Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People’s History tells U.S. history from the point of view of — and in the words of — America’s women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers.

As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country’s greatest battles — the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women’s rights, racial equality — were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance. Covering Christopher Columbus’s arrival through President Clinton’s first term, A People’s History of the United States features insightful analysis of the most important events in U.S. history.

Library Journal calls Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those. . . whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.” Packed with vivid details and telling quotations, Zinn’s award-winning classic continues to revolutionize the way U.S. history is taught and remembered.

The book has appeared in popular media, like The Sopranos, The Simpsons, Good Will Hunting, Lady Bird, and the History Channel documentary The People Speak. [Publisher’s description.]

More than two million copies sold.

The 35th anniversary edition, published in November of 2015, includes a new introduction by Anthony Arnove. He begins,

Howard Zinn fundamentally changed the way millions of people think about history with A People’s History of the United States. He would be the first to say, however, that he didn’t do so alone. The book grew out of his awareness of the importance of social movements throughout U.S. history, some of which he played an active role in during the 1960s and 1970s and beyond, namely the Civil Rights Movement, mass mobilizations to end the Vietnam War, as well as other antiwar movements, and the many movements for higher wages and workers’ rights and the rights of women, Latinos, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, and others.

ISBN: 9780062397348 | HarperCollins

Teacher Quotes

As a teacher, the Zinn Education Project website is invaluable because it provides activities that directly relate to A People’s History. Last week we did The People vs. Columbus, et al. which places all the parties involved in the arrival of Columbus on trial for the murder of the Tainos. The activity was so interactive that teachers from other classrooms had to ask us to quiet down. Students were able to better understand the motives and consequences behind the arrival.

Even though A People’s History can be a bit difficult for some students, the activities on the Zinn Education Project website makes the content accessible regardless of their reading level.

—Julian Hipkins III

HIgh School Administrator, Washington, District of Columbia

My first lesson as a student teacher was using an excerpt from A People’s History of the United States to teach about Columbus. I was working at Booker T. Washington Middle School in NYC. A student raised her hand and said, “Howard Zinn is my uncle!” I was honored, my hero’s niece! For Christmas, I got a signed copy!

—Francesca Miller

Teacher, New York, New York

More than thirty years ago, I had the pleasure of sitting next to Howard Zinn on a cross-country flight to check out graduate programs. Despite my being somewhat star-struck, he was one of those easy to “fall into conversation with” seatmates — kind, engaging, and interested in why I was traveling.

When I revealed that I was considering becoming a social studies teacher, he said “You must do that. The world needs teachers like the one you will be.” The voice of the universe had spoken and I have been a classroom teacher for the past thirty years, using parts of A People’s History of the United States and his inspirational approach to understanding the American experience.

—Annie Barnes

High School Humanities Teacher, Los Angeles, California

I grew up very trusting (too trusting) of the mainstream media and the accounts of our nations history from my textbooks. For years I was under the impression that the United States of America was the greatest nation in the world with no flaws — the epitome of democratic perfection. I would sing the national anthem proudly at baseball games and digest all the stories of our founding fathers that led me to idolization.

Then I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and everything changed. I became more curious about who was writing the history and their motivations. I developed a lens by which to critically judge the events and accounts I read in newspapers and history books. I was more thoughtful about a mainstream version of our history informed how another might see the world differently than me.

His book was the catalyst — opening me to a deeper understanding of myself, my biases and how they manifested subconsciously into sexism, racism, classism, and other forms of intolerance. After doing more work, reading books like The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, I found my way with conviction into activism. Each day I do this work I feel increasingly more empowered to be an aware and mindful ally to the Movement for Black Lives and other movements who struggle to dismantle systems of violence and oppression.

—Brendan Orsinger

Organizer with the James Reeb Voting Rights Project, District of Columbia

I read A People’s History of the United States in the summer before my junior year of high school — fifteen years ago now. It was an interesting time. This would have been 2005-2006, so the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were well underway, and I was beginning to pay attention to what those around me were saying about war.

As I sat in Boston Common reading my paperback copy of A People’s History, I must have had dozens of people come up to me to tell me how much it had changed their lives. Some were former students, some were fans, some were college students reading Zinn for the first time. Howard Zinn gave me a gift — a radical awakening. His work has that kind of power. You don’t forget injustice easily, and he unearths the injustices the other textbooks would rather forget.

I had the distinct honor of meeting Zinn when he gave the opening remarks at an adaptation of Grace Paley’s work. For all that Zinn was — activist, educator, historian, pacifist, mensch — he reminded me of why our people fight for justice. I love the long, anti-capitalist, anti-white supremacist tradition he carried forward as a Jew. We are obligated by our religion to fight for all who are oppressed, and every time I read Zinn, I am graced with that reminder, and that memory.

I believe in the power of radical change through progressive education and fully support the work of the Zinn Education Project.

—Becky Eidelman

Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Graduate Student, Boston, Massachusetts

I am an 8th grade Humanities teacher at Melrose Leadership Academy in Oakland.

I just finished chapter 4 of A People’s History of the United States on tyranny with my 8th graders, and I have never seen so many of my students engaged in discussion! One of my normally non-avid readers came up to me at the end of the class and said, “Ms. V, this is such an interesting book!”

I am so proud to be using Howard Zinn’s work! Thank you!

—Marisa Villegas

Middle School Humanities Teacher, Oakland, California

Because of this book, I understood early in my college career the importance of the true, unfiltered words of the actual actors in a historical event. As a result, I was drawn further into the study of history and, eventually, into my career as a history teacher. What A People’s History brought to my attention is that American history is much more interesting than that. Our history is an exciting, sometimes appalling, struggle for power and that makes us just like every other country that has ever existed.

A long list of “good guys” with no one to struggle with is neither a true story nor a good story. It doesn’t resonate because it leads the student to believe that we are all waiting for the next exceptional leader, instead of becoming a force for change in our own communities. A People’s History helped me recognize this as a student of history and inspires my attempt to bring true stories to young people, weary of the inaccessible lists that history teaching has become.

—Reynolds Bodenhamer

HIgh School Social Studies Teacher, Gulfport, Mississippi

In my first year of teaching 15 years ago, I was browsing local bookstores for resources that could supplement the textbook that I resented. I became a history teacher to help students make history a living part of their lives and the textbook seemed to have the opposite effect. I grabbed A People’s History of the United States and have yet to put it down.

The way in which Howard Zinn makes history compelling for students is undeniable and a resource that I have decided I — and my students — cannot be without. Many students who find themselves in alternative programs will often say that teachers never made school interesting. Zinn’s work gave me the resource I needed to capture the internal sense of justice so many urban students have. As an educator, I am filled with excitement that although I opened the window with the help of Howard Zinn, they have made the effort to examine what is outside.

—Dawn Fontaine

High School Social Studies Teacher, Springfield, Massachusetts

I have been a Howard Zinn fan since I picked up a copy of A People’s History when it first came out. I have cited it in more newspaper opinion columns than I can remember. I also quoted from it many times in my lectures at West Kentucky Community and Technical College, where I was on the faculty for 36 years. I recommended the book to my students. I still recommend the book to my union brothers and sisters — I’m the webmaster-editor for the Kentucky State AFL-CIO, a member of the state executive board and a retiree-member of AFT Local 1360. More than a few have bought copies of it.

—Berry Craig

Professor Emeritus of History, West Kentucky Community and Technical College, Louisville, Kentucky

Read more quotes from teachers about the impact of Howard Zinn and A People’s History of the United States on their work.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress
Chapter 2. Drawing the Color Line
Chapter 3. Persons of Mean and Vile Condition
Chapter 4. Tyranny Is Tyranny
Chapter 5. A Kind of Revolution
Chapter 6. The Intimately Oppressed
Chapter 7. As Long as Grass Grows or Water Runs
Chapter 8. We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God
Chapter 9. Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom
Chapter 10. The Other Civil War
Chapter 11. Robber Barons and Rebels
Chapter 12. The Empire and the People
Chapter 13. The Socialist Challenge
Chapter 14. War Is the Health of the State
Chapter 15. Self-help in Hard Times
Chapter 16. A Peoples War?
Chapter 17. Or Does It Explode?
Chapter 18. The Impossible Victory: Vietnam
Chapter 19. Surprises
Chapter 20. The Seventies: Under Control?
Chapter 21. Carter-Reagan-Bush: The Bipartisan Consensus
Chapter 22. The Unreported Resistance
Chapter 23. The Coming Revolt of the Guards
Chapter 24. The Clinton Presidency
Chapter 25. The 2000 Election and the “War on Terrorism”

The post A People’s History of the United States: 1492 – Present appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

One of the most important aims of teaching is to prompt students to empathize with other human beings. This is no easy accomplishment in a society that pits people against each other, offers vastly greater or lesser amounts of privileges based on accidents of birth, and rewards exploitation with wealth and power.

Empathy, or “social imagination,” as Peter Johnson calls it in The Reading Teacher, allows students to connect to “the other” with whom, on the surface, they may appear to have little in common. A social imagination encourages students to construct a more profound “we” than daily life ordinarily permits. A social imagination prompts students to wonder about the social contexts that provoke hurtful behaviors, rather than simply to dismiss individuals as inherently “evil” or “greedy.”

One teaching method we use to promote empathy, and return to unit after unit, is the interior monologue. An interior monologue is simply the imagined thoughts of a character in history, literature, or life at a specific point in time. After watching a film, reading a novel, short story, or essay, or performing improvisation skits, the class brainstorms particular key moments, turning points, or critical passages characters confronted.

This lesson was published by Rethinking Schools in Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching For Equity and Justice (Volume 1). For more lessons like “Promoting Social Imagination Through Interior Monologues,” order Rethinking Our Classrooms, with creative teaching ideas, compelling classroom narratives, and hands-on examples that show how teachers can promote the values of community, justice, and equality while building academic skills, edited by Wayne Au, Bill Bigelow, and Stan Karp.

See Table of Contents.

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The lesson described here asks students to empathize with Douglass’ desperate confrontation with slave owners and their agents by drawing on their own experiences resisting those who would seek to control them. This is not to suggest any parity of oppression between slavery and students’ lack of independence. But our imaginative capacity is limited by our experience, and it’s that experience we must use as a resource if we’re to attempt to comprehend the lives of others.

Additional Resources

▸ The Library of Congress offers Frederick Douglass’ papers online.

Video Clip

Danny Glover reading Frederick Douglass’s speech on the 4th of July. This is one of many film clips that can be viewed online from Voices of a People’s History.

The post Frederick Douglass Fights for Freedom appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Attack on Apalachicola River. The fort had provided home and safety to more than 300 African and Choctaw families. Painting by Jackson Walker, Museum of Florida Art.

Colonial laws prohibiting Black and white people from marrying one another suggest that some Black and white people did marry. Laws imposing penalties on white indentured servants and enslaved Africans who ran away together likewise suggest that whites and Blacks did run away together. Laws making it a crime for Indians and Black people to meet together in groups of four or more indicate that, at some point, these gatherings must have occurred. As Benjamin Franklin is said to have remarked in the Constitutional Convention, “One doesn’t make laws to prevent the sheep from planning insurrection,” because this has never occurred, nor will it occur.

The social elites of early America sought to manufacture racial divisions. Men of property and privilege were in the minority; they needed mechanisms to divide people who, in concert, might threaten the status quo.

Find more remote-ready lessons here and refer to our remote teaching guide.

Individuals’ different skin colors were not sufficient to keep these people apart if they came to see their interests in common. Which is not to say that racism was merely a ruling class plot, but as Howard Zinn points out in chapters 2 and 3 of A People’s History of the United States, and as students see in this lesson, some people did indeed set out consciously to promote divisions based on race.

Because today’s racial divisions run so deep and can seem so normal, providing students an historical framework can be enlightening. We need to ask, “What are the origins of racial conflict?” and “Who benefits from these deep antagonisms?” A critical perspective on race and racism is as important as anything students will take away from a U.S. history course. This is just one early lesson in our quest to construct that critical perspective.

Classroom Stories

The Color Line lesson led to a discussion about how oligarchs defend their interests. We would come back to that throughout the school year because the students noticed how race was being used as a wedge issue again and again. . .

When students learned how race had been created, how the structure of white supremacy had been constructed, they began to realize that it could also be destroyed.

— Julian Hipkins III
High School U.S. History Teacher, Washington, D.C.
Originally quoted in “How American oligarchs created the concept of race to divide and conquer the poor” by Courtland Milloy in The Washington Post.

The post The Color Line appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

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Few documents in U.S. history share the hallowed reputation of the Emancipation Proclamation. Many, perhaps most, of my students have heard of it. They know — at least vaguely — that it pronounced freedom for enslaved African Americans, and earned President Abraham Lincoln the title of Great Emancipator. They know what it says, but no one has read it. Every U.S. history textbook mentions it, but I’ve never seen a single textbook that actually includes its full text.

Here, students examine excerpts from Lincoln’s first inaugural address, the rarely mentioned original Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution that Lincoln promised to support, and the Emancipation Proclamation. This lesson asks students to think about what these documents reveal about Lincoln’s war aims. Was it a war to free the slaves? Lincoln never said it was. Most textbooks don’t even say it was. And yet the myth persists: It was the war to free the slaves.

The post A War to Free the Slaves? appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Illustration of the draft riots in New York City. Source: New York Public Library.

As Howard Zinn describes in A People’s History of the United States, the most destructive period of civil violence in U.S. history occurred during four days of rioting in July 1863. Zinn writes, “The draft riots were complex — anti-black, anti-rich, anti-Republican.” This activity focuses especially on the conflict between recently arrived Irish immigrants and blacks.

One of the critical “habits of the mind” that students should develop throughout a U.S. history course is to respond to social phenomena with “why” questions. They should begin from a premise that events have explanations, that people don’t, for example, kill each other simply because they speak different languages, attend different churches, or have different skin colors.

This activity takes the outrages of the 1863 riots as its starting point, and asks students to piece together clues that help account for this sudden explosion of rage. It’s important to note that making explanations is different than making excuses. Here, we’re asking students to try to understand the horrors committed, not to rationalize them.

Note: It’s best to do this activity before students have read about the draft riots in chapter 10 of A People’s History of the United States, excerpted below.

. . . the Conscription Act of 1863 provided that the rich could avoid military service: they could pay $300 or buy a substitute. In the summer of 1863, a ‘Song of the Conscripts’ was circulated by the thousands in New York and other cities. One stanza:

We’re coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more
We leave our homes and firesides with bleeding hearts and sore
Since poverty has been our crime, we bow to thy decree;
We are the poor and have no wealth to purchase liberty.

Depiction of rioters and police during the New York City draft riots of 1863. Harper’s Weekly, August 1, 1863. Source: Harper’s Weekly, Public domain

When recruiting for the army began in July 1863, a mob in New York wrecked the main recruiting station. Then, for three days, crowds of white workers marched through the city, destroying buildings, factories, streetcar lines, homes. The draft riots were complex — anti-black, anti-rich, anti-Republican. From an assault on draft headquarters, the rioters went on to attacks on wealthy homes, then to the murder of blacks. They marched through the streets, forcing factories to close, recruiting more members of the mob. They set the city’s colored orphan asylum on fire. They shot, burned, and hanged blacks they found in the streets. Many people were thrown into the rivers to drown. On the fourth day, Union troops returning from the Battle of Gettysburg came into the city and stopped the rioting. Perhaps four hundred people were killed. No exact figures have ever been given, but the number of lives lost was greater than in any other incident of domestic violence in American history.

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Culled from full-length autobiographies, these accounts were selected to help teenagers understand the horrific experiences of people their own age who were enslaved in the not-so-distant past.

Included are stories of teenagers, all under the age of 19, torn from their mothers and families, suffering from starvation, and being whipped and tortured. But these are not all tales of deprivation and violence. Teenagers will see themselves in these accounts as the people who are enslaved challenge authority, play games, tell jokes, and fall in love. These stories cover the range of the experience of enslavement, from the passage in slave ships across the Atlantic to daily life in slavery both on large plantations and in small city dwellings, and from escaping slavery to fighting in the Civil War.

The writings of  Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley, as well as others whose narratives are not so well known.

ISBN: 9781556526350 | Lawrence Hill Books

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Since its first publication in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me has become one of the most important — and successful — history books of our time. Having sold nearly two million copies, the book also won an American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship and was heralded on the front page of the New York Times in the summer of 2006.

For the 2018 edition, Loewen has added a new preface that shows how inadequate history courses in high school help produce adult Americans who think Donald Trump can solve their problems, and calls out academic historians for abandoning the concept of truth in a misguided effort to be “objective.”

What started out as a survey of the twelve leading American history textbooks has ended up being what the San Francisco Chronicle calls “an extremely convincing plea for truth in education.” In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen brings history alive in all its complexity and ambiguity. Beginning with pre-Columbian history and ranging over characters and events as diverse as Reconstruction, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, the My Lai massacre, 9/11, and the Iraq War, Loewen offers an eye-opening critique of existing textbooks, and a wonderful retelling of American history as it should — and could — be taught to American students.

Introduction

Read the introduction to Lies My Teacher Told Me in an article in the Washington Post, It’s back in the age of ‘alternative facts’: ‘Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong’.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 | Handicapped by History: The Process of Hero-making
The truth about Helen Keller, Woodrow Wilson, Betsy Ross, etc.

Chapter 2 | 1493: The True Importance of Christopher Columbus
From the real ‘discoverer’ of the New World to the myths about a flat world to the enslavement and extermination of the Arawaks to Columbus’ penniless’ death.

Chapter 3 | The Truth about the First Thanksgiving

Chapter 4 | Red Eyes
The truth about Native slaves, Native raiders, the French and Indian War, scalpings, the Louisiana Purchase, and much else.

Chapter 5 | “Gone With The Wind”: The Invisibility of Racism In American Textbooks
The truth about racism, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, lynchings, and the success of the Reconstruction governments before Reconstruction was ended by violence.

Chapter 6 | John Brown and Abraham Lincoln: The Invisibility of Antiracism in American History Textbooks
The truth about John Brown, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, carpetbaggers, scalawags, and slaves in the Civil war armies.

Chapter 7 | The Land of Opportunity
The absence of social class in American history textbooks.

Chapter 8 | Watching Big Brother: What Textbooks Teach about the Federal Government
How textbooks misrepresent the U.S. government and omit its participation in state-sponsored terrorism.

Chapter 9 | Down the Memory Hole: The Disappearance of the Recent Past
Why students rarely learn about events that happened in their teachers’ lifetimes.

Chapter 10 | Progress Is Our Most Important Product
The myth of Progress: bigger is not always better.

Chapter 11 | Why Is History Taught Like This?
Why so much time is devoted to minutia when large-scale epidemics among Natives are ignored.

Chapter 12 | What Is the Result Of Teaching History Like This?
Minority Students End Up Alienated, All Students End Up Bored, and No One Can Use the Past To Think Cogently About the Future.

Afterword | The Future Lies Ahead and What To Do About Them
How to Assess Sources, Learn About the Past More Accurately, and Teach Others What Has Gone Wrong.

ISBN: 978-1620973929 | New Press

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“Weaving together first-person accounts by familiar historical figures, traditional black spirituals and vignettes featuring fictional composites of actual people, Rappaport (Freedom River) creates an affecting, multitextured chronicle of slavery in America. Throughout, the author underscores the courage, resilience and resolve of those held captive. Writing in the present tense, Rappaport brings an immediacy to such events as the failed attempt by a group of Africans to revolt against their captors during the Middle Passage; Frederick Douglass’s bold defiance of his vicious master; and the daring work of John Scobell, a runaway slave who became a Union spy during the Civil War. Interspersed with anecdotes of specific historical incidents are passages affording glimpses of the captives’ daily lives, as in descriptions of “hush harbors,” spots deep in the woods where they met clandestinely to worship; and the secret schools at which black children learned to read and write. The symbolic and realistic converge effectively in Evans’ (Osceola) often emotion-charged oil paintings, which capture both the pain and the triumph at the heart of this trenchant compilation.” —Publishers Weekly

ISBN: 9780763628765 | Candlewick Press

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