My mother-in-law got me this book for my birthday. 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.
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn |
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Revised edition published: 2003 Originally published: 1980 Acquired: July 2025 Read: August 2025 |
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 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.
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