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”

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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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Over the years I included in my curriculum at Portland, Oregon Franklin High School examples of resistance, set up simulations and activities where students challenged the system or took on the roles of change-makers. Still, I sent too many students into the world as cynical young adults when what I wanted was to empower students to become active citizens — thinking critically about society, identifying its problems and working toward solutions. I wanted to start this school year with one hopeful story we could return to repeatedly. I found it in Salt of the Earth, a compelling and dramatic film that demonstrates alliances, solidarity, and resistance.

Film is in public domain. View Salt of the Earth or download free online at Internet Archive.

This lesson was published by Rethinking Schools in Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching For Equity and Justice (Volume 1). For more teaching activities like “Salt of the Earth: Grounds Students in Hope,” order Rethinking Our Classrooms with essays, teaching ideas, compelling classroom narratives, and hands-on examples.

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Most books leave out the story of the 381-day bus boycott involving thousands of people.

Issues of racism and direct confrontation between African American and European American people in the United States are usually considered too sensitive to be dealt with directly in the elementary school classroom. When African Americans and European Americans are involved in confrontation in children’s texts, the situation is routinely described as a problem between individuals that can be worked out on a personal basis. In the few cases where racism is addressed as a social problem, there has to be a happy ending.

Most books show Rosa Parks on her own and leave out her role with the NAACP and her trips to the Highlander Center. (Pictured here with freedom school educator Septima Clark.)

This is most readily apparent in the biographical treatment of Rosa Parks, one of the two names that most children associate with the Civil Rights Movement, the other being Martin Luther King Jr. The image of “Rosa Parks the Tired” exists on the level of a national cultural icon. Dozens of children’s books and textbooks present the same version of what might be called “Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.”

Jo Ann Gibson Robinson was one of the main organizers of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Rosa Parks was a poor seamstress. She lived in Montgomery, Ala., during the 1950s. In those days there was still segregation in parts of the United States. That meant that African Americans and European Americans were not allowed to use the same public facilities such as restaurants or swimming pools. It also meant that whenever the city buses were crowded, African Americans had to give up seats in front to European Americans and move to the back of the bus. 

One day on her way home from work Rosa was tired and sat down in the front of the bus. As the bus got crowded she was asked to give up her seat to a European American man, and she refused. The bus driver told her she had to go to the back of the bus, and she still refused to move. It was a hot day, she was tired and angry, and she became very stubborn.

The driver called a policeman, who arrested  Rosa. When other African Americans in Montgomery heard this, they became angry too, so they decided to refuse to ride the buses until everyone was allowed to ride together. They boycotted the buses. The boycott, which was led by Martin Luther King Jr., succeeded. Now African Americans and European Americans can ride the buses together in Montgomery. Rosa Parks was a very brave person.

This story seems innocent enough. Rosa Parks is treated with respect, and the African American community is given credit for running the boycott and winning the struggle. On closer examination, however, this version reveals some distressing characteristics that serve to turn a carefully planned movement for social change into a spontaneous outburst based upon frustration and anger.

The following annotations on the previous summary suggest that we need a new story, one not only more in line with the truth but one that shows the organizational skills and determination of the African American community in Montgomery and the role of the bus boycott in the larger struggle to desegregate Montgomery and the South.

Click “Download Lesson” to continue reading article with myths and facts.

Why is this important?

One of the few children’s books that places Rosa Parks in the context of an organized movement.

When the story of the Montgomery bus boycott is told merely as a tale of a single heroic person, it leaves children hanging. Not everyone is a hero or heroine. Of course, the idea that only special people can create change is useful if you want to prevent mass movements and keep change from happening. Not every child can be a Rosa Parks, but everyone can imagine herself or himself as a participant in the boycott. As a tale of a social movement and a community effort to overthrow injustice, the Rosa Parks story opens the possibility of every child identifying herself or himself as an activist, as someone who can help make justice happen.

By Herbert Kohl, the author of more than forty books, including the bestselling classic 36 Children. A recipient of the National Book Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, Herb Kohl was founder and first director of the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York City and established the PEN West Center in San Francisco, where he lives.

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Click for more resources for teaching about the Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912.

This activity embodies a couple of key insights of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. One is that history is not inevitable. People’s choices matter. Through role play, students in this lesson explore some of the actual dilemmas faced by strikers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912. Here, the teaching methodology is designed to match the history itself, as students portray Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.)  organizers deciding how — and for what — to conduct a massive strike. The other is that social class matters. Too often, traditional textbooks and curricula neglect the way social class has shaped our country’s history and how people’s understanding of class has influenced their actions.

Social class is at the heart of this lesson, as it is at the heart of so much of Howard Zinn’s work. This activity — co-authored with Norm Diamond and included originally in the book The Power in Our Hands: A Curriculum on the History of Work and Workers in the United States — highlights how unions can have different goals and structures than the ones that predominate today.

One Big Union, by Josh MacPhee. Source: Justseeds

In “Lawrence, 1912,” students contrast the American Federation of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World. Students act as, and empathize with, union organizers. The role play illustrates, well, the power in our hands — one of the first major victories for U.S. labor, and an inspirational instance of worker solidarity. This lesson broadens students’ sense of what workers can and do fight for beyond wages and benefits.

This is one of the 16 lessons available from The Power In Our Hands.

Classroom Stories

This week’s @ZinnEdProject activity is about the 1912 and Strike. One of my students imagined himself as a recent Polish immigrant and wrote his internal monologue in Polish!! @SAC_PR students are the best pic.twitter.com/HuRvDM6fLJ

— Amelia E Serafine (@AmeliaESerafine) February 14, 2019

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Standing on My Sisters’ Shoulders is full of riveting historical footage and original interviews with Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, Unita Blackwell, Mae Bertha Carter, Victoria Gray Adams, Dorie Ladner, and more. Voter registration, the fight for equal education, desegregation, and of course the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s challenge at the Democratic Convention are featured.

Victoria Jackson Gray Adams at the 1964 Democratic convention. By George Ballis/Take Stock.

If you can show just one film on the Civil Rights Movement, this should be the one. An exquisite tool for high school and college teachers of history, women’s studies, African American studies, and related subjects. Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Unita Blackwell, and countless others at last get the recognition they deserve. —Pricilla Murolo, Professor of History and Director of the Women’s History program, Sarah Lawrence

A powerful and moving film about ordinary women armed with sheer determination. —Jennifer Moffet, Jackson Free Press

A film by Joan Sadoff, Dr. Robert Sadoff and Laura J. Lipson. Distributed by Women Make Movies.

Schools/Institutions/Home Video: How to Buy. It is also available via Kanopy for free with a library card from a participating system.

Trailer

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500 Years of Chicana Women’s History offers a powerful antidote to this omission with a vivid, pictorial account of struggle and survival, resilience and achievement, discrimination and identity. The bilingual text, along with hundreds of photos and other images, ranges from female-centered stories of pre-Columbian Mexico to profiles of contemporary social justice activists, labor leaders, youth organizers, artists, and environmentalists, among others. With a distinguished, seventeen-member advisory board, the book presents a remarkable combination of scholarship and youthful appeal.

In the section on jobs held by Mexicanas under U.S. rule in the 1800s, for example, readers learn about flamboyant Doña Tules, who owned a popular gambling saloon in Santa Fe, and Eulalia Arrilla de Pérez, a respected curandera (healer) in the San Diego area. Also covered are the “repatriation campaigns” of the Midwest during the Depression that deported both adults and children, 75 percent of whom were U.S.-born and knew nothing of Mexico. Other stories include those of the garment, laundry, and cannery worker strikes, told from the perspective of Chicanas on the ground. From the women who fought and died in the Mexican Revolution to those marching with their young children today for immigrant rights, every story draws inspiration. Like the editor’s previous book, 500 Years of Chicano History, this thoroughly enriching view of Chicana women’s history promises to become a classic. [Publisher’s description.]

About the Editor: Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez is a widely known Chicana writer, activist, and lecturer. Now director of the Institute for Multiracial Justice in San Franciso, she has published six books, most recently De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century.

ISBN: 9780813542249 | Rutgers University

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The women featured in Let It Shine: Stories of Black Women Freedom Fighters are: Ella Josephine Baker, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune, Shirley Chisholm, Dorothy Irene Height, Biddy (Bridget) Mason, Rosa Parks, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman.

ISBN: 9780152010058 | Harcourt

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Students always shake their heads in total disbelief when they are reminded that women have had the right to vote for less than one hundred years. They are even more amazed when they read the fiery words and learn about the brave actions of women who dared to speak out against oppression in the early nineteenth century. They are shocked to learn that in 1872, Susan B. Anthony was arrested for “knowingly voting without having a lawful right to vote,” and found guilty. Who would have thought that those committed to the early women’s movement were but the first of several generations of brave women to fight against economic exploitation as well as physical, social, and racial inequality?

The road to the franchise was long and strewn with difficult and often dangerous obstacles. But women persevered. They continued to use their voices to demonstrate that they would not be deterred from achieving their goals.

Reprinted from Teaching with Voices of a People’s History of the United States, published by Seven Stories Press.

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