Howard Zinn (1922–2010)
Author of A People's History of the United States
About the Author
A committed radical historian and activist, Howard Zinn approaches the study of the past from the point of view of those whom he feels have been exploited by the powerful. Zinn was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1922. After working in local shipyards during his teens, he joined the U.S. Army Air show more Force, where he saw combat as a bombardier in World War II. He received a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 1958 and was a postdoctoral fellow in East Asian studies at Harvard University. While teaching at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, Zinn joined the civil rights movement and wrote The Southern Mystique (1964) and SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964). He also became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, writing Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal (1967) and visiting Hanoi to receive the first American prisoners released by the North Vietnamese. Zinn's best-known and most-praised work, as well as his most controversial, is A People's History of the United States (1980). It explores American history under the thesis that most historians have favored those in power, leaving another story untold. Zinn discusses such topics as Native American views of Columbus and the socialist and anarchist opposition to World War I in examining his theory that historical change is most often due to "mass movements of ordinary people." Zinn's other books include You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times (1995) and Artists in Times of War (2004). He has also written the plays Emma (1976), Daughter of Venus (1985), and Marx in Soho (1999). (Bowker Author Biography) Howard Zinn grew up in the immigrant slums of Brooklyn, where he worked in shipyards in his late teens. He saw combat duty as an air force bombardier in World War II, and afterward received his doctorate in history from Columbia University. His first book, "La Guardia in Congress", was an Albert Beveridge Prize winner. In 1956, he moved with his wife and children to Atlanta to become chairman of the history department of Spelman College. He has since written and edited many more books, including A People's History of the United States, SNCC: The New Abolitionist; Disobedience and Democracy; The Politics of History; The Pentagon Papers: Critical Essays; You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times; and The Zinn Reader (Seven Stories Press, 1997). Zinn is also the author of three plays, Emma, Daughter of Venus, and Marx in Soho. Among the many honors Zinn has received is the 1998 Lannan Literary Award for nonfiction. A professor emeritus of political science at Boston University, he lives with his wife, Roslyn, in the Boston area, near their children and grandchildren. (Publisher Provided) show less
Works by Howard Zinn
You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times (1994) 806 copies, 22 reviews
A Young People's History of the United States (For Young People Series) (2007) 539 copies, 6 reviews
A People's History of the United States: Highlights from the Twentieth Century (1999) 356 copies, 5 reviews
A Young People's History of the United States, Volume 1: Columbus to the Spanish-American War (2009) 206 copies, 4 reviews
A Young People's History of the United States, Volume 2: Class Struggle to the War on Terror (2007) 141 copies, 2 reviews
A Young People's History of the United States: Columbus to the War on Terror (For Young People Series) 132 copies, 1 review
Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor's Last Century (2001) 102 copies, 1 review
A People's History of the United States: Abridged Teaching Edition (New Press People's History) (2003) 82 copies
A People's History of the United States, Vol. 2: The Civil War to the Present, Teaching Edition (2003) 37 copies
Three Plays: The Political Theater of Howard Zinn: Emma, Marx in Soho, Daughter of Venus (2010) 32 copies
A People's History of the United States, Vol. 1: American Beginnings to Reconstruction, Teaching Edition (2003) 30 copies
Heroes and Martyrs: Emma Goldman, Sacco & Vanzetti, and the Revolutionary Struggle (2001) 9 copies, 1 review
Eine Geschichte des amerikanischen Volkes. Band 1: Kolonialismus, Rassismus und die Macht des Geldes (2006) 2 copies
The Conspiracy of Law 1 copy
Associated Works
Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies (2002) — Contributor — 1,026 copies, 6 reviews
A People's History of American Empire: A Graphic Adaptation (2008) — Contributor — 791 copies, 24 reviews
You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes, and Cultural Myths (2001) — Contributor, some editions — 739 copies, 4 reviews
Bridging the Class Divide: And Other Lessons for Grassroots Organizing (1997) — Foreword, some editions — 113 copies, 1 review
War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writing (2016) — Contributor — 110 copies, 2 reviews
Life of an Anarchist: The Alexander Berkman Reader (1992) — Introduction, some editions — 104 copies
Take My Advice: Letters to the Next Generation from People Who Know a Thing or Two (2002) — Contributor — 50 copies
Democracy in Print: The best of the Progressive Magazine, 1909-2009 (2009) — Contributor — 14 copies
Transforming Teacher Unions : Fighting for Better Schools and Social Justice (1999) — Contributor — 12 copies
Three American Radicals: John Swinton, Charles P. Steinmetz, and William Dean Howells (1991) — Foreword — 6 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Zinn, Howard
- Legal name
- Zinn, Howard
- Birthdate
- 1922-08-24
- Date of death
- 2010-01-27
- Gender
- male
- Education
- New York University (BA|1951)
Columbia University (MA|1952|PhD|1958) - Occupations
- historian
university professor
political activist - Organizations
- Spelman College
Boston University
U.S. Army Air Corps - Awards and honors
- Thomas Merton Award
Eugene V. Debs Award
Lannan Literary Award (Nonfiction, 1998)
Upton Sinclair Award (1999)
Haven's Center Award for Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship (2006) - Relationships
- Zinn, Jeff (son)
- Short biography
- Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010) was an American historian, playwright, and socialist thinker. He was chair of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, and a political science professor at Boston University. Zinn wrote over 20 books, including his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States. In 2007, he published a version of it for younger readers, A Young People's History of the United States.
Zinn described himself as "something of an anarchist, something of a socialist. Maybe a democratic socialist." He wrote extensively about the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement and labor history of the United States. His memoir, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Beacon Press, 2002), was also the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn's life and work. Zinn died of a heart attack in 2010, at age 87. - Cause of death
- heart attack
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Brooklyn, New York, New York, USA
- Places of residence
- Newton, Massachusetts, USA
Auburndale, Massachusetts, USA - Place of death
- Santa Monica, California, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Discussions
Bill introduced to ban Howard Zinn books from Arkansas schools in Pro and Con (March 2017)
Howard Zinn RIP in Radical History (September 2011)
Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87 in Pro and Con (February 2010)
Chomsky and Zinn -- a survey in Pro and Con (November 2007)
Reviews
This tells U.S. history from the perspective of the "people," looking not at the doings of elites directly, but the way that people were exploited, and the way that they fought back. Zinn is particularly interested in labor and class, I would say, but also explores exploitation and resistance on the basis of race and gender.
The book starts with the coming of Columbus, and that's where Zinn sets out his stall, showing in unflinching detail the kind of thing many previous histories elide. His show more Columbus is no hero, but a ruthless purveyor of genocide. In a sense, Zinn is a victim of his own success; though I definitely learned the traditional pro-Columbus version of this story as a child in the early 1990s, it is much less commonly taught these days, and I suspect many readers will already be familiar with the "true" version he tells here. Still, I found there were a lot of details here, and story succinctly but effectively told. We then get the British colonization of the Americas told in the same style, with a focus on how the upper classes built their wealth by exploiting black slaves, brutally exterminating natives, and imposing harsh conditions on lower-class whites, and also setting up a matrix of race relations and laws that would ensure these exploited groups would never unite. From there, Zinn works his way forward, telling the story of the American Revolution, the early days of the U.S., the Indian genocide, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Great Depression, the World Wars, and so on.
I was familiar with the broad strokes of what was listed here, but found it effectively done. Zinn's basic thesis is that the U.S. has never really been what it claims to be, but a system designed to accumulate wealth for the governing classes, who provide just enough freedom and accommodation to head off rebellion, but never enough to carry out meaningful change. I did not know much about all the rebellions he chronicles here in particular, and I appreciated the meticulous detail on the brutal violence. I think it's easy to imagine that what seems like the increasing brutality of our past decade is an aberration, but it's not—it's just making visible something that has always been present in U.S. society.
Once you get to the 1960s or so, the book takes a bit of a turn. It gets more interested in the very specific actions of politicians. I think this is at least partially because we reach Zinn's own lifetime, and thus what he sees as significant is shaped by what he lived through. But I would say the second half of the book has a different project than the first. While the thesis of the first half of the book is "you were misled about American history, it was never about equality," the thesis of the latter parts of the book seem to be a critique of the Democratic Party, for being no different than the Republicans in any meaningful way despite its claims and aspirations. This I found less interesting to be honest, and more time dependent; a long chronicle of grievances against Bill Clinton was probably a lot more salient in 2003 than it is in 2025. In particular, the last two chapters are very clearly stuck on, as the book was quite obviously designed to end with chapter 23, "The Coming Revolt of the Guards." The other thing I found a little bit of a struggle in the last section, is Zinn often has this vibe of "and now the people are going to finally rise up"... but they never do. His chronicle of antiwar stuff in 2001 and '02 seems pretty naïve in retrospect; it wasn't the vanguard of anything meaningful.
That said, I was struck by how powerful the cultural movements of the 1960s and '70s seemed, and it made me wonder why the anti-Trump movement seems so anemic in comparison given the existential threat he poses. Why can't we muster anything better than social media posts? Where are the work stoppages?
The flaw of the book is that there's a circle he doesn't quite square, which is that though he sometimes argues that the government fails to give the people what it wants (e.g., universal healthcare during the Clinton administration), there are other times the people very much do get what they want, it's just that what the people want isn't what Zinn's "the people" want. People want crime to be cracked down on, immigration to be restricted, welfare to be cut. If the people want this better world, why do they continually act as though they do not? Part of it is how the issues are framed by the "Establishment" (this is a term Zinn increasingly uses in the latter part of the book that I very much hated), but are we just saying that the people are saps who don't know what's good for them? If so, why? This gap between what the people supposedly want and what the people act as though they want isn't adequately explored, I would argue.
My copy's text comes from 2003, but it has an interview with Zinn in the back that I think comes from 2005. Zinn died in 2010; I'd be curious to know what he thought of Obama, though I suspect he'd be pretty scathing. In chapter 23, he writes this:
The book starts with the coming of Columbus, and that's where Zinn sets out his stall, showing in unflinching detail the kind of thing many previous histories elide. His show more Columbus is no hero, but a ruthless purveyor of genocide. In a sense, Zinn is a victim of his own success; though I definitely learned the traditional pro-Columbus version of this story as a child in the early 1990s, it is much less commonly taught these days, and I suspect many readers will already be familiar with the "true" version he tells here. Still, I found there were a lot of details here, and story succinctly but effectively told. We then get the British colonization of the Americas told in the same style, with a focus on how the upper classes built their wealth by exploiting black slaves, brutally exterminating natives, and imposing harsh conditions on lower-class whites, and also setting up a matrix of race relations and laws that would ensure these exploited groups would never unite. From there, Zinn works his way forward, telling the story of the American Revolution, the early days of the U.S., the Indian genocide, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Great Depression, the World Wars, and so on.
I was familiar with the broad strokes of what was listed here, but found it effectively done. Zinn's basic thesis is that the U.S. has never really been what it claims to be, but a system designed to accumulate wealth for the governing classes, who provide just enough freedom and accommodation to head off rebellion, but never enough to carry out meaningful change. I did not know much about all the rebellions he chronicles here in particular, and I appreciated the meticulous detail on the brutal violence. I think it's easy to imagine that what seems like the increasing brutality of our past decade is an aberration, but it's not—it's just making visible something that has always been present in U.S. society.
Once you get to the 1960s or so, the book takes a bit of a turn. It gets more interested in the very specific actions of politicians. I think this is at least partially because we reach Zinn's own lifetime, and thus what he sees as significant is shaped by what he lived through. But I would say the second half of the book has a different project than the first. While the thesis of the first half of the book is "you were misled about American history, it was never about equality," the thesis of the latter parts of the book seem to be a critique of the Democratic Party, for being no different than the Republicans in any meaningful way despite its claims and aspirations. This I found less interesting to be honest, and more time dependent; a long chronicle of grievances against Bill Clinton was probably a lot more salient in 2003 than it is in 2025. In particular, the last two chapters are very clearly stuck on, as the book was quite obviously designed to end with chapter 23, "The Coming Revolt of the Guards." The other thing I found a little bit of a struggle in the last section, is Zinn often has this vibe of "and now the people are going to finally rise up"... but they never do. His chronicle of antiwar stuff in 2001 and '02 seems pretty naïve in retrospect; it wasn't the vanguard of anything meaningful.
That said, I was struck by how powerful the cultural movements of the 1960s and '70s seemed, and it made me wonder why the anti-Trump movement seems so anemic in comparison given the existential threat he poses. Why can't we muster anything better than social media posts? Where are the work stoppages?
The flaw of the book is that there's a circle he doesn't quite square, which is that though he sometimes argues that the government fails to give the people what it wants (e.g., universal healthcare during the Clinton administration), there are other times the people very much do get what they want, it's just that what the people want isn't what Zinn's "the people" want. People want crime to be cracked down on, immigration to be restricted, welfare to be cut. If the people want this better world, why do they continually act as though they do not? Part of it is how the issues are framed by the "Establishment" (this is a term Zinn increasingly uses in the latter part of the book that I very much hated), but are we just saying that the people are saps who don't know what's good for them? If so, why? This gap between what the people supposedly want and what the people act as though they want isn't adequately explored, I would argue.
My copy's text comes from 2003, but it has an interview with Zinn in the back that I think comes from 2005. Zinn died in 2010; I'd be curious to know what he thought of Obama, though I suspect he'd be pretty scathing. In chapter 23, he writes this:
We have known for some time that the poor and ignored were the nonvoters, alienated from a political system they felt didn't care about them, and about which they could do little. Now alienation has spread upward into families above the poverty line. These are white workers, neither rich nor poor, but angry over economic insecurity, unhappy with their work, worried about their neighborhoods, hostile to government—combining elements of racism with class consciousness, contempt for the lower classes along with distrust of the elite, and thus open to solutions from any direction, right or left. (636)He then points out that similar circumstances existed in the 1920s, which were mobilized into the KKK at first, but later into unions. Unfortunately, reading this in 2025, you can see how here he was right in the worst possible way, as these are the exact groups that have given Donald Trump and the MAGA movement its power base, which is steadily rolling back what little good work has been done by the U.S. government. Obama and his successors in the Democratic Party failed to respond to very real issues, and now the U.S. is paying for it. show less
A Rorschach test, indeed. What do you think about Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States? What do you assume about anyone who would read it?
Many have attempted to ban it. Many think of it as “anti-American.”
Zinn is as “anti-American” as the Preacher in Ecclesiastes is depressing and anti-life. Sure, if you’ve bought into certain narratives, and cannot countenance bursting those particular bubbles, that’s a conclusion to draw.
And, indeed, the standard story of show more what you were taught in school is highly criticized in this book. The author starts with an unflinching look at exactly what Columbus and his ilk did to the Indigenous people of America. Throughout is a story of well-heeled class interests preserving themselves at the expense of everyone else, and only as much ground given as necessary to keep the whole system from turning on itself. There’s nothing innocent about the United States portrayed in these pages. Its constant failure is on display for all to see.
Everyone who talks about Zinn will say he has his agenda. And he does; he’s very open about it. For that matter, every history has an agenda, because it is an attempt at creating a narrative on the basis of a series of facts, and what one decides to emphasize and what one correspondingly neglects betrays some kind of bias or angle.
If anything, the problem with this work is with Zinn’s naivete and blind spots: he is a Builder who really wants to lionize and consider special the culture of resistance in the 1960s, and he is willing to throw any other attempt at reform under the bus in so doing.
While Zinn confesses the failure of modern communist endeavors because of their priority on party over people, he maintains a Marxist conceit about “A People’s History,” as if the history of agitation and organization against moneyed interests and corporations is “the People’s History”. It would be better titled “The Resister’s History of the United States,” because that’s the tenor of the book.
There’s a lot of things in the history with which to grapple. You learn quite quickly how police today are far nicer to citizens and others than they were in the past. This does not mean police today are nice; it means what was done by police in action against citizens and others in the 19th and early 20th centuries were abominable. Zinn is probably not wrong in how he characterizes the Constitution as enshrining sufficient federal power to advance the interests of the wealthy and the merchants. He’s also probably not entirely wrong that whatever the government has given to assist labor or the less than advantaged is done with a view to maintaining societal stability: just enough is given so that the people don’t rise up in sufficient revolt to overthrow the system.
You’d thus think he would be hard on corporations and those who advanced their interests, and you would not be wrong. He is not a fan of Nixon or Reagan. But it would seem most of his invective comes against those in the Democratic party. He conflates Carter with Reagan and Bush as perpetuating a militaristic, pro-corporate administration. He has no love for Bill Clinton. These are all betrayers of the leftist cause.
Thus, this history is probably more offensive to moderate to centrist leftists than anyone on the right. For Zinn it has always been not enough and never for the right reasons. The diminishment of the efforts of Progressivism in the beginning of the 20th century is notable. Likewise his attempts at casting FDR and the New Deal down from the way it was exalted by many on the left.
This attempt at re-framing what was done in the 1900s and 1930s-40s would be more tolerable if similar skepticism was maintained about what happened from the 1960s onward. Yes, the forms of resistance he talked about are real enough, but none of them were as significant as he would like to imagine. He has a naive confidence in polling about what Americans say they want, trusting their general desires even though the moment said general desires get translated into substantive policy they lose support. People are more invested in the status quo than Zinn would care to imagine.
And the fruit of everything 1960s was not nearly as transformative as Zinn would postulate. The work as written clearly had an arc which was to end with 1992 and the 500th anniversary of Columbus, and discussions of Clinton and the early War on Terror were added later. Zinn died in 2010 and so there would be no real grappling with the 2008 economic crisis and its fallout, with the Obama phenomenon and then Trumpism. Zinn never delves into the “dark side” of populism, the Huey Longs or those like Trump who will emphasize populist themes even though all he does is to the advantage of those with wealth like himself. From the perspective of 2024 it’s hard to maintain the naive confidence that all the resisting Zinn talked about in the second half of the twentieth century really lead to as much transformation as he would have liked to see. And that which was accomplished he takes for granted or again sublimates under the premise that it was only granted to keep things from getting out of hand.
And thus, in the end, this history of the United States really does not give enough credit to many of the changes which have been made, nor to the aspirations of the nation, even recognizing how the reality has always fallen far short of those aspirations. Much of what is in this history are facts, things which actually happened, and they do need to be grappled with in terms of our legacy. The United States is not the force of good we would like to imagine it to be, but should that mean we should just give into the cynicism and not appeal to the better angels of our nature?
The ways Zinn worked to try to change things, apparently, did not work well enough for him or us. What he would like to imagine seems more remote than it was when he was writing. His methods thus did not get us to that imagined better place. Maybe there was more to the reform movements than he would like to give credit; maybe the post-war generation didn’t have all the answers the way they imagined they did. And as the Boomer generation has demonstrated, the only thing worse than idealism is frustrated idealism gone reactionary. show less
Many have attempted to ban it. Many think of it as “anti-American.”
Zinn is as “anti-American” as the Preacher in Ecclesiastes is depressing and anti-life. Sure, if you’ve bought into certain narratives, and cannot countenance bursting those particular bubbles, that’s a conclusion to draw.
And, indeed, the standard story of show more what you were taught in school is highly criticized in this book. The author starts with an unflinching look at exactly what Columbus and his ilk did to the Indigenous people of America. Throughout is a story of well-heeled class interests preserving themselves at the expense of everyone else, and only as much ground given as necessary to keep the whole system from turning on itself. There’s nothing innocent about the United States portrayed in these pages. Its constant failure is on display for all to see.
Everyone who talks about Zinn will say he has his agenda. And he does; he’s very open about it. For that matter, every history has an agenda, because it is an attempt at creating a narrative on the basis of a series of facts, and what one decides to emphasize and what one correspondingly neglects betrays some kind of bias or angle.
If anything, the problem with this work is with Zinn’s naivete and blind spots: he is a Builder who really wants to lionize and consider special the culture of resistance in the 1960s, and he is willing to throw any other attempt at reform under the bus in so doing.
While Zinn confesses the failure of modern communist endeavors because of their priority on party over people, he maintains a Marxist conceit about “A People’s History,” as if the history of agitation and organization against moneyed interests and corporations is “the People’s History”. It would be better titled “The Resister’s History of the United States,” because that’s the tenor of the book.
There’s a lot of things in the history with which to grapple. You learn quite quickly how police today are far nicer to citizens and others than they were in the past. This does not mean police today are nice; it means what was done by police in action against citizens and others in the 19th and early 20th centuries were abominable. Zinn is probably not wrong in how he characterizes the Constitution as enshrining sufficient federal power to advance the interests of the wealthy and the merchants. He’s also probably not entirely wrong that whatever the government has given to assist labor or the less than advantaged is done with a view to maintaining societal stability: just enough is given so that the people don’t rise up in sufficient revolt to overthrow the system.
You’d thus think he would be hard on corporations and those who advanced their interests, and you would not be wrong. He is not a fan of Nixon or Reagan. But it would seem most of his invective comes against those in the Democratic party. He conflates Carter with Reagan and Bush as perpetuating a militaristic, pro-corporate administration. He has no love for Bill Clinton. These are all betrayers of the leftist cause.
Thus, this history is probably more offensive to moderate to centrist leftists than anyone on the right. For Zinn it has always been not enough and never for the right reasons. The diminishment of the efforts of Progressivism in the beginning of the 20th century is notable. Likewise his attempts at casting FDR and the New Deal down from the way it was exalted by many on the left.
This attempt at re-framing what was done in the 1900s and 1930s-40s would be more tolerable if similar skepticism was maintained about what happened from the 1960s onward. Yes, the forms of resistance he talked about are real enough, but none of them were as significant as he would like to imagine. He has a naive confidence in polling about what Americans say they want, trusting their general desires even though the moment said general desires get translated into substantive policy they lose support. People are more invested in the status quo than Zinn would care to imagine.
And the fruit of everything 1960s was not nearly as transformative as Zinn would postulate. The work as written clearly had an arc which was to end with 1992 and the 500th anniversary of Columbus, and discussions of Clinton and the early War on Terror were added later. Zinn died in 2010 and so there would be no real grappling with the 2008 economic crisis and its fallout, with the Obama phenomenon and then Trumpism. Zinn never delves into the “dark side” of populism, the Huey Longs or those like Trump who will emphasize populist themes even though all he does is to the advantage of those with wealth like himself. From the perspective of 2024 it’s hard to maintain the naive confidence that all the resisting Zinn talked about in the second half of the twentieth century really lead to as much transformation as he would have liked to see. And that which was accomplished he takes for granted or again sublimates under the premise that it was only granted to keep things from getting out of hand.
And thus, in the end, this history of the United States really does not give enough credit to many of the changes which have been made, nor to the aspirations of the nation, even recognizing how the reality has always fallen far short of those aspirations. Much of what is in this history are facts, things which actually happened, and they do need to be grappled with in terms of our legacy. The United States is not the force of good we would like to imagine it to be, but should that mean we should just give into the cynicism and not appeal to the better angels of our nature?
The ways Zinn worked to try to change things, apparently, did not work well enough for him or us. What he would like to imagine seems more remote than it was when he was writing. His methods thus did not get us to that imagined better place. Maybe there was more to the reform movements than he would like to give credit; maybe the post-war generation didn’t have all the answers the way they imagined they did. And as the Boomer generation has demonstrated, the only thing worse than idealism is frustrated idealism gone reactionary. show less
History is about power, said Eugen Weber. This one is about the powerless majority, the humble members of society. The farmers, mechanics, laborers. The Native Americans dispossessed of their land. The slaves dispossessed of their liberty. The women and children, the rent payers, the downtrodden. This is the flip side of the elitist history you learned in school. It is not about kings or presidents, founding fathers or saviors or statesmen. It is "disrespectful of governments and respectful show more of people's movements of resistance." Always on the side of the people, it does not claim to be a "balanced" account of history. It IS the balance. It provides what is missing from other histories. A must read if you want a balanced understanding of American history.
This book is class conscious, not nation conscious. It discusses America's major wars, but only to challenge their legitimacy and to decry how they supplanted class issues with nation issues. This book is populist. It celebrates examples from American history of powerless groups that organized to protect themselves from the powerful. This book believes in the virtue of disobedience. It calls for and hopes for non-violent revolution in an America that is "a system in deep trouble." "Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes." Alienation is spreading upward.
A brilliant interpretation of American class struggle from the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the 1980s. show less
This book is class conscious, not nation conscious. It discusses America's major wars, but only to challenge their legitimacy and to decry how they supplanted class issues with nation issues. This book is populist. It celebrates examples from American history of powerless groups that organized to protect themselves from the powerful. This book believes in the virtue of disobedience. It calls for and hopes for non-violent revolution in an America that is "a system in deep trouble." "Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes." Alienation is spreading upward.
A brilliant interpretation of American class struggle from the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the 1980s. show less
What is it reading this book makes me so angry? It has something of being deceived by a friend. Growing up in Germany a highlight for us kids was the arrival of a CARE packet sent by a family-friend who had fled to the USA in the 30s („the uncle in America“). He lived in the land of milk and honey, the land one could only dream of where people celebrated Christmas in warmly glowing picture-postcard houses half buried in snow. Later Kennedy appeared as the hero in shining armour who was show more slain by dark forces (he is still widely regarded as such in Germany). Then the Vietnam war shattered this dream world and the US emerged as the deeply troubled and divided country it is. For a while Hollywood and the cowboy films perpetuate the myth of Good versus Evil and the Good always wins - enjoyed as the myth that it was it didn’t fool me or anybody around me. (A Manichaean world view taken by successive US governments persists: „Axis of Evil“; this coupled with a missionary self-perception promoted by big business.) This is just fiction of course, to deceive the gullible, reality is not that simple. Decent young men carry out commands to shoot women and children in Vietnam, hard-working men - many no doubt deeply caring for their families - produce bombs that kill indiscriminately in far-away countries … The US: is it then the country of the free that proclaims “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”? At times and for some, yes!, but more often a life of squalor and wretchedness awaits the wretched; their lives are overlooked, silenced, discarded as troublesome and unimportant. Zinn gives them a voice. He does not claim to write ‘objective’ history: ‘objective’ history writing does not exist, he says and he is right: „behind every fact presented is a judgement“. Zinn lifts the class interest hiding under the veil of ‘the national interest’. A few people decide on wars in which millions are killed and maimed in the name of ‘national interest’. Nationalist fervour is instilled in children - more so in the US than in European countries - so they become pliant tools in the hands of the few.
The US - the ‘land of the free’ - the country the nationalists are so proud of, how much of it’s true history is taught in schools? That the landing of Columbus initiated a genocide until the last Indians were herded into reservations to rot? That founding proclamation „all men are created equal“ really is meant to say: „All white men of property are created equal“, excluding all women, the poor, the dark-skinned? That the wealth of the new Nation was built on slave-labour? That freeing of slaves did not stop the racism (not even the election of the first black president)? That the country has always been governed, right from its founding, by a small clique of the wealthy and powerful, an oligarchy who try their utmost to hide behind the fiction of ‘democracy’? That the industrial-military interests made the US a global imperialist power, the only one with military bases all over the world? That there may never have been a day in the last hundred years when the US was not involved in a military conflict, overt or covert and - if possible - kept secret from its citizen not that successive UK governments - Tory or Labour - behave differently )? That under the legal principles established at the Nuremberg Trials, many of the US presidents - not just Bush - as well as their close collaborators should stand trial for ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ like Kissinger who - hight of irony - received the Nobel peace price (Harold Pinter, in his award lecture for the 2005 Nobel literature price made good for this error of judgement https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture... )?
Zinn wanted to write this book, he says, „to awaken a greater consciousness of class conflict, racial injustice, sexual inequality, and national arrogance“, the accumulation of wealth and political power in the hands of a few, „the poisoning of the press and the entire culture by money.“ But Zinn does not give up hope: he writes about the bravery in the fight against injustice, ‘revulsion against the endless wars’, women who ‘will no longer tolerate abuse and subordination, protest against police brutality, directed especially at people of colour’, …
The book closes with the Clinton presidency. Obama, elected with so much hope for a fundamental change, disappointed - not always for lack of trying (e.g. failure to close Guantánamo and failure to provide universal health care for everybody). But Obama widened the Afghan war, multiplied the DRONE warfare; on the positive side rapprochement with Iran and Cuba. Zinn gives his view of the Obama presidency in an interview (9 Oct. 2009) available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cDFmMDKhww
Indispensable reading for anybody interested in the US - and who can afford to shut their eyes and stick their head into the sand? (III-18) show less
The US - the ‘land of the free’ - the country the nationalists are so proud of, how much of it’s true history is taught in schools? That the landing of Columbus initiated a genocide until the last Indians were herded into reservations to rot? That founding proclamation „all men are created equal“ really is meant to say: „All white men of property are created equal“, excluding all women, the poor, the dark-skinned? That the wealth of the new Nation was built on slave-labour? That freeing of slaves did not stop the racism (not even the election of the first black president)? That the country has always been governed, right from its founding, by a small clique of the wealthy and powerful, an oligarchy who try their utmost to hide behind the fiction of ‘democracy’? That the industrial-military interests made the US a global imperialist power, the only one with military bases all over the world? That there may never have been a day in the last hundred years when the US was not involved in a military conflict, overt or covert and - if possible - kept secret from its citizen not that successive UK governments - Tory or Labour - behave differently )? That under the legal principles established at the Nuremberg Trials, many of the US presidents - not just Bush - as well as their close collaborators should stand trial for ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ like Kissinger who - hight of irony - received the Nobel peace price (Harold Pinter, in his award lecture for the 2005 Nobel literature price made good for this error of judgement https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture... )?
Zinn wanted to write this book, he says, „to awaken a greater consciousness of class conflict, racial injustice, sexual inequality, and national arrogance“, the accumulation of wealth and political power in the hands of a few, „the poisoning of the press and the entire culture by money.“ But Zinn does not give up hope: he writes about the bravery in the fight against injustice, ‘revulsion against the endless wars’, women who ‘will no longer tolerate abuse and subordination, protest against police brutality, directed especially at people of colour’, …
The book closes with the Clinton presidency. Obama, elected with so much hope for a fundamental change, disappointed - not always for lack of trying (e.g. failure to close Guantánamo and failure to provide universal health care for everybody). But Obama widened the Afghan war, multiplied the DRONE warfare; on the positive side rapprochement with Iran and Cuba. Zinn gives his view of the Obama presidency in an interview (9 Oct. 2009) available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cDFmMDKhww
Indispensable reading for anybody interested in the US - and who can afford to shut their eyes and stick their head into the sand? (III-18) show less
Lists
My List (1)
Unread books (1)
Beacon Press (1)
Favourite Books (1)
Titoli bestiali (1)
1980 great books (1)
el (2)
South End Press (2)
Read (2)
ISBN (1)
2025 (1)
United States (1)
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 83
- Also by
- 23
- Members
- 26,119
- Popularity
- #799
- Rating
- 4.1
- Reviews
- 280
- ISBNs
- 319
- Languages
- 14
- Favorited
- 101
