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.

“Manifest Destiny”: The phrase is evocative of so many things that Euro-Americans call progress: populating the west with hard-working settlers, expanding profitable agriculture and industry, sharing the attributes of democracy and Christianity, and removing the Indians. For the American Indian people, however, such “progress” brought cultural, political, economic, and spiritual genocide.

Yet despite the movement of Euro-Americans who believed that they had the God given right to spread their “yearly multiplying millions” across continental North America, many Indian people resisted such encroachment. They united in peaceful and wartime opposition to the flood of westward expansion; they entered into trade agreements that encouraged strong economic ties with white Americans; they met with federal agents to plead for their survival; and they spoke in front of the Supreme Court in unsuccessful attempts to prove the unconstitutionality of state and federal actions. None of these efforts stopped the tide of Indian Removal, and no actions of the settlers could fully silence or stem the power and eloquence of Indian resistance.

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

Classroom Story

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Activism of all kinds courses through its pages. In contrast to typical textbook portrayals of a predominantly white abolition movement, credit here goes first to “the growing resistance of slaves themselves and the militancy of black and white abolitionists.” Later, in its descriptions of the Civil War, the book shows how enslaved African Americans were a powerful force in shifting the aims of the war from union to freedom. Despite Lincoln’s commitment to keep it a white man’s war, blacks — North and South — demanded the right to fight and, after they won that right, successfully fought for equal pay with white soldiers. In the South, enslaved people sabotaged plantations and ran away to Northern lines. Documents from numerous sources — novels, letters, speeches, congressional testimony, newspaper editorials — breathe life into the text and are accompanied by generally provocative discussion questions.

Exhilarating Defiance
Sections on Reconstruction are especially effective. Where most high school texts organize chapters around the policy zigs and zags of Lincoln, then Andrew Johnson, then the Radical Republicans, et al., Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution focuses on the creativity and determination of people at the bottom. Ex-slaves destroyed cotton gins, refused to work in gangs under white overseers, demanded their own land, and in 1867 in South Carolina refused to pay taxes to the white planter-dominated government.

In straightforward prose, students learn how ex-slaves sought in daily life to create a new, more equal society in the South:

Discarding the symbols of their enslavement, many rejected names forced upon them by slavemasters and took new ones. Casting aside drab garments of slavery, they wore new badges of freedom — brightly colored outerwear, fancy hats, ornate parasols, elegant veils.

They held meetings without white permission, supervision, or presence — that is, without the probing eyes of a master or overseer. In everyday encounters, they challenged former masters, mistresses, and overseers. Such defiance was expressed in a variety of encounters — looking an exmaster straight in the eye, talking back to a plantation mistress, refusing to tip a hat or give way to whites on a sidewalk.

In a world turned upside down, slaves found their defiance exhilarating.

Learn more in the Zinn Education Project national report, “Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction,” and find teaching resources on Reconstruction below.

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In 1872, two neighboring families in Hartford, Connecticut, shared dinner. As they argued over the quality of popular fiction, the two men concluded that they could write a better novel than any currently popular one. Although neither had ever written a novel, together Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, in which they satirized the business and politics of their day. The novel eventually gave a name to the Gilded Age — the historical period between 1860 and 1890 characterized by the sharp contrasts in society, in which America’s surface gleamed with gold while camouflaging the cheap base metal underneath.

Such symbolism was hardly lost on the ordinary people who lived through the Gilded Age and who experienced tremendous hardships and losses. Whether they lived in the rapidly industrializing cities where they had few services and even fewer amenities, or in small rural communities where they were victimized by grueling poverty, their hardships were similar. And while they got poorer, the rich were getting richer.The inequities that flourished in this seemingly gilded environment fueled a new generation of struggles.

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

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From the first days of English settlement, the boundaries of the New World were shaped by expansionist policies that pushed out the Indians, drove out the French and the Spanish, and eventually overwhelmed the Mexicans.

When we examine foreign policy from this perspective, it is clear that the late nineteenth century represented, not a revolutionary departure from past policies, but an evolutionary shift. How else can we explain the three international wars and the untold number of wars between the colonists and the Indians that preceded the American Revolution among “the 103 military interventions in other countries between 1798 and 1895”?

Despite the widespread support for “progress” surrounding the quest for empire, many Americans spoke out against the shortsighted goals of expansionist, interventionist, and imperialistic policymakers. Without these voices, students may inaccurately believe that expanding the empire was a universally accepted and supported goal of all Americans. Our goal, then, is to divest our students of this mythical belief and to introduce them to the eloquent voices of resistance to empire.

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

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Here in their own words are Frederick Douglass, George Jackson, Chief Joseph, Martin Luther King Jr., Plough Jogger, Sacco and Vanzetti, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Mark Twain, Paul Robeson, Cesar Chavez, Leonard Peltier, June Jordan, Walter Mosley, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Yolanda Huet-Vaughn, and Malcolm X, to name just a few of the hundreds of voices that appear in Voices of a People’s History of the United States, edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove.

The 10th anniversary edition will feature new voices including whistleblower Chelsea Manning; Naomi Klein, speaking from the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Liberty Square; a member of Dream Defenders, a youth organization that confronts systemic racial inequality; members of the undocumented youth movement, who occupied, marched, and demonstrated in support of the DREAM Act; a member of the day laborers movement; and several critics of the Obama administration, including Glenn Greenwald, on governmental secrecy. [Publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9781609805920 | Seven Stories Press

 Reviews

“Voices should be on every bookshelf. [It presents] the rich tradition of struggle in the United States, from the resistance to the conquest of the Americas in the era of Columbus through the protests today of soldiers and their families against the brutal invasion and occupation of Iraq.” —Arundhati Roy

“In Voices of a People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn has given us our true story, the ongoing, not-so-secret narrative of race and class in America.” —Russell Banks

“When I began work, five years ago, on what would become the present volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States, I wanted the voices of struggle, mostly absent from our history books, to be given the place they deserve. I wanted labor history, which has been the battleground, decade after decade, century after century, of an ongoing fight for human dignity, to come to the fore. And I wanted my readers to experience how at key moments in our history some of the bravest and most effective political acts were the sounds of the human voice itself.

“To omit or to minimize these voices of resistance is to create the idea that power only rests with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth, who own the newspapers and the television stations. I want to point out that people who seem to have no power, whether working people, people of color, or women—once they organize and protest and create movements—have a voice no government can suppress.” —Howard Zinn, from the introduction

Excerpt

Included in Voices of a People’s History is the full statement Paul Robeson intended to present when called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on June 12, 1956. Robeson, who had been a fierce opponent of racism and the foreign policy of the United States, was not allowed to read his statement.

“It would be more fitting for me to question Walter, Eastland, and Dulles than for them to question me, for it is they who should be called to account for their conduct, not I. Why does Walter not investigate the truly “un-American” activities of Eastland and his gang, to whom the Constitution is a scrap of paper when invoked by the Negro people and to whom defiance of the Supreme Court is a racial duty? And how can Eastland pretend concern over the internal security of our country while he supports the most brutal assaults on fifteen million Americans by the white citizens councils and the Ku Klux Klan? When will Dulles explain his reckless irresponsible “brink of war” policy by which the world might have been destroyed?”

Book Preview

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Using excerpts from the thousands of interviews conducted in the 1930s with people who had been enslaved, the astonishing audiotapes made available the only known recordings of people who actually experienced enslavement — recordings that had gathered dust in the Library of Congress until they were rendered audible for the first time specifically for this set.

The interviews were conducted by researchers working with the Federal Writers’ Project. [Publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9781595582287 | The New Press

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ISBN: 9781583226711 | Seven Stories Press

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Features a preface and afterword read by the author himself.  [Publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9780060754143 | HarperAudio

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Fifteen-year-old Claire, the beloved daughter of a black father and Irish mother, finds herself torn between the two warring sides. Faced with the breakdown of the city —the home — she has loved, Claire must discover the strength and resilience to address the new world in which she finds herself, and to begin the hard journey of remaking herself and her identity.

Addressing such issues as race, bigotry, and class head-on, Walter Dean Myers has written another stirring and exciting novel. [Publisher’s description.]

“Written in screenplay format like his Printz Award-winning Monster, Myers’s historical novel is set in 1863 New York City during the Civil War draft riots, which began as a protest against conscription and resulted in a clash between the city’s Irish and African-American populations. The streets are no longer safe for 15-year-old Claire, whose parents (her father is black, her mother Irish) run the Peacock Inn restaurant/tavern. “I don’t see why you have to be a black person or a white person,” Claire says, after being cautioned to stay inside. “Why can’t you just be a person?” But when the Colored Orphan Asylum is looted and burned, Claire feels an obligation to help. Myers writes poignant dialogue, laying bare the prejudices of the period, while exploring Claire’s emotional transition out of childhood. Stage directions (“CLOSE-UP of MAEVE. Her face is a picture of incredible anger as she screams at the POLICE”) pull readers into both the setting and characters, though the transitions between scenes are occasionally jarring. Readers should find this story moving — a direct result of Myers’s empathetic portrayal of those on both sides.” —Publishers Weekly

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