Overall a really nice look at American history from the viewpoint of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. There couldn't possibly be better timing than amidst a presidential election to read a book like this - a book that helps you look at the contrast of what we traditionally believe our country to be, and what our actions show us to be - for what better way is there to consider what we would like our country to become?

It did bog down for me a couple of times, primarily when discussing the gazillion strikes and protests that helped bring us into modernity. The nice thing was that the writing style is approachable and interesting, and each section stands on its own for the most part, so skimming a few pages here and there won't detract from the experience.

I read the 'highlights of the 20th century' version because that was the one on a reading list I am following, but I wish I had gotten the full unabridged book. Didn't cover some things I was hoping to learn more about.

As a fan of narrative history -- embodied by great works like n  Battle Cry of Freedomn and n  The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America 1932-72n -- reading A People's History of the United States was an alternately invigorating and frustrating experience. Representing Howard Zinn's attempt to counter "Great Man" interpretations of American history and fasten his personal ideology to an overarching national story, the book excels in descriptions of the perpetual mistreatment of American Indians, the social and political struggles against embedded white supremacy that defined the Civil Rights Movement, and the activist backlash against the Vietnam War. Zinn was knowledgeable and passionate enough about each of those subjects that he could have probably written a compelling book about any one of them. It's in trying to include them and many other subjects in a centuries-spanning narrative that emphasises the common people at the deliberate expense of undeniably influential political players where he delivers mixed results. Presidents as consequential as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson scarcely intrude on Zinn's proletariat-focused story except to do something nefarious at the behest of business interests and the military-industrial complex. It's fair to say that Zinn speaks truth to power (be it the political establishment or the historical status quo) but it's a selective truth that has little time for details that don't fit his purpose. Chapters on the American Civil War and WWII/The New Deal are quite poor while Zinn's portrayal of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident is a masterclass in excising facts that don't support the darkest interpretation of a catalytic event. On the flipside, both the closing chapter elaborating on Zinn's vision of a better America and an afterword copping to some of the book's blind spots are great. After reading both this and n  You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Timesn, I have to admit I prefer Zinn the memoirist to Zinn the historian.

History as it's told in our high school history textbooks is history that focuses on American leaders, whether political, military, or business. Zinn argues convincingly that we need also to see history as it happened to "the people," and that this perspective is by no means synonymous with that of America's elites. In fact, the official line in America's history and politics has been that America is basically one big middle class. Certainly, America long had a larger middle class than most of the rest of the world, but as Zinn points out, we are "a middle class society governed for the most part by its upper classes." And what we see time after time (as in the present day) is that those who govern us have worked consistently for their own class first and for the country-as-a-whole second.

Zinn takes a hard look at the slaughter of the native Americans, at the exploitation of blacks and poor whites, at the alliance between government and business interests, at the struggles for the abolition of slavery, for labor rights, for civil rights, for women's rights... and over and over we see politicians taking action, passing and enforcing legislation only when popular movements force them to do so. Not simply when the electorate that voted them into office wants it, but when the people demand it in ways that cannot be easily ignored (as the polls more or less can when both parties are so similar on many basic issues). Voting, in fact, can be seen as consitently as a device for making people feel empowered while changing little.

I'll let Zinn speak for himself a bit.

“My viewpoint, in telling the story 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.”

Zinn puts himself consistently on the side of "the people," inasmuch as there can be said to be such a group--certainly it's not a unified group, and Zinn recognizes this. Still, Zinn would argue, the diversity represented by "the people" have more in common with one another (as much as they have been prevented from seeing it) than they do with the elites who run the country.

Fair warning: it's a long read, and pretty dense. Definitely not what we used to call "drunk-on-the-beach reading." In fact, if you want to read a book that shares some insights with this book without the exhaustive focus, you might start with James Loewen's _Lies My Teacher Told Me_. Really, these are two books that should be read by anyone who wants to understand our country and its history. If it's true that "those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it," then I think a necessary corollary is that "those who don't know the truth about history are doomed to repeat it."

A partial journal of reading this very long book

7/7/20 My Facebook Post
I am very late to this classic. The first paragraph landed so hard I have to stop reading and do errands to let this process through my body. Here's what did it—from Columbus's log when he was met with an extraordinary welcome by Arawak people who inhabited the Bahamas:

"They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned ... They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features ... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane. ... They would make fine servants. ... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

The legacy of this mindset is nauseating. The misinterpretation of love, altruism, and gifts to honor visitors, from a Western perspective of power and possessions and the arrogant belief that any culture that is different from theirs is necessarily ignorant or stupid rather than perhaps more evolved and connected to oneness? ... I do not know where to begin. I have been reading and editing Native material the last few months, and seeing and feeling the roots of the pain leaves me moaning in my own agony. I will absorb this book as fast I'm capable.

Later that same day, I post:
Only 2 chapters in and I've learned that in 1619 settlers in Virginia were so desperate for food they resorted to cannibalism. A man killed his wife who was sleeping on his chest and then cut her up and ate her. Whites were enraged at the Indians' superior ability to farm and live off the land, and therefore they vilified them even more. Because they could not enslave Natives, they got people from Africa, ripped them away from family, culture, and language, thereby trying to ensure their helplessness. Black slaves were the solution to white cannibals' inability to farm. So these ignorant white cannibals enslaved people, called everyone else savages to justify what they were doing, and then to keep indentured white servants and black slaves from ganging up on them, they initiated systemic racism, giving white servants privileges to divide and conquer. And so it began.

A friend comments:

I wrote a paper in college about the arrogance behind Jamestown. One detail that sticks in my mind: thinking that because Virginia was at a similar latitude to the Mediterranean, they would be able to grow palm trees and pineapples. No research, just the assumption that if they willed it so...

And another friend messages me that Zinn was a hero of the left but practiced bad scholarship and made things up. She referenced an article titled "Lies the Debunkers Told Me: How Bad History Books Win Us Over", with the dek: "Politicians quote them. Movie stars revere them. But these authors are so busy spinning good yarns that they don't have time to research the facts." I read the article and notice that it fails to cite any specific historical inaccuracies and debunks nothing. It only says that the book is simplistic and "inspire[s] a degree of passion that verges on the pugnacious." Thereby doing the very thing it is accusing Zinn of—offering facile arguments that make people feel as if they've been hoodwinked and are now in the know.

Ridiculous. People do these things all on their own. We hear anything and, according to our beliefs, we go to extremes of rejection or acceptance, in our need to paint things black or white, good or bad, and therefore ourselves virtuous for being on whatever side we deem "good."

At the start of People's History, Zinn fully discusses the impossibility of anybody writing a history that is objective. A historian chooses what to dwell on. Most histories dwell on the stories told by whomever is victorious. Zinn is choosing to tell the other side. I read on, making up my own mind.

7/8/20 Second Day of Reading
About 60 pages in, I decided to look at some other Goodreads reviews. "Don't read this book!" screams a reviewer with 165 likes. "Eye-opening," say others. Some people idolize Zinn; others declare he is an effete arrogant a-hole and if you like this book, you dislike America.

At the beginning of the book, there is a bit about how historians with biases cherry-pick facts, and the way they insert the ones they disagree with into a basket-load of facts they agree with skews history.

Review

Yes, Zinn does this too. He is a lefty; he believes in the power of the people; he dislikes bullies and murderers and usurpers and a few rich men controlling the masses. All true (and openly acknowledged in chapter 23). But what I value in this book is the story of "the other side." I've heard plenty of the "good pilgrim," noble founders, and broad-stroke tales of how we fought for independence and spent "blood and treasure" (a loathsome euphemism for "murder and land theft") to settle America. What I've never heard is about the in-fighting and factions I see in today's culture, about the strategizing behind suppression and uprising. Can we be so different from the past? No, this book lets us know, it's always been this way.

I needed to hear the everyday struggles of regular people who in truth are the engine of any revolution or evolution, and this book takes you into the shoes of people struggling to survive—the conquered and the bullies. It takes you beyond names of battles and dates I was supposed to learn in high school history into the brutality and pure evilness of people like Andrew Jackson and so many others. It gives you the firsthand voices from documents where legions of articulate Indian leaders pled for their treaties to be upheld and you feel their betrayal and the death of First Nations people.

Honestly, I don't give a hoot about bias or Zinn lovers and haters. Everyone is biased. I refuse to idealize or condemn. I'm simply grateful for a book that makes history as real as my fingers and toes.

A Contemplation

I read this book as part of my late-in-life attempt to educate myself, debunking a lot of what I was taught in school and picked up by osmosis in this segregated American culture. I was perfectly primed for Zinn by previously reading several books about race and racism as well as Erik Larson's London Blitz history, The Splendid and the Vile, and Jess Walter's excellent upcoming novel, n  The Cold Millionsn, about the beginning of the labor union movement, much of whose history is reprised in some brutal chapters in Zinn's book.

But the more I read about the overblown entitlement (which belief really derives from one in Manifest Destiny*) of everyone from the original European invaders to today's pocketful of billionaire capitalists, the more two other novels came to mind: n  The Dinnern by Herman Koch and n  Not Forgetting the Whalen by John Ironmonger. Both novels deal with how people respond to crises. Koch's book determines that our culture is directed by a group of elite people, who run the legal system and are devoid of ethics and empathy, who believe they can and must do whatever it takes to prevail individually, with no sense of value in any lives but their own and their kin's. Koch likens this mindset to a disease that is inherited by offspring who perpetuate it. Ironmonger's novel shows us as a species infused with a deep inborn altruism. In response to a worldwide pandemic, we/they survive by helping one another.

Although many people choose to put their heads in the sand and stick with whatever beliefs they've always had, there is the opportunity right now to change—to see all the usually hidden motivations just under the surface of most large human movements. Both human drives (individual power grabbing versus actions for the wellbeing of all of us) are currently fully exposed. A People's History shows the roots of a sense of entitlement that has grown like an inherited cancer in our American culture and is now threatening to take over and kill the body.

Lying did not begin with the current administration of the United States. We are merely seeing ourselves in such an exaggerated fun-house mirror that if we look, we cannot avoid knowing who we are. We Americans are a population who has been brought up on lies: "We are the good guys," is one of the biggest (although partially true; chapter 16 "A People's War?" is an outstanding deconstruction of a truth that's been exaggerated into an idealized myth. And please do not condemn as "biased" anybody who asks questions that expose hypocrisy; this is the very knee-jerk exaggeration that births the historical lies this book debunks!).

Our written history presented "genocide" as hard-won settlements through true grit and expenditure of "blood and treasure." When we could only survive via free labor, we invented racism and kidnapped countless people, yet the Confederacy erected statues of traitors as if they were heroes and many people still claim that loving them has nothing to do with supporting racism. Three hundred seventy treaties made with Native peoples are regularly broken with impunity and bogus rationales. (The history is so distorted that in a recent incident, a woman who was headed to a Trump rally that was illegally taking place on lands the Supreme Court ruled belonged to the Sioux Nation, yelled to Native American protestors "Go back to where you came from.") Historically we have invaded other countries when it benefitted us economically, although the popular reasons given may have been twisted to sound benign (there's a whole excrutiating chapter on the Vietnam war). Now is not the first time science has been distorted to support a political agenda: Shortly after Bush took office in 1990, a government scientist prepared a report for a Congressional committee on the dangerous global warming results of fossil fuels, and "the White House changed the testimony, over the scientist's objections, to minimize the danger (Boston Globe, October 29, 1990)." (576) Debilitating tax breaks for the rich began with Democrats—"the Kennedy-Johnson administrations—who, under the guise of 'tax reform,' first lowered the World War II-era rate of 91 percent on incomes over $400,000 a year to 70 percent. During the Carter Administration (though over his objections) Democrats and Republicans in Congress joined to give even more tax breaks to the rich." (580, citing America: Who Really Pays the Taxes? by Donald Barlett and James Steele) A People's History documents it all.

However, we humans are simultaneously inherently altruistic. (Can we expand our psyches enough to contain this nuanced paradox?) We are herd animals who will stop to care for the hurt, help our neighbors, practice radical acts of compassion, and applaud self-sacrificing heroes.

I am not married, but I've listened to many couples fight, and my least favorite mode is when people deflect responsibility by counter-blaming in response to a true naming of a mistake; both statements may or may not be true, but it's irrelevant because they have nothing to do with each other and succeed in creating two strains of speech that never connect. I see this going on constantly:

Liberals: The separation of immigrant children from their parents is unconscionable.
Conservatives: Yeah, but Obama built the jails.

Liberals: People who have lived in systemic racism, along with their allies, should demonstrate and we should finally rectify the errors.
Conservatives: Yeah, but violence to property and law enforcement is bad.

Liberals: White people need to recognize their bias and become anti-racists.
Conservatives: There's a world history of white slavery also.

Liberal: That news article you just posted is bogus. Just check Snopes.
Liberal: It's got a lot of comments. (Hence, it is not removed.)

Conservatives: Liberals are thought police who insist that everybody agree with them.
Liberals: Conservatives are stupid idiots.
Conservatives: Liberals are arrogant a-holes.

Liberals, Conservatives, and 80% of the population that will not vote or think about politics: All politicians are crooks, so why even bother to . . . [fill in the blank]

Can we please stop this?

It has been well documented since the 2016 election that up to 80 percent of eligible Americans did not vote. That 80 percent also is well represented in the current fun-house mirror image of who we are: people who will not do the work to be informed and make the best decisions we are capable of for the good of all of us.

Right this moment, we are all hurting, we have all made mistakes, and we're all in need of help, compassion, and self-sacrifice. So I pray that we will follow our better instincts and use the very tiny window of time that remains to consciously choose a return to empathy. November 3, 2020, is not merely an election; it is a referendum on our moral nature.

__________
*Manifest Destiny is the belief or, more likely, the bogus rationale to convince others that some people are directly descended from God (kings, etc.) and therefore more entitled to power, riches, and national expansionism.

In many ways, this is not my typical five-star review. The People's History of the United States is tedious, repetitive, and an overall slog to get through. Though so much of the information provided is wholly interesting, some of the Zinn's examples are merely empty fodder and these cause the already long book to slow. Zinn was anti-oppression, and this means that sometimes he seems pro-whatever-is-being-oppressed, though I don't think this is always the case. For instance, it's easy to surmise from the many examples that Zinn is pro-socialist, but I'm not entirely sure that's true. Certainly, he backed the socialist stance when it was the voice that was being oppressed. And certainly, of the major forms of government, Zinn likely felt the most affinity with socialism. But in later chapters as well as in the conclusion, it seems that Zinn acknowledges that socialism is also a broken system—a step forward, but not the solution. Additionally, Zinn's anti-oppression position means that he sometimes illustrates a part of history from an angle that obscures some bit of inconvenient truth. This is unfortunate, because it gives the naysayers cause to spit on this book and declare it “communist propaganda” (or whatever the taboo phrase of the day is). These moments are few and far between and majority of this book is quite historically accurate, in my layman's opinion.

The People's History of the United States was also difficult for me to get through because I've long studied this history and I already knew the more major events covered in this book. Perhaps many of those other narratives I've read owe their information to Zinn, but having come to this book later in my journey, I found much of the story to be old news. That's not to say Zinn doesn't provide considerable history I have not come across in my previous studies. In fact, what Zinn most convinced me of was how so many of these events that I thought were motivated by various reasons primarily (perhaps exclusively) came about because of money.

The reason The People's History of the United States deserves a five-star rating is because, though it's not an enjoyable read, it is such a immense labor of love and passion for the subject. Zinn put his heart and mind into every page of this book and it shows. Even so, I was tempted to slap four stars on this book and move on until I came to Zinn's afterword. Prior to this, Zinn had merely provided over six-hundred pages of dry facts without much commentary or call-to-action. Here, in these final pages, Zinn stirred my emotions. He took all the information he'd provided and agitated it within me and said, “now what are you going to do?” It was an effective challenge.

The People's History of the United States is the kind of book that is difficult to read straight through. Did I learn some things? Absolutely. But so much of what I learned has already sifted straight through my brain. This is the sort of book one who is passionate about the subject should own. It is the kind of book one should keep handy in case someone is eager to argue about the perfection of the state. It is the kind of book that should be picked up from time to time and serve as a reminder to the people of their history and the vicious circle that has been built up around them, keeping them caged for over five hundred years.

"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 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."

A fantastic, if biased and flawed, look at the evils of the U.S. and the wonders of its peoples' efforts. It will make you wish that we could live up to the ideals that Zinn presents, ideals so optimistic that any sane person knows they can never be met. However, it will make you want to try to meet them, which is the highest praise it can be given.

“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.”

In this broad history of the United States, Zinn’s interests are very much evident. After seeing so much of US history presented as the history of the state and statesmen, Zinn focuses the reader on the history of the people. He leads the reader to question the idea of saviors - leaders who change the course of history — and instead to look at the movements of the people and the way that this has shaped our country. Any writer who can take over 600 pages of US History and make it utterly compelling deserves all the accolades. I learned so much in reading this - both in the facts and perspectives presented as well as in the way Zinn gave me some structure for challenging the status quo and for asking the next level questions. In my mind, some of the best history books are the ones that push me to take an uncomfortable look at things that I assume I know - they take me outside of my comfort zone and make me realize that I had assumptions that were so baked into my frame of reference that I didn’t recognize that it was an assumption and not a fact. This one should be required reading.

A history of dissent and victimhood.

Zinn's controversial work is the less-told perspective of those that are victims of American white apartheid, American imperialistic tendencies especially in the 1960s in Vietnam/Indonesia and the American dissent involved. Granted, I only read the abridged version, but you'll get an overview of much of the 1960s protesting Vietnam war as well as growing feminism during that time. Zinn is clearly focused on telling the story of those that were harmed, marginalized or victimized by America's quest for global dominance or domestic conformity to the foundation of patriarchy and white supremacy.

From native American protests on Alcatraz to Attica prison rebellion, you'll get a recounting of the marginalized of American society. Additionally, you'll find a scathing analysis of post-Reagan presidencies: Clinton in particular stripping welfare benefits from the poor while advancing corporate self interest. American presidents continue the same wash-rinse-repeat of what was started in the 1980s.

This book is old news but it is still important news. I find it curious that is is controversial for some people. While I do believe there is some benefit to history told through a nationalistic viewpoint (traditional history approaches) there is also great value in telling the story of those that have not benefited and have in fact been victims. The claims that this work is "biased" is stating the obvious. Of course it's biased, all history recounting is biased. Does bias undervalue the perspective? Does bias invalidate what is trying to be communicated? I don't believe so. Sure, you can reject work like Zinn and go on your merry way believing in the myth of American exceptionalism, but you will likely not be part of any tangible solution for the very real problems of modern America.

Four stars because the editing of this abridged version was horrendously unorganized.

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.

In 1846, in Concord, Massachusetts, the writer Henry David Thoreau ran into a tax collector called Sam Staples, who asked for his poll tax. Thoreau declined to pay, refusing – he said – to contribute to what he regarded as the government's illegal war against Mexico. He was put in prison.

When Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, ‘What are you doing in there?’ it was reported that Thoreau replied, ‘What are you doing out there?’

Howard Zinn is not in jail (he's dead), but the message to readers is much the same. This is a big book with a big chip on its shoulder. It's not really a history of the US at all, it's a kind of ‘Marxist Companion to’ American history – but none the worse for that, and Zinn can hardly be accused of concealing his biases. He's very upfront about the fact that this book ‘leans in a certain direction’. His reading of history is one dominated by social and economic inequality presided over by governments that protect capitalist interests at the expense of people's lives. And, as you might imagine, he's not short of examples.

It's interesting that many of those who dislike this book seem almost personally offended by it. That is worrying, because it suggests that American patriotism (which is almost a state religion) has succeeded in convincing people to identify themselves with their governments, one of the things that Zinn is trying, passim, to argue against. Certainly ‘America’ as a state does not come out of this very well, but I rather doubt that Zinn believes any other countries are much better; the point is only that the US is no different.

Instead of memorable dates or acts of statesmanship, then, we have a history of the disenfranchised and the working-classes, from Columbus to the War on Terror, demolishing the fiction that the US is a ‘classless’ society and establishing the importance of protest and activism in achieving any meaningful social advances.

In some cases this means coming at the familiar stories of American history from a new angle – as is the case with the settling of North America, which Zinn sees as straightforwardly genocidal, or his account of the ‘Roaring’ 1920s, which focuses on the country's staggering wealth disparity. Sometimes again, Zinn's approach is more or less in line with traditional narratives, as for instance when it comes to the civil rights movement. And finally there are the stories in here which you don't typically see in histories of the U.S. at all, such as the rise and ultimate fall of American unionism, something I, like most people in Europe, have often wondered about.

What I love about books that focus on protest movements is that they help break down the idea that countries are monolithic, or that the behavior of a state is even moderately successful in enacting the wishes of its populace. And the US has had some of the most courageous and eloquent protesters anywhere. Emerson may not have gone to jail for his beliefs like his friend Thoreau, but consider the letter he wrote to President Van Buren in 1838, on the subject of Indian Removal. The policy, he says, is

a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country any more?

Others had the presence of mind to produce this stuff on the fly. Eugene Debs, jailed for speaking out against the First World War, told his judge in court:

Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

(And critics call this an anti-American book! You're cheering over heroic Americans the whole way through – they just happen to be in confrontation with their government most of the time. It's very moving, and I was a bit of an emotional wreck for much of the three weeks I spent reading it.) The gradual emancipation of women furnishes some of the best anecdotes. Elizabeth Blackwell, a doctor who got her medical degree in 1849 from Geneva College, wrote about one of her first cases, where she called in a local physician for consultation on a pneumonia patient:

This gentleman, after seeing the patient, went with me into the parlour. There he began to walk about the room in some agitation, exclaiming, “A most extraordinary case! Such a one never happened to me before; I really do not know what to do!” I listened in surprise and much perplexity, as it was a clear case of pneumonia and of no unusual degree of danger, until at last I discovered that his perplexity related to me, not to the patient, and to the propriety of consulting with a lady physician!

It was interesting to discover that many of the radical female activists of the early twentieth century – and there were a lot of awesome women involved in anarchist syndicates and that kind of thing – were ambivalent on the question of suffrage, regarding votes as, at best, a distraction from the real issue of class warfare. Zinn is broadly sympathetic, just because he likes people who are angry; indeed activists who take a more conciliatory approach don't always come off well here. Martin Luther King's ‘I have a dream’ speech, for instance, is ‘magnificent oratory, but’ – the crucial qualification – ‘without […] anger’.

All of the book's themes come together when it discusses war. There is a bracing résumé of the US's appalling military interference in Central America, and cynical (but convincing) discussions of Korea and Iraq. On Vietnam, Zinn is even more scathing than conventional wisdom would suggest – indeed, there is a sense that self-congratulatory cultural ‘admissions’ of failure have served to gloss over the ugly realities. Consider the 660 Vietnamese civilians massacred at My Lai, for example. The soldiers of Charlie Company took their time raping and dismembering the women, rounding up and killing the children, and forcing the rest of the villagers to lie down in ditches while they walked up and down shooting them, while divisional command staff watched from a helicopter. None of the anguished, important, self-examining Hollywood treatments of the conflict have come close to facing up to this kind of thing.

War is recognised here as a class issue. ‘If there is a war,’ wrote Bolton Hall in an appeal to the working classes in 1898, ‘you will furnish the corpses and the taxes, and others will get the glory.’ Zinn encourages readers to consider what exactly is meant when politicians talk about the ‘national interest’, so often to be equated with corporate profits. But more generally, there is a welcome consideration of the justification for spending citizens' money on vast military projects instead of on ways to help those of them with no food, housing, or employment. As Eisenhower said, in a moment of rare presidential clarity:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in a final sense a theft from those who are hungry and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.

Welfare is one of the many issues on which both sides of the American political spectrum have united in inactivity, allowing the term itself to become almost a dirty word. (A similar process has happened with ‘socialism’.) In a 1992 survey, 44 percent of people thought too much was being spent on ‘welfare’, but 64 percent thought too little was being spent on ‘assistance to the poor’. *headdesk* Vocabulary is everything…

It's true that there is, at times, an unnecessarily conspiratorial tone here – the implication that some knowing capitalist-patriarchal cabal is deliberately manipulating events to the people's detriment. Events are manipulated to the people's detriment, but the reason is systemic rather than down to individual villains (though yes, there are some conspicuous exceptions). And the ruling classes can't win: advances in social justice or economical equality – of which there are, in fact, many – are attributed to an Establishment desire for ‘long-range stability of the system’ rather than to any humanitarian motives. Where concessions have been made, ‘the chief motive was practicality, not humanity’.

Zinn does say at one point that the American system ‘was not devilishly contrived by some master plotters; it developed naturally out of the needs of the situation’, but such reminders are only necessary because they are belied by his general stance. Still, over the 700-odd pages, I think the system is illustrated rather well. The account left me energised, fired-up. And people should be angry. As Zinn's history shows, the advances in American society have only come about because people got angry and forced the government to act. Now is certainly no time to stop.

This is one of those books that I pick up on occasion and read another chapter. Want to know what REALLY happened in this country's history...minus the varnish and bullshit? Some of the names will be familiar, but this ain't your high school history book...