honestly and truthfully as possible, but to interpret history in a way that would influence people's thinking and future society toward what he believes to be the best of all worlds i.e. some kind of communism. This is reminiscent of communist legal Bolshevik politician Krylenko who believed that a person's guilt in a court of law should be determined not on whether or not they actually did the crime, but whether or not their guilt or innocence was expedient to the Bolshevik revolution.

A People's History of the United States is not so much a story of a people's struggle rather than the story of how socialism and communism and their advocates have been discriminated against in America. Also, the underlying thesis of his book is essentially Marxist in nature, assuming that the entire history of America is a struggle between classes i.e. the have nots against the haves. He assumes socialists and communists are freedom fighters against the evil corporate capitalists. Again, he conveniently ignores the fact that his beloved communism was responsible for over 100 million deaths in the world during the 20th century, more deaths than were caused by Fascism.

Although this book is mostly hogwash, there are a few things that were worth reading (although one could easily find better books on it that are far less biased and not attempting to sell a communist agenda) such as his inclusion of white indentured servants, his token mention of governmental violation of the rights of white separatist Randy Weaver, and information he gives on the Ludlow Massacre. However, even these subjects are permeated with an anti-white, anti-Western bias. For instance, when discussing slavery in Zinn's world, blacks were treated much worse, and only whites who owned slaves are truly evil, never mind the fact that slavery was practiced throughout the world by all peoples at all times. The only thing about it that really makes whites unique when it comes to practicing slavery was that they were the FIRST to make laws criminalizing it and they enforced the criminalization of slavery through their "evil" imperialism. Zinn also entirely leaves out details of the Arab Slave trade that took the majority of their slaves from Africa, although at least one million of their slaves consisted of white Europeans taken from "Spain, France, England and even the fledgling American colonies." From Wikipedia:"Historians agree between 11 and 18 million Africans were enslaved by Arab slave traders and taken across the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara desert between 650 and 1900,[4][5][6] compared to 9.4 to 14 million Africans brought to the Americas in the Atlantic slave trade[7] from 15th century to the early 19th century." The idea of the Arabic slave trade being less brutal than that practiced by whites on Africans becomes even more absurd in light of the fact that the Arab slave traders would march their African slaves across great expansions of desert, the Sahara desert being one, killing many in the process, or the fact that many African slaves would be castrated by their handlers.

Given the extreme nature of Zinn's careful selection of the facts one can only arrive at the conclusion that Zinn's purpose is to attack and deride whites in an attempt at making them look like the "cancer of history."

Howard Zinn is an incredibly dishonest historian. I don't know what is more disturbing; Zinn's morally reprehensible mutilation of American history to serve his own political ends or the fact that so many people accept and regurgitate his distorted version of history as actual fact. For instance, once a girl I knew who was a social liberal mentioned to me after having seen that I had read Zinn, that she preferred reading history books like his because they "told the truth about things."



More on the Arab Slave Trade:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_sla...

Thomas Sowell: On The Real History of Slavery and Racism
http://www.deadcatsandclippings.com/?...

War Before Civilization
http://books.google.com/books/about/W...

White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/...