Product Description

Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History of the United States is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #220 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-01
• Released on: 2005-08-02
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 768 pages

Amazon.com
Consistently lauded for its lively, readable prose, this revised and updated edition of A People's History of the United States turns traditional textbook history on its head. Howard Zinn infuses the often-submerged voices of blacks, women, American Indians, war resisters, and poor laborers of all nationalities into this thorough narrative that spans American history from Christopher Columbus's arrival to an afterword on the Clinton presidency.

Addressing his trademark reversals of perspective, Zinn--a teacher, historian, and social activist for more than 20 years--explains, "My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)--that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth."

If your last experience of American history was brought to you by junior high school textbooks--or even if you're a specialist--get ready for the other side of stories you may not even have heard. With its vivid descriptions of rarely noted events, A People's History of the United States is required reading for anyone who wants to take a fresh look at the rich, rocky history of America.

From Publishers Weekly
According to this classic of revisionist American history, narratives of national unity and progress are a smoke screen disguising the ceaseless conflict between elites and the masses whom they oppress and exploit. Historian Zinn sides with the latter group in chronicling Indians' struggle against Europeans, blacks' struggle against racism, women's struggle against patriarchy, and workers' struggle against capitalists. First published in 1980, the volume sums up decades of post-war scholarship into a definitive statement of leftist, multicultural, anti-imperialist historiography. This edition updates that project with new chapters on the Clinton and Bush presidencies, which deplore Clinton's pro-business agenda, celebrate the 1999 Seattle anti-globalization protests and apologize for previous editions' slighting of the struggles of Latinos and gays. Zinn's work is an vital corrective to triumphalist accounts, but his uncompromising radicalism shades, at times, into cynicism. Zinn views the Bill of Rights, universal suffrage, affirmative action and collective bargaining not as fundamental (albeit imperfect) extensions of freedom, but as tactical concessions by monied elites to defuse and contain more revolutionary impulses; voting, in fact, is but the most insidious of the "controls." It's too bad that Zinn dismisses two centuries of talk about "patriotism, democracy, national interest" as mere "slogans" and "pretense," because the history he recounts is in large part the effort of downtrodden people to claim these ideals for their own.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Howard Zinn, professor emeritus at Boston University, is a historian, playwright, and social activist. The author of numerous books, he has received the Lannan Foundation Literary Award for Nonfiction, and the Eugene V. Debs Award for his writing and political activism. In 2003 he was awarded the Prix des Amis du Monde Diplomatique.

Customer Reviews

Peoples History of the United States
Amazing book. I am 63 years old and wish I'd been interested in american history sooner. I spent most of my life blindly believing the history of school textbooks. Howard Zinn blows the lid off of most of what I had accepted as gospel. This book certainly opened my eyes to what went on behind the scenes. We may not be bad people, but we've sure had some very bad leaders over the years, who made some very selfish decisions without regard to the long term effects of their actions. Three cheers for Howard Zinn.

No sugar coated, political correctness here!
Well written, intensely compelling, and mind expanding. This book should be a mandatory read for every high school student in the country. Throw away The American Pageant, and hand out Zinn's book instead.

A political, not a cultural, history
Professor Zinn definitely fills a need--a well-documented political history of the United States from the point-of-view of those who work to move this country nearer to a realization of the democratic values expressed in The Declaration of Independence--in other words to transform the beautiful rhetoric of the Declaration into political reality. This work has only begun and has a long way to go. Zinn's book does disappoint me, though, in touching so lightly on cultural history: just to pick two examples, the Index lists neither J.J. Audubon nor George Washington Carver. My impression is that Zinn elbows the unique achievements of Americans aside in his anxiety to shine a searchlight on our dirty laundry--of which there is a great heap!