A People's History of the United States: American Beginnings to Reconstruction

by Howard Zinn, Kathy Emery

The New Press's Abridged Teaching Edition of A People's History of the United States has made Howard Zinn's original text available specifically for classroom use. With exercises and teaching materials to accompany each chapter, Volume I spans American Beginnings to Reconstruction.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2003

About the author

Howard Zinn was an American historian, playwright, philosopher, socialist intellectual and World War II veteran. He was chair of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, and a political science professor at Boston University. Zinn wrote more than 20 books, including his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States in 1980. 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, 1994), was also the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn's life and work. Zinn died of a heart attack in 2010, at the age of 87.

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is both an important and dangerous book. In his defense, Zinn never purports to be writing a balanced history. In the first chapter, he couches his efforts as a response to other earlier methodologies, in particular Kissinger's disheartening assertion that "history is the memory of states." Zinn's book, in contrast, is history as the memory of the oppressed; it is still part of "that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history," but it gives the body of American historiography a push in what Zinn believes - and what I agree - is the right direction. "That, being as blunt as I can, is my approach to the history of the United States," he says baldly, and then, with a gruffness that won me over instantly, "the reader may as well know that before going on."

All this being said, Zinn frequently loses this perspective in the heat of analysis, and makes lego models of domestic power relations from complicated events which he knows, in his better moments, to be much more nuanced. "It would take either a full-scale rebellion or a full-scale war to end... [slavery:]. If a rebellion, it might get out of hand, and turn its ferocity beyond slavery to the most successful system of capitalist enrichment in the world. If a war, those who made the war would organize its consequences. Hence, it was Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves, not John Brown. John Brown was hanged, with federal complicity, for attempting to do by small-scale violence what Lincoln would do with by large-scale violence several years later - end slavery." Really? Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to be gained out of this paragraph, but it's dangerously reductionist. Can we differentiate the violence of John Brown and Abraham Lincoln only by scale? To what extent can we relate these episodes of violence solely to the two men involved - very differently, I think - in their causes and execution? Surely degree of involvement with capitalism is not the only relevant difference between Abraham Lincoln and John Brown, who famously hacked a Tennessee family to pieces with broadswords simply because they lived on pro-slavery land, a man described in a more contemporary source as "the lanky Ohio farmer who... lived with strange fever-haunted dreams and felt an overwhelming compulsion to act on them... wholly ineffectual in everything he did save that he had the knack of drawing an entire nation after him on the road to unreasoning violence?"

Other troubling elements include Zinn's tendency to use the words of single individuals without support to "prove" the strength of a movement or national mood, and his fondness for using his own reading of a group's intent to discredit their action. Both are bogus and harmful methods of historiography.

But maybe the most dangerous aspect of this book is its constant invitation - even despite Zinn's disclaimer - to be read as a statement of unequivocal Truth. Such a reading leads to just the sort of monomaniacalism of perspective that is currently one of the American progressive movement's most self-hindering aspects, and certainly a humanly degrading influence upon its proponents. Zinn dismays and even sometimes angers me with his own lack of imagination concerning what moves societies and people. Nevertheless, let's give him credit; the book is endlessly useful in the alternative pull it asserts upon the wider field of history, and as a corrective adjustment to individual Americans' sense of our own history.

[MJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

A telling of our country's history from the perspectives of ordinary people: Native Americans, slaves, women, workers...voices not usually heard. Blows many of our "historical myths" out of the water. A very powerful book.

[Flora maccoll · Rating 5 out of 5]

a must read. should be required reading by anyone who graduates from high school.

[Heather Graber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a huge history buff... But great book.