"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past" -some British propagandist

Preamble:
--Zinn filled in for that History 12 class taught by that one critical high school teacher which sadly I did not attend because I was duped into 3 blocks of marketing/entrepreneurship. True story. This history teacher had a running argument with the marketing teacher regarding the need to teach (in the marketing classes) how goods were sourced and their labor practices. That did not happen.
--Later, I stumbled across Zinn in the library, shortly after being introduced to Chomsky (and self-directed learning). Not an uncommon introduction to American radicalism. And here I am revisiting a decade later…

The Brilliant:
--It turns out my self-directed teachers were pretty bad-ass. “History” ranges from the mind-numbing litany of dates and names, to the dynamic ebbs and flows of struggle and possibilities.
--Furthermore, history is a manifestation of our social imagination; it acts as our footing and serves as a guiding light for how we build our present and future. Thus, it is a source of power for social control mostly written and disseminated by victors; if we cannot imagine change, how can we act on it?
--Zinn’s “People’s History” disrupts the social control narratives of history by starting from the bottom up, applying class analysis and emphasizing the political nature of recounting history (i.e. which “facts” are important and how should they be framed).
--Several points on the book’s conclusion:
1) I was reminded how Zinn missed the Occupy Movement by under 2 years. Had he lived, he could have seen the 99% slogan that he finished this book with spread in the cities he lectured in and beyond.
2) Powerful characterization of the middle class/academics as guards, and working/poor as prisoners, stuck in a system that rules by divide-and-conquer.
3) “Absentee authority”. What a great phrase.

The Good:
--“History” of this type is tricky. Historical details are useful for small case studies. For grand narratives, I tend to prefer political economy that really dives into the different layers and interactions between sociopolitical power and socioeconomic structures. But this method cannot possibly cover all the pieces of history that Zinn sets out to do here, so Zinn remains more on the surface resulting in an accessible (critical) History 101 book. Examples of in-dept political economy syntheses:
-The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (yes, "A People's History", there's a connection with Zinn)
-And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

--I wanted to revisit Zinn’s perspectives on several topics in particular; only one did I get surprising findings:
1) Labor power during Great Depression/New Deal era:
-Going in, I was conflicted over this view of Yanis Varoufakis’: responding to the assertion that FDR was forced into the New Deal compromises by a well-organized labor movement, Varoufakis contends that labor’s bargaining power had vanished when the Great Depression hit, with the working class then lining up willing to do anything for employment.
-So, Zinn's Ch.15 “Self-Help in Hard Times” adds an interesting twist, and ended up reading like the heart of his book. Zinn portrays the significance of sitdown strikes during this time, driven by the rank-and-file against union leadership. Zinn further contends that the labor movement won most from rank-and-file spontaneous disruptions instead of through the organization of unions which was easier for State Capitalism to absorb into reformism. So much to unpack here… How much I would love to hear Varoufakis, Zinn, and global south communist Vijay Prashad discuss this together…

--These other topics were good intros, but need to look elsewhere for more depth:
2) Labor history during late-19th century: booms, busts, strikes… this is where political economy synthesis can really add shape to the events.
3) Capitalist crises' relationship with wars: good hints…
4) Race/“whiteness” as divide-and-conquer for settler colonialism/slave trade: hoping Gerald Horne can go more in-depth…

The Missing:
--I’m much faster recycling through old favorites than new reads, but I seriously need to get a move on all the global south perspectives I want to explore. Up next:
-favorite author Vijay Prashad’s sequel: The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
-A Theory of Imperialism
-Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital

تاریخ همه کشور ها معمولا از نظر وقایع کلی مبارزات حق طلبانه ، ظلم ها ، شادی ها یکسان است .فقط رنگ وشکل ان با هم فرق دارد و کمی هم از نظر تاخر و تقدم زمان وقوع حوادث و رویدادها متفاوت است .
هر قهرمانی برای عده ای قهرمان است و برای عده ای دیگر ضد قهرمان ،نگاه تاریخی به واقعه ای در یک ظرف زمان تراژدی است و وقتی در برهه زمان دیگری وبا توجه به دست آورده های ان بررسی میگردد یک لازم مبارک .
بشر نمیدانم در طول تاریخ متوحش یا متمدن شده است ولی هر چه هست خالق بشر امید دارد به این بشر و من امید دارم به این امید

Do you think the U.S. government's domination by business interests and the wealthy is a relatively recent development? Think the founding fathers would be appalled by the current situation? Think Republicans are responsible for tax cuts for the rich? Think Democrats are the party of the working class? Think JFK was a pretty good guy? Think U.S. involvementin WWII was morally motivated?
If you want to find out why you're wrong about all these things, if you want clear evidence that our government was created precisely to protect the interests of the wealthy elite against the working people, and is currently functioning exactly according to plan, if you know that the two-party system is a con game but aren't exactly sure how it works, if you want to understand what 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are really about, then you need to read this book.

NON IN NOSTRO NOME



Riscrivere la storia può far risonare echi che sono brutte e pericolose: chi dalle nostre parti vuole riscrivere la storia sono quelli che equiparano gli “allegri” ragazzi di Salò ai partigiani, le foibe alla Shoah, il confino a una villeggiatura, noi italiani alla “brava gente”, e il fascismo a un periodo storico importante e prestigioso.
Allora, per questo, invece di “riscrivere” userò l’espressione scrivere in modo nuovo. Cambiando prospettiva: la storia vista dal basso, dalla gente e non dai governi, dai poveri e non da nobili, aristocratici e borghesi. Mettendo in risalto aspetti che nella lettura storiografica consolidata rimangono marginali.
Per cui, in questo specifico caso, vuol dire sottolineare e mettere in luce il punto di vista dei nativi, degli schiavi, dei neri, di chi abitava quel continente prima che arrivasse Colombo (il genocidio compiuto dagli spagnoli, e in misura geograficamente più limitata, dai portoghesi, a cui seguirono poi gli altri popoli europei, inglesi prima e sopra tutti, portò allo sterminio del 90% della popolazione locale). Il punto di vista delle donne.
Mettere in discussione il pretesto del progresso quando si annientano interi popoli e una narrazione della storia condotta dal punto di vista dei conquistatori e dei capi della civiltà occidentale.



La prima regola esportata nelle colonie americane (perché gli Stati Uniti sono nati come tali, colonie) è quella della divisione in classi. E siccome stiamo parlando del Sei-Settecento, le classi erano essenzialmente due: i ricchi – mai più del 10% della popolazione - e i poveri.
Volendo, una sorta di terza classe era costituita dal clero.
Le colonie appaiono dunque come società di classi in lotta fra loro, un dato messo in ombra dalle storie tradizionali, che si concentrano sullo scontro esterno con l’Inghilterra e sull’unità dei coloni durante la Rivoluzione. Il paese, perciò, non è “nato libero”, ma schiavo e libero, servo e padrone, locatario e proprietario, povero e ricco.
Quando si andò costituendo anche una classe media
il gruppo dominante trovò, negli anni sessanta e settanta del Settecento, uno strumento straordinariamente utile: il linguaggio della libertà e dell’uguaglianza, che riuscì a unire un numero di bianchi sufficiente per combattere una rivoluzione contro l’Inghilterra senza porre fine alla schiavitù e alla disuguaglianza.
In sintesi - neppure troppo estrema - i cinquantacinque costituenti scrissero un testo per fondare e governare un paese in difesa del denaro, di chi lo possedeva o voleva conquistarlo.



Nella storia del mondo non c’è paese dove il razzismo sia stato così importante e duraturo come negli Stati Uniti. E il problema della “color line” esiste tuttora. Ho letto l’edizione del 2003, nel caso qualcuno si illudesse che la citazione in corsivo riguardi esclusivamente il passato.
Il traffico di schiavi coinvolse almeno cinquanta milioni di africani. Senza dimenticare che fino alla costa occidentale, fino ai porti di partenze delle navi (l’Inghilterra aveva il numero maggiore di navi e l’incontrastato dominio mondiale del mercato), erano altri africani, neri o arabi, a guidare le carovane di incatenati anche per mille chilometri percorsi a piedi, i bianchi avevano messo su un commercio alquanto lucrativo. Conveniente sia per chi organizzava il trasporto sia per chi, “utilizzatore finale”, si avvantaggiava di manodopera a buon prezzo, tenuta in schiavitù a vita, pena la morte o altro (frustate, stupro, mutilazione, marchiatura, uccisione per smembramento…).
Esistevano anche i servi, da non confondersi con gli schiavi. E quelli erano bianchi: per ripagare il debito contratto con il viaggio, restavano in servitù alcuni anni, generalmente tra i 5 e i 7 - a condizioni senz’altro migliori di quelle degli schiavi. Servi e schiavi ogni tanto si sono coalizzati per combattere il padrone bianco. Ma sono stati moti di breve durata, sia perché gli interessi erano diversi – gli uni lottavano per migliori condizioni, gli altri per la mera vita e libertà – sia perché il re o la regina mandavano prontamente centinaia di soldati ben armati a reprimere ogni insurrezione.



La mitologia che circonda i padri fondatori, i costituenti, persiste. Furono uomini saggi e giusti che cercarono di realizzare un equilibrio dei poteri? In realtà l’equilibrio non rientrava nei loro desideri, a meno che non servisse a mantenere le cose come stavano: un equilibrio, insomma, tra le forze dominanti all’epoca. Certo non volevano un equilibrio egualitario tra schiavi e padroni, nullatenenti e possidenti, indiani e bianchi. I padri fondatori ignorarono totalmente metà del popolo. La Dichiarazione d’indipendenza non le menzionava, erano assenti dalla Costituzione, invisibili nella nuova democrazia politica. Erano le donne dell’America dei primi tempi. Leggendo i soliti libri di storia, ci si può dimenticare metà della popolazione del paese. Gli esploratori erano uomini, i proprietari terreni e i mercanti erano uomini, i leader politici erano uomini, e così i militari. L’invisibilità delle donne, il fatto che siano trascurate, è un segno della loro condizione sommersa. Questa invisibilità le rendeva in qualche modo affini agli schiavi neri.



Il testo di Zinn è ricco di citazioni – riportate in un modo che può prescindere dalle note, e quindi garantire una lettura più agevole. Zinn riporta la voce degli schiavi delle colonie, dei neri liberi e dei movimenti contro la segregazione razziale del Novecento; delle donne che per prime hanno chiesto l’uguaglianza nell’Ottocento e di quelle della “seconda ondata” femminista degli anni Sessanta/Settanta del Novecento; dei nativi americani; dei movimenti contro le guerre (dalla Grande Guerra al Vietnam, alla guerra in Iraq); dei movimenti operai; dei movimenti di liberazione, resistenza e opposizione (dagli omosessuali ai movimenti degli immigrati e a Occupy). Parlano semplici cittadini e associazioni di minoranze; intellettuali e politici; poeti e scienziati; riformatori e rivoluzionari. Bianchi, neri e indiani.
Zinn racconta una storia nota in modo del tutto insolito: la storia del paese chiamato Stati Uniti d’America vista da chi ha dovuto lottare anche dopo l’indipendenza per vedere riconosciuti i proprio diritti umani e civili.
Una rivoluzione copernicana spostando l’attenzione dai vincitori ai vinti. Una contronarrazione. In pratica, una storia al contrario.

In life I’ve been lucky to have had great teachers; I’ll never forget first reading A People's History of the United States in my high school U.S. history course. Even when he was cracking jokes, Mr. Sheehan always encouraged an active questioning of the historic record, and wanted us students to familiarize ourselves with a number of perspectives. I imagine this is how Howard Zinn entered the lives of many an impressionable or disaffected young person.

So what is this book? Well, it is more or less what it boasts to be: “A People’s History,” Zinn looks at U.S. history through the lens of the working class—the people. He also criticizes those in power that benefit off the exploitation of this group, as well as systems of control used to maintain this status quo. This includes re-examining the prevailing understanding of what American democracy entails. Starting at the very beginning, Zinn boldly asserts:

“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 the 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.” (99)

If it’s not readily apparent, those who hold dear the ideas of “American exceptionalism” or extreme free-market capitalism will probably hate this book. Ingrained in the earliest version of what we conceptualize to be the United States, Zinn will challenge most notions of perceived greatness. This is after all a country built by the labor of enslaved blacks and on land stolen from Native Americans.

Zinn does not pull any punches when it comes to bluntly stating how racism, misogyny, fear, and other vain forms of division have been used to maintain America as a caste system of sorts with little room for social mobility. He makes a good case for how this is facilitated by a deeply entrenched and prevalent narrative:

“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. And so, the schools, the churches, the popular literature taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary luck.” (262)

Taking a step back, it must be noted that the vast majority of published history adheres to a distinctly American form of story-telling that upholds rugged individualism and prioritizes the roles of esteemed individuals. Do you have a favorite president? Well, Zinn is going to do his darndest to kick out the pedestal upon which you view that guy. In this volume, no leader that upholds any system of inequality is free of criticism, which sometimes results in flippant quips such as this hot take on FDR in WWII:

“Roosevelt was as much concerned to end the oppression of Jews as Lincoln was to end slavery during the Civil War; their priority was policy (whatever their personal compassion for victims of persecution) was not minority rights, but national power.” (410)

It is important to contextualize that during World War II, FDR signed Executive Order 9066 which resulted in the unjust internment of Japanese Americans. Nearly a century earlier, Lincoln passed the Homestead Act to appease expansionists at the expense of Native American’s homes and lives. These are objectively bad things. Still, if pressed, I myself would be inclined to cite FDR and Lincoln as two of America’s most impactful presidents, but is important to remember the totality of a leader’s legacies, which are often more complex than an overly simplistic, feel-good narrative.

What Zinn most advocates for in this volume is that people must organize, not blindly follow a charismatic savior. ‘Be the (organized) change you want to see in the world’—or something to that effect. The socio-economic underpinnings that enables the preservation of power, affluence, and influence of the wealthiest elite can only be effectively challenged by the many, not the exceptional few.

“One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another: small property owners against the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and unskilled. These groups have resented one another and warred against one another with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country.” (632)

If you think that’s chilling, in 2019 the Washington Post has since reported that the top 10% now own more than 70% of the nation’s wealth, with the top 1% having more than the bottom 80% of the population combined. So if these statistics upset you, please vote if you do not already do so.

Howard Zinn did his part by creating this accessible, pop-history of sorts that could be easily digestible by the working class, and change the conversation. On that note, while he does properly cite and contextualize his historical quotes, sadly, to my personal chagrin, he does not include detailed footnotes. If I have any criticisms of this work, they mostly boil down to this irksome observation. But that said, even if history isn’t your jam, this book is still easy enough to understand and a good learning tool.

Overall, I would still definitely recommend this book as a well-argued resource (and/or effective paperweight). Rather than an end-all be-all source on the subject matter, however, I would consider it more as an excellent launch point for further study. By Zinn’s own (refreshing) admission in the Afterword, his conception of the working class is hindered by the constraints of his own lived experience. So if you are interested in reading more, I would also recommend:
-tA Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki
-tThe History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter
-tAn Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
-tThe Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
-tThe New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

If you have any other must-read suggestions please leave your recommendation in a comment! In the spirit of Howard Zinn, and plucky high school history teachers everywhere, let’s keep the conversation going. Or don’t, you know, you do you.

I read this for my American History course in college. Really enjoyed it!

4****

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.

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.

Λιγο μαρξιστικη η προσεγγιση αλλα σαφεστατα αρκετα διαφωτιστικο για τις απαρχες του αμερικανικου κοσμου.


update: Για να μην κουραζεστε, για ολα φταιει ο καπιταλισμος. Απλα το γραφει σε 758 σελιδες για να το εμπεδωσετε.

This is as awesome as I knew it would be. All history books drag in some places and this one is no exception because every part didn't interest me. On the whole, however, the information is amazing. He recounts about so many events in the history of the United States in which average people are cheated, abused, mistreated, arrested, and killed by agents of the government or if not the government itself, by others to whom the government turned a blind eye. This is not a book for those "patriots" who pretend that Americans live in a land of equal opportunity. This is the blood and guts rendition that depicts the daily, yearly, decades-and centuries-long struggles of the average person. Don't look for favored status of the rich white men here. This is the tale of the poor, the minority, the female, the marginalized parts of society who have to fight for every single thing and who still usually lose.

I highlighted so many things that were events in US history or comments on the status of some inequality or mistreatment of years ago. The sad thing is that many of those situations or events are so similar to ones today. As the saying goes, the more things change the more they stay the same.

I can't believe that I have finished this! It set on my bookshelf for so long that the spine actually completely faded (oh the sun). And yet I'm not sure how many facts from this will sick with me in the long run.

An essential book for your home library for mind expansion and reference. I have added a lot of notes to this book to guide you from chapter to chapter in case you have particular areas of interest that you do not want to miss. I have owned a copy of this book a long time and have never read it from Cover to cover. I finally got a copy of the audible version and that helped me get through the entire book. If you are having that same problem I urge you to go immediately to chapters 25 and 26. I would like to quote those chapters to you word by word. They are outstanding.

Some people criticize this book as ahistorical. I think what that means is that people think that it does not show history as they are used to hearing it. Zinn talks about that fact at the end of the book. He says the obvious. Historians pick and choose about what facts they include in their writing. This does not necessarily mean that the facts they leave out are untrue or misleading. Zinn titles this book as a People's history. He points out that often history goes through time moving from significant person to significant person. It is not surprising when you realize that a lot of those significant people are white males.

Zinn is refreshing to me in that he takes an anti-capitalist point of view without beating you over the head with it. Well, maybe he does do a little beating over the head in the last couple of chapters but in most of the book he talks about people's movements and times when the masses of people tried to take over their own lives rather than being lead.