“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 People’s History of the United States is a meticulously researched revolutionary document that departs from the endorsed, sanitized and sanctioned version of American history that lionizes conquering figures like Christopher Columbus, our elected presidents, and other (largely) white male leaders who are (in fact) the champions of the rich and powerful at the expense and peril of everyone else. Here you will find the stories of the colonized, the displaced, the lied to, the swindled, the exploited and victimized. But more than that, you will find these same everyday resilient Americans resisting, and coming together to demand their rights and take back their power.

This book is so threatening to the corporate establishment there have been numerous efforts to ban it and keep it out of schools. One of those efforts is occurring as I’m writing this: State of Arkansas 91st General Assembly Regular Session, 2017 HOUSE BILL 1834 by: Representative K. Hendren:
“An act to prohibit a public school district of open enrollment public charter school from including in its curriculum or course materials for a program of study books or any other material authored or concerning Howard Zinn; and for other purposes.”

I believe A People’s History of the United States should be required reading for every American.

Update: I took this out of the library to attempt a reread...no changes, wanted to be fair. Still don't care for it. As noted, no changes.


Oh my goodness aren't we brave to tell (re-tell) American history this way? "You've been lied to and only I have the strength of character to tell you about it"

Yeah, yeah, yeah I've heard it all before. In C.S. Lewis' Great Divorce there's a high churchman of the Church of England who's going on about how brave he was to take a secular stand and renouncing "traditional" beliefs. The "person" he's talking to (who was with him at that time) calls him on it and says you were never in danger of being renounced. You were in the main stream and only pretending (or possibly fooling yourself to put the best face on it) to go against the main stream. That's what we've got here, Since the 70s it's been "fashionable" to try and "debunk" American values and heroes. This one goes right down the line from going for the worst take possible on Columbus to attacking the motives of everyone involved in the American Revolution.

You want to read this, fine. But let me suggest some balance, bias is bias no matter which side it comes from or comes down on.

I won't debate (for example) Christopher Columbus' motives here...just realize he like everyone else was a product of his times and if you read his own writings you'll find "slavery and genocide" were the farthest things from his mind.

European "industrial" culture met a hunter gatherer culture and we got the predictable result. Does anyone really think that maybe fencing off the "New World" and making it a sort of preserve for tribal culture would ever have happened? Yes there were tragedies (I am not taking them lightly, all human history is rife with tragedy) but the continual self flagellation and the "let's all hate America and feel guilty about history-ism" has gotten silly. If we can't look at it for what it is and was and then move on we'll destroy ourselves.


*******

I'm adding these review segments from other sources simply to bolster the point that what I say/said here is far from some simply biased conservative opinion (though I am generally speaking conservative). I would suggest that those who read this review and have the reaction that is common for many on the left first read the 7 pages (update 7/10/2022, now there are 10 pages) of arguments (attacks) that are already here. Answering that same comments over and over is getting silly.

We as a people (America) are losing (giving up) the ability to think for ourselves. Many are far more likely to try and shout down any opposing thoughts rather than think about them. We are at a place where communication has almost ceased. If we don't get back to the "loyal opposition" and the ability to disagree logically and civilly we will soon reach a point of no return.

So please just think and consider what you believe.:

Judging by the History News Network’s online vote conducted in 2012, many American historians loathe Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. More than 600 historians who participated in this vote pronounced Zinn’s radical history the second “least credible history book in print.” Comments by participants in the HNN vote suggest that this negative verdict on A People’s History had an ideological dimension. Zinn’s “viewing American history through a Marxist lens is a painful exercise in tortured reasoning” complained one online critic, while another denounced A People’s History as “absolutely atrocious agit-prop.

******
Stanford Education Professor Sam Wineburg.:

"Wineburg, one of the world's top researchers in the field of history education, raises larger issues about how history should be taught. He says that Zinn's desire to cast a light on what he saw as historic injustice was a crusade built on secondary sources of questionable provenance, omission of exculpatory evidence, leading questions and shaky connections between evidence and conclusions.
Indeed, says Wineburg, while Zinn pulled his anecdotes from a secondary source, Lawrence Wittner's 1969 book Rebels Against War, Zinn ignored evidence in that same book that undermines his claim. Among the examples Zinn overlooks is Wittner's point that 24 percent of the registrants eligible for the war were African American, while the percentage of draft-evasion cases involving blacks was only 4.4 percent of the total pursued by the Justice Department. And a similar trend held with conscientious objectors. "Surprisingly few black men became C.O.s," Wittner adds.

Similarly, Zinn roots his argument that the Japanese were prepared to surrender before the United States dropped the atomic bomb on a diplomatic cable from the Japanese to the Russians, supposedly signaling a willingness to capitulate. Wineburg writes that Zinn not only excludes the responses to the cable, but also that he fails in the later editions of the book to incorporate the vast new scholarship that emerged after the death of the Emperor Hirohito with the publication of memoirs and new availability of public records, all of which support the position of Japan's resolve to fight to the last."

*******************
KIRKUS REVIEW
"For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian--Zinn posits--has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do--only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains."

***************

A well written, but severely flawed historical work.
It reads more like sociology than history, with Zinn's concern for social groups and people's movements. Now, at a certain point, those areas with overlap, but for the most part he seems less concerned with getting to a historical truth than preaching a message. At that point, one has to wonder how he deals with contradictory evidence and conflicting opinions. Does he grapple with them and try to sift through all the available evidence? Or does he dismiss them as constraints brought on by more traditional/biased/capitalist thinking?
The most irksome thing about this work, however, is its over-reliance on secondary works. Normally, when a person wishes to "rewrite the history" of a nation/group/period, they go to primary sources from the time (letters, diaries, newspapers, etc). However, in the bibliography, very few original primary sources can be found. Instead what one finds is a list of books Zinn used to bolster his beliefs about American history. Indeed, since this book takes secondary works and synthesizes the information, Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" is a tertiary book of history, and not a very good one, at that.

A rare book, In the world where majority of the Historical books are written from the viewpoint of victors, in a world who admires conquerors more than the vanquished, in a world where traditional narratives have come from the ruling elites, in a world where Oppressor are seen as a deservingly dominant race, in a world which cherishes and rejoice the injustice, and out of this very world comes a historian, a writer, named Howard Zinn, who turns history on its head, in this book, The People's History of United states, a history written purely from the viewpoint of oppressed people, this book doesn't perceive Columbus as a conqueror, but instead it tells us about the mass suffering, murders, injustice, humiliation, that the indigenous peoples, the Indians, have had to gone through after Columbus landed in the Americas.

This book covers the 5 hundred years of American History, from 1492, the day Columbus landed in America to the Bush, and Clinton Presidency. This book debunks the myth of enlightened American empire.

The history is from the viewpoints of ordinary People, the poor people, the people who are often denied their rights, the people who have no authority, the peoples who are subjugated, the oppressed people, the people who don't have any voices, the people who are demonized, be it slaves, workers, women, Native or Indigenous People.

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.

I had wanted to read this for quite a while and I was finally able to borrow it from the library only to realize its 700+ pages. I felt really anxious about finishing it before I had to return it so I spent the past few days reading and not doing any of my work. I need to come up with a plausible lie to tell my boss tomorrow about what I've been working on. I also still have 15 days left before I have to return the book so I kind of feel dumb now.

At this point I've heard most of what's covered in this book before. I think if it had been my first time reading about these things I would've been moved more deeply and I would be one of those people who tells others how great this book is and how they have to read it.

I personally think it's important for us to contend with the history of this country, to even allow ourselves to feel angry or bad about the things that have happened while also not feeling like it's some sort of attack on us personally. I think it's also okay to just acknowledge that our government does a lot of shitty things that we may sometimes benefit from and that we can be somewhat culpable for. I also am not that sensitive to being critiqued or told I'm a piece of shit so maybe that's why I think its an overreaction when people get so viscerally angry at books like this for painting the country in a bad light. It's also kind of weird in my opinion to tie your identity so closely to your country but to each his own.

Anyways I enjoyed the book, probably because it has politics similar to mine.

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 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.
tt
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.
tt
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.
tt
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?
tt
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).
tt
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.
tt
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.
tt
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.
tt
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.
tt
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.
tt
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.
tt
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.”
tt
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.

The People's History of the United States was first published in 1980 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. It has gone through a few expansion editions until Zinn's death in 2010. It was intended as a counter balance to the typical glossy American history told from the perspective of our heroes and accomplishments. It is the sins of omission that Zinn addresses in giving voice to the common man. Instead of our traditional narrative, he explores the colonial conquest and expansion from the view of the Hispaniolas and Native Americans, the legal manipulations of those in poverty, rampant racism and the battle for civil rights, the intense and prolonged struggle for rights of the laboring class, the suffragette movement, imperialist meddling in other countries' politics for economic reasons, antiwar movements, and other resistance squelched by the government or kept quiet in the media. The impetus behind so much of our legislation as well as domestic and foreign policy from our earliest history to the present has really been what supports government controls, the agenda of the wealthy and economic interests at the expense of 99% of the population, and not just our own citizenry but globally. Zinn stated that he would like to be remembered "for introducing a different way of thinking about the world, about war, about human rights, about equality," Zinn makes no apologies for his liberal, rebellious leanings and he is no less patriotic for it. I am close enough in age that I am not surprised by his view points and attribute much to being of that generation. It took me a while to work through this book, not because it was difficult but because of my habit of further research. I found this read both distressing and prophetic to our current political situation. Highly recommended.

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/...

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.