
WHY READ IT?
For me, it’s because it was sitting on my shelf for years, and I was tired of not knowing what to think of it. A People’s History of the United States is a behemoth. I mean that both because of its physical size and due to its impact on the teaching of history and our culture at large. People speak of it as either a harbinger of America’s destruction, or as the lens through which they clearly saw America for the first time. That’s the kind of book I’m eager to grapple with. It has bite.
I read it as my first book in 2021, still staying indoors due to COVID and eagerly awaiting a vaccine. In terms of my reading, this was the perfect way to kick off a year where I traveled down new roads and burned old bridges down. I’d read up on the reputation of the book beforehand. I knew its angle was to highlight the history of the poor, workers, women, blacks, indigenous and colonized people. It’s an inversion of the American drama we usually get, starring great, principled and successful white men.
To quote Matt Damon when he played Will Hunting, “read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. That book will fucking knock you on your ass.”
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Textbooks taught us that history is about explorers and settlers, businessmen and presidents. And they’ll show up in Zinn’s work, but they’re not the focus and in almost every instance, they’re not the heroes either. A People’s History of the United States synthesizes a generation of scholarship in the 1960s and 70s that turned away from the great man theory of history. Instead, it started investigating the stories of those who didn’t get star billing. In that one sense, a lot of what’s written here isn’t that radical, because other people were doing it at the time Zinn wrote it. But with this book, he crafted a cohesive narrative about America’s underdogs and oppressed. He wrote it with such passion, skill and readability that it has captivated people for decades and hasn’t diminished.
For Zinn, the wheel of American history turns on the struggle between elites and the lowly, the wealthy and the oppressed. We’re not exceptional. For every unique idea America introduced or perfected, we introduced a horror to match it. Natives, enslaved peoples, women, immigrants and poor usually took the brunt of those horrors. Here, as anywhere else, the mighty and the meek struggle over who gets what, who controls power and decides what society produces.
This is Zinn’s reason for writing the book in a nutshell. Sure, it’s a history book, but what it is more than anything is a history anti-textbook. This is like in Star Trek’s warp engines, when matter and antimatter collide. They destroy each other. You get a burst of energy and a giant explosion that propels the ship forward at great speed. The conventional history books you read in school? That’s matter. Zinn? He’s antimatter – his book looks like history, it reads like history, it’s got substance and heart in most of the right places. But when it touches the history you’re familiar with, the result is annihilation.
The book begins, with Christopher Columbus stumbling upon the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean Sea in 1492. Zinn, however, examines the moment with an eye toward what the Taino natives on that island experienced. He mentions Columbus’s own writings where he described the Taino as generous and hospitable. Then Zinn describes how Columbus and his men took advantage of this hospitality to enslave the Taino. Europeans forced the natives to find any gold available on the island under threat of torture, dismemberment and death.
We got sanitized hints of this in school. Teachers delivered them in drips and drabs as our school boards thought we could handle more elements of the truth. Columbus was cruel to some of the natives, but if he hadn’t come, and boldly so, none of us would be here in the Americas to learn about it. This line of thinking implies we’re all better off because of Columbus and the colonizers. Or we acknowledge the slavery, rape and murder that Europeans used against the native population only passively. It happened, almost as if it couldn’t be helped. We treat it as the inevitable result of a cultural clash between a more “advanced” European power and a “backward” native American one.
But agency matters. We all have it. None of this was written in stone at the time it occurred, and I believe the best history books help us understand this. History, like any scheme of understanding life, is all about appreciating that our existence is defined by choices. We have roads to choose from. Yes, the ones that are available to us are often defined by our circumstances, including what we were born with and what we need to survive. But in the end, people make choices. Then historians compound these choices across the years, and color it with a narrative tied to what the author wishes to emphasize.
There’s tension between the realities of life and the moments where history could’ve turned differently. That’s what Zinn’s book makes so clear.
WHERE DOES A PEOPLE’S HISTORY TAKE US?
After first contact between Europe and Native America, Zinn leads us through the colonial era. Europeans and their enslaved African captives begin to flow into the now-US. Those Europeans remake it in their image while mostly pushing Native Americans back toward the wilderness. We see slavery begin. Then, only after slavery takes hold, we see the racist ideology that defines black and white begin to take shape. As Ibram Kendi said in his book Stamped from the Beginning, racist ideas developed after racist policies, and as justifications for them. This book centers slavery in its telling of our history – those who perpetrated as well as those who suffered from and resisted it. It’s also not afraid to see those who violently resisted slavery as justified in their actions. This is something that I remember high school classes being awfully ambivalent about (except, of course, for the Civil War itself).
As you might expect, Zinn takes a skewer to a lot of popular American myths about ourselves. For instance, he’s not afraid to call out the Founding Fathers as not just revolutionaries, but rich, slave-holding, property-holding revolutionaries. Many or most were determined to hold onto those slaves and that property (who’d have guessed)? They were motivated to protect their “possessions” and fight off potential rebellions. This goes against a lot of what conventional history emphasizes. America’s ideology of manifest destiny gets similar treatment. He describes the imperial acts we undertook in the American West, the relocation and destruction of native tribes, the wars in Mexico. American invasions in the Philippines, Central America also get covered here. Zinn dismisses the idea that American power has forthright, or noble in most of its actions. He doesn’t see this imperialism as a regrettable period or blip in our history. It’s a thread that starts at the beginning and has yet to taper off.
Zinn chronicles antiwar protestors, labor activists, union workers, civil rights demonstrators and other radicals. We get a picture of rebellion after rebellion that embodied what was well-intentioned about the American values we claim to uphold. We also learn about revolts that reject those values entirely but deserve a second look. These points of history held revolutionary potential for the country to go in a vastly different direction.
I will highlight some of these historical turning points, and the personalities that helped shape them, in future essays.
WHAT DOES HOWARD ZINN GET WRONG?
Not as much as many of his critics claim. Sure, there’s bias here – Howard Zinn himself declares his bias, and says he isn’t that bothered by it. It’s useful to counteract the bias that’s already present in conventional history from the other direction. You can find long lists of supposed factual errors on the Internet; some of them are legitimate. I won’t repeat most of their work here. As an example: while George Washington was definitely one of the richest presidents, it’s not at all clear that he was the richest man in America in his time. Zinn suggests he was.
However, most of this book was secondary in nature. That is to say, it relied on the primary research of other historians rather than doing much original scholarship of its own. In A People’s History of the United States, Zinn compiles a lot of hidden histories that had been getting revealed by his contemporaries in more scholarly texts. But Zinn was the first to put it all in one epic, cohesive, readable, poignant and dangerous volume. To date, it’s so popular that it’s become a standard text in itself, at least as a corrective to others.
I’d argue Zinn engages in too much sinister interpretation of the motives of elites. Of course he’s right when he says there were important corporate considerations behind America’s involvement in World War II with the allies. You gotta make the world safe for business, they’d probably tell you. Of course America acted to keep hold of its colonial possessions like the Philippines as much as it fought against fascism. But I don’t think it negates the value of the fight. World War II was an imperialist war, but it was also many other wars. It contained multitudes, just like many events do, and just like we do.
There’s plenty of class analysis here (capitalists vs. those they oppress). I think it’s valuable for Zinn to be viewing history in those terms. But it seems like sometimes he assumes too much class consciousness on the part of capitalists. Their actions do hurt the poor and marginalized, or benefit the rich more. But those elites can also sometimes believe the narrative they tell. They can believe they’re doing the right thing even as they worsen class divisions.
Class analysis should be considered and even prioritized, but Zinn makes it sound like it’s all a conscious game all the way through. I doubt Lincoln was thinking through a scheme to liberate slaves while also consciously keeping them in a less severe state of servitude to keep them from being a threat to the profits of moneyed interests. Zinn wants to convince you that the Civil War was waged to protect Northern business interests as much as to free slaves. Sometimes Zinn forgets that because there are class consequences to a historical event doesn’t mean that the actors had class motivations.
Some critics say A People’s History of the United States is too pessimistic about America. It treats everyday workers, poor and minorities as doomed to lose. It portrays them as hopelessly swindled or outgunned. I didn’t see it that way. Sure, they lost a lot of important fights, maybe more than they won. The original sins of these founding colonials, conquerors and slavers make me wonder if this experiment is redeemable at all. We remain built on that legacy. But there’s also so much courage, accomplishment, hope and rage among the oppressed in this book. I get emboldened by it, not discouraged. Those who fight for better? They’ve always been with us among the people we call “American”.
WHY DON’T THEY WANT YOU TO KNOW THIS?
Because once you read it, you might not stop there. A People’s History of the United States is a popular gateway drug on the American left. It’s easy to see why the book has that appeal. It’s convincing, effective, and has an awful lot of truth to it whether you’re willing to jump into the fight against capitalism or not.
Some of the facts are wrong, and some of it veers a touch too far toward pessimism for my tastes. But its heart seems sound, and much of Zinn’s general thesis of history has value to me. Its voice has been a necessary one for decades. If nothing else, its leftward pull helps wrench our jingoistic and whitewashed history back toward the center.
But most of all, it gives voice to people, movements and stories that are too easily ignored or subverted. And you won’t have heard enough of them to satisfy your need to learn more. This book isn’t just a journey – it’s the start of a larger one. However you take Zinn’s history, let him inspire you to read a lot more trained historians. That’s the book’s greatest value to me.
TIRED OF READING?
The People Speak – This film is basically famous people reading aloud the letters and documents that inspired A People’s History of the United States. Matt Damon, Sean Penn, Don Cheadle, Rosario Dawson, Kerry Washington, and Marisa Tomei show up to read. If you’ve read this far, you know whether or not that appeals to you. I haven’t seen it, but I know it’s shorter than the book and more attractive than a picture of Howard Zinn (or me, for that matter), so give it some consideration.
A People’s History of American Empire – It’s the graphic novel version of some of the most violent and compelling elements of A People’s History of the United States. It focuses on America’s imperialist efforts around the world, including in Iraq, Mexico, the Philippines, and more. It doesn’t shy away from labor battles, native massacres or street-level persecutions in America, either. If you’ve read it, let me know what you think.
A People's History of the United States
"In the American historical system, the people are represented by several important groups: immigrants & enslaved people, workers & indigenous. These are their stories." [DUN DUN]
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