A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present
by Howard Zinn
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Book Summary Information
Author: Howard ZinnEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-08-02
ISBN: 0060838655
Number of pages: 768
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780060838652
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present
Book Review: WHAT CAN I SAY ABOUT THIS BOOK? READ BELOW
Summary: 5 Stars
In A People's History of the United States, author Howard Zinn seeks to present U.S. history through the eyes of ordinary people, depicting the struggles of Native Americans against European and U.S. conquest and expansion, slaves against slavery, unionists and other workers against capitalism, women against patriarchy, African-Americans against racism and for civil rights, and others, as Zinn suggests, whose stories are not often told in mainstream histories. A dissident work, A People's History has become a major success, and was a runner-up in 1980 for the National Book Award, which was won that year by Leon F. Litwack for his epic history Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. A People's History has been adopted in high schools and colleges throughout the United States and frequently updated since its publication in 1980, with the most recent edition covering events through 2003.
According to Dan Flynn of neoconservative David Horowitz's website Front Page Magazine, "The New York Times review opined that the book should be 'required reading' for students. Professors have heeded this counsel. Courses at the University of Colorado Boulder, UMass-Amherst, Penn State, and Indiana University are among dozens of classes nationwide that require the book. The book is so popular that it can be found on the class syllabus in such fields as economics, political science, literature, and women's studies, in addition to its more understandable inclusion in history. Amazon.com reports in the site's "popular in" section that the book is currently #7 at Emory University, #4 at the University of New Mexico, #9 at Brown University, and #7 at the University of Washington. In fact, 16 of the 40 locations listed in A People's History's "popular in" section are academic institutions, with the remainder of the list dominated by college towns like Binghamton (NY), State College (PA), East Lansing (MI), and Athens (GA)."
In a 1998 interview prior to a speaking engagement at the University of Georgia, Zinn told Catherine Parayre he had set "quiet revolution" as his goal in the writing of A People's History.
"A quiet revolution is a good way of putting it. From the bottom up. Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives. It would be a democratic socialism. I'm thinking of the German and the French and the Scandinavian models. Here in the U.S., we need to develop social benefits that we don't have in this country: health care, unemployment insurance, benefits for pregnant women, et cetera. President Clinton thinks he is being generous, but he is not. We still have a long way to go, and we should learn from other countries."
Chapter 1: Christopher Columbus
A People's History begins by looking at the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World from the point of view of the natives on the island of Hispaniola, which is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them water, food, gifts.
Zinn quotes from the diaries of Christopher Columbus:
Columbus wrote: "As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts."
In Chapter 1 of A People's History, Zinn wrote:
The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the other side of the Atlantic--the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. For, like other informed people of his time, he knew the world was round and he could sail west in order to get to the Far East." "...So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians, who swam out to greet them. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears. This was to have enormous consequences: it led Columbus to take some of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailed to what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask presented to Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild visions of gold fields. On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa Maria, which had run aground, Columbus built a fort, the first European military base in the Western Hemisphere. He called it Navidad (Christmas) and left thirty-nine crewmembers there, with instructions to find and store the gold. He took more Indian prisoners and put them aboard his two remaining ships. At one part of the island he got into a fight with Indians who refused to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his men wanted. Two were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. When the weather turned cold, the Indian prisoners began to die..."
In another section, Zinn outlines his ideas about writing history:
It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others ... [but] any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest... [T]his ideological interest is not openly expressed ... it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. ... The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks) -- the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress -- is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. . . .
The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.
Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican War as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott's army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American War as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by African-American soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by African-Americans in Harlem, the post-war American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can "see" history from the standpoint of others.
Criticisms
Although widely praised in leftist political circles, the book is not without its critics, primarily from conservatives, such as Dan Flynn and the liberal Michael Kazin of Dissent Magazine. The main argument of those critical of A People's History is that it is too focused on perceived class conflict in the United States, and wrongfully attributes sinister motives and intentions to the American political elite.
They argue that Zinn's portrayal of U.S. Founding Fathers as "leaders of the new aristocracy" who cynically sought to replace one form of oppressive elite control with another, is disingenuous. They argue that while the founders rhetoric contrasted with their actions --in that some of the founders were themselves slave owners-- they did establish the most liberal democracy in the world and codified into law basic human rights and that these views, reflected in public and private documents, were fundamentally held beliefs, and not just rhetoric. They also find fault with Zinn for what they say is his selective use of the experience of immigrants, focusing only on the hardships faced by immigrants and not on the success that many millions have and continue to experience.
A growing body of scholarship produced since 1975 supports the counter-argument that many of the founding fathers were slave owners, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. For example, Paul Finkelman, legal historian and editor of the 18-volume encyclopedia called Articles on American Slavery established in his book Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson that Jefferson owned more than 500 slaves during his lifetime.
In a 1996 interview with Calvin Simons, fordemocracy.org/speeches/1996-04-22-zinn-howard-interview.htm Zinn discussed Richard Hofstadter's 1948 book, The American Political Tradition: and the Men Who Made It (1948).
The American Political Tradition established how both the liberal and conservative traditions in the United States (including Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover; Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt; the founding fathers; and the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians who followed the founders) "hewed to certain fundamental principles" of nationalism, capitalism and private enterprise." Zinn said those same principles continue to guide the Democratic and Republican parties. Both, he said, "are very closely connected with corporate wealth; they both have the same fundamental foreign policy; they both support enormous military budgets and only differ in small ways on how much social spending there should be to take care of human needs."
Very informative and enlightening. A must read for every American!
Summary of A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present
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.United States Books
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