You may not enjoy this book or agree with it and it definitely should not be the only history book you read, but it is crucial that you read this book at some point in your life. It's a slog, but so so rewarding and worthwhile to see history from this angle.

Zinn's book is nothing more than a one-sided, hit piece against western civilization and America. Rather than balance the story of America from the perspective of the evils present in all human culture and civilzation, Zinn presents a picture of the United States and western Europeans as the "root of all evil". This book is the most twisted, biased, manipulative propaganda screed I've ever laid eyes on outside of a communist party manual. Everything about America, in this book, is bad. The "evil white man" is the super-villain. The black, brown and red people are the heroes who live in some fantasy land of "noble savages" and perfect harmony with nature, until the evil white European comes along to rape, kill and enslave. There are far better books on the history of the United States and this worthless, leftist propaganda screed is not even worth your time let alone your money.

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

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

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

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

I think the publishers forgot a word on the cover of this book! If they had called it "A People's PARTY History of the United States" I would have at least known what I was getting into. That one word makes a big difference; one version, the People's History, sounds like a history written in an effort to humanize our history and to include those not typically afforded space in a history text. If it were rightly called A People's Party History, I would have known it for what it was: a history of Socialist and Labor movements in the US in a book focused on talking about class warfare.

Don't get me wrong, I like rebellion and screwing authority more than most people I know. But I thought from reading the back of the book that this would be a history focused on blacks, latinos, women, and other minority groups in the US. He tries to pay lip service to this, but its not what he cares about. Just as one example among hundreds and hundreds: there is a single sentence, wedged in between a history of the Wobblies and a discussion of the constitutionality of Section 7 of the National Industrial Recovery Act (abhorred by labor unions) that reads, "Women, after a long and difficult battle won the right to vote." One sentence? On a constitutional amendment that gave suffrage to 50% of the US population?

He has my attention when he is talking about the paternalism inherent in some of the Civil Rights language, but he loses it completely when he unreflectively refers to motherhood a "prison" or all business owners as "monsters".

Not worth your time.

This book is a farce. While I think some of chapters on early American history have value, the closer the book gets to your lifetime the more you scratch your head and ask WTF. Reading Mr. Zinn's version of American history would lead you to believe that the United States of America is the most cruel, inhuman, and evil place on the planet. It has been so long since I had this one forced down my throat in high school, but what I recall most vividly was discussing the chapters on Vietnam in class. Mr. Zinn heaps praise on Ho Chi Minh as a benevolent leader who can do no wrong leading the righteous North. Now, a classmate of mine whose family just so happened to have fled Vietnam because the North Vietnamese had slaughtered a large number of his family became irate to the point he left class and would no longer read the book. Needless to say, Mr. Zinn's People's History is a selective work of history in which the author discounts any and all counter arguments which disprove his unabashedly Marxist view of the world.

Audiobook narrated by Matt Damon. Nuff said.

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

"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.

People who don't approve of Zinn's equal opportunity perspective of history love to call him an America hater. I'm sure that George W. Bush would say that he's an enemy of freedom. But the thing that I love so much about Zinn and this book is his consistent ability to portray the United States (as defined by its history) as so much more than a static, monolitichly motivated country. Traditional approaches to history tell a student that our country was founded by white Christian men with lots of money and connections and that since then everything of value that has gone on here was contributed by those men. It tells us that you must be one of those men to be significant, to be a worthwhile citizen of the United States. Zinn and his colleagues of other inclusive historians fight against exactly that idea. They write about women, Native Americans, labor activists, homosexuals...all these groups of people who have long been considered insignificant in the forming of our more perfect union. Zinn isn't an America hater, he's a man who wants to tell its true story, one that fleshes out the beauty and mistakes of our national past, portraying a much more dynamic country than traditional history allows.

Written in the 70's, this book admitedly now lacks some of the radical quality it possessed when it was published. Still, it's in that list of books that truly changed out country and the way Americans think and I love it for that.

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

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

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

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

The Part Where I Talk About the Book:

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

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

The Part Where I Talk About Other Stuff:

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




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

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

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

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

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

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.

not me channeling timothee chalamet's worst character and looking great doing it