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.

A December 1773 advertisement for a Sons of Liberty meeting. History textbooks often gloss over — or ignore completely — the massive community organizing effort that underlay the armed rebellion against the British.

In conjunction with my book, Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past, I reviewed 22 elementary, middle school, and high school texts. Fourteen were displayed at a National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) convention that I attended, while eight are approved for use in California, which has among the strictest criteria in the nation. I compared the 13 mythologies of the American Revolution discussed in my book with those perpetuated in these texts, and the results are startling. Although some texts fare better than others, all contain some serious lapses.

A Declaration of Independence twenty-one months before July 4, 1776. Click image to learn more and see larger picture.

. . . In 1997, Pauline Maier published American Scripture, where she uncovered 90 state and local “declarations of independence” that preceded the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The consequence of this historical tidbit is profound: Jefferson was not a lonely genius conjuring his notions from the ether; he was part of a nationwide political upheaval. Again, textbook writers have watered down the legend while missing the main point. Many now state that Jefferson was part of a five-man congressional committee, but they include no word of those 90 documents produced in less-famous chambers.

Some say these myths are harmless — what damage can stories do? Plenty. They change our view of historical and political processes. Myths that celebrate individual achievement mask fundamental truths of great importance. The United States was founded not by isolated acts of heroism but by the concerted revolutionary activities of people who had learned the power of collaborative effort. “Government has now devolved upon the people,” wrote one disgruntled Tory in 1774, “and they seem to be for using it.” That’s the story the myths conceal.

This article was originally published in the Winter 2004/05 issue of Rethinking Schools magazine. For more critical reviews of textbooks, visit Rethinking Schools.

Related Resources

Ray Raphael’s website with articles, interviews, a quiz, a detailed critique of commonly used textbooks, and more.

The post Re-examining the Revolution 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.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow (2002) provides a thorough overview of Jim Crow and the black response to it. The four-hour documentary explores the history of segregation from emancipation through World War II, chronicling both its formal and informal manifestations in the South and beyond. The second and third episodes, which examine the black experience from Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 through the start of the NAACP’s school desegregation campaign in the 1930s, is particularly useful for establishing the movement’s precursors and preconditions. [Description by Hasan Kwame Jeffries.]

The post The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

World War II, like so many other events in history, presents the teacher with an overwhelming range of topics. The rise of Nazism and fascism in Europe, the Holocaust, the military history and diplomacy of the war, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war in the Pacific, the Nuremberg Trials, the dropping of atomic bombs, the beginnings of the Cold War — there is no way to cover all these events in a typical month-long unit.

One event that invariably gets neglected is the war-time internment of Japanese Americans from the West Coast of the United States. The reasons are numerous. But I suspect the main reason is that serious investigation of the internment would contradict the traditional presentation of the U.S. role in the war — how U.S. ingenuity and power turned back Hitler, liberated the concentration camps, halted Japanese expansionism, and generally fought the good fight. Such an interpretation does not leave much room for aberrations, particularly one as anti-democratic as the Japanese internment.

More resources on the incarceration (internment) of Japanese Americans during WWII.

This lesson was published by Rethinking Schools in Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching for Equity and Justice (Volume 2). For more lessons like “A Lesson on the Japanese American Internment,” order Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching for Equity and Justice (Volume 2) with a rich collection of from-the-classroom articles, curriculum ideas, lesson plans, poetry, and resources. See Table of Contents.

The post A Lesson on the Japanese American Internment appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Rights Matter: The Story of the Bill of Rights is a free downloadable curriculum developed by Nancy Murray and the Bill of Rights Education Project at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. The project encourages citizens to think critically about difficult social issues and the importance of the Bill of Rights.

The sections of Rights Matter: The Story of the Bill of Rights include:

Preface (1)
Introduction (2)
1) Fight the Power (3)
2) The Fatal Flaw (6)
3) Who Were ‘We the People’? (9)
4) Securing Blessings of Liberty (12)
5) The Bill of Rights (16)
6) Just Words on Paper (22)
7) Whose Land is this Land?(27)
8) Second American Revolution(31)
9) Retreat From Reconstruction(34)
10) Fear Overwhelms(37)
11) New Times of Crisis (41)
12) The Civil Rights Movement (45)
13) The Rights Revolution (50)
14) The Rights of Students (54)
15) Balancing Liberty & Security(63)
Epilogue: Future of the Bill of Rights

Rights Matter: The Story of the Bill of Rights is also available for free in Spanish in PDF format: Los Derechos Importan: La Historia de la Carta de Derechos.

Produced by the The Bill of Rights Education Project, ACLU of Massachusetts.

The post Rights Matter: The Story of the Bill of Rights appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

“A rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” This much-quoted phrase seems as relevant today as it did during the Revolutionary War. The documents in “Half a Revolution” illustrate this fight and the way in which it was carried out during and immediately after the Revolutionary War. Independence, it seems, did not bring an end to the fighting between various “factions.” To Joseph Plumb Martin, the “poor soldiers” served their country well during the war, but afterward “they were turned adrift like old worn-out horses.” Samuel Dewees recalled that the soldiers at York “were afraid to say or to do any thing” for fear of punishment, and Dewees avoided encountering officers lest they might “construe my conduct in some way or other into an offense.” Henry Knox described the need of “men of reflection, and principle” to be protected “in their lawful pursuits” from “the violence of lawless men.” And James Madison worried about ways to control “the majority” who may be led by “the mischiefs of faction.”

These factions, and the way in which both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution dealt with them, resulted in “half a revolution.” Indeed, a revolution in its entirely would have required an end to class conflict by welcoming American Indians into North American society, outlawing slavery, and granting equal rights to American women — in other words, creating a new society characterized by economic, social, racial, and political equality.

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

The post Half a Revolution appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

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.

The post The Early Women’s Movement appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Source: Library of Congress.

The first organized gathering of women to demand their rights as women took place during two days in July 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. The manifesto produced by the women in Seneca Falls offered a blueprint for feminist organizing for decades to come. The most “radical” demand — at least the only demand not passed unanimously by the assembly — was for universal suffrage. Not all attendees were women. In fact, it was the most prominent African American abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, who seconded Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s motion for female suffrage. However, the large majority of those present were women, and many, perhaps most, were veterans of the abolition movement. Some of those in attendance were working-class, but most came from privileged backgrounds. Their Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions proclaimed that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” But, as the feminist scholar Gerda Lerner points out, the authors of this denunciation “did not speak for the truly exploited and abused working woman. As a matter of fact, they were largely ignorant of her condition and, with the notable exception of Susan B. Anthony, indifferent to her fate.” Nor did the document address the plight of women who were not white.

Mural by Blake Chamberlain on an interior wall of the Women’s Rights National Historical Park Visitor Center depicting influential people of the women’s suffrage movement. Source: Victoria Stauffenberg, public domain

The role play included here is designed to simultaneously honor the accomplishment and explore the limitations of the women of Seneca Falls. The activity includes roles for the upper-class and middle-class white women who organized the convention, but also for women who were not in attendance: poor, working-class white mill workers; enslaved African American women; Cherokee women 10 years after the Trail of Tears; and Mexican women in territory newly conquered by the United States in its war with Mexico. This is not the entire rainbow coalition that would have been in attendance at an assembly fully representative of this country’s women in 1848. But it’s representative enough to give students a chance to imagine the additional demands that might have been raised that summer had it not been so limited in race and class.

Classroom Stories

I always use the Zinn Education Project’s Seneca Falls, 1848: Women Organize for Equality lesson, and no other activity does so well to teach students to question “unmarked” categories assumed to be normative. In this instance, the lesson teaches students to see that the “women’s” movement was really about white, privileged women. They then understand, too, how “men” means just white men in the United States.

The role play activity captures their attention, keeps them engaged, and cultivates a deeply critical perspective not only on Seneca Falls but also on the workings of race, class, and gender.

—Elizabeth Bergman

High School Social Studies Teacher, Los Angeles, California

For the past several years, I’ve had the joy of teaching AP U.S. History at my school.  It’s important to me that my students get a full, accurate picture of the people’s history of the United States, so I regularly use Zinn Education Project materials in my classes.

I’ve used the Seneca Falls, 1848 lesson several times. Last year, I took the time to locate multiple primary source documents from a diverse group of women to help students. These documents helped students build their primary source document analysis skills, and learn from multiple perspectives and experiences of women who lived during this time. As a class, we used the materials and role descriptions from the activity. Students also used additional primary source documents to add to their knowledge prior to the mock convention.

This lesson about women’s history provides my class with the historical context, as well as their personal connections to this history, to gain a full understanding of the complexity of the suffrage movement. Thank you, Zinn Education Project!

—Hayley Breden

High School Social Studies Teacher, Denver, Colorado

I recently used the Seneca Falls Convention lesson and was pleased by how engaging it was for my students. We started by reading the chapter on women’s history from A Young People’s History of the United States. This helped set up the history behind the Seneca Falls Convention.

My class was properly outraged just by the reading and then I passed out the laws affecting women in 1848 provided in the lesson. We went through each of these and that provided a lot of opportunities for discussion. Next, the students broke up into the different groups of women and read about what struggles they were facing. During this small group work, I listened in on my students’ conversations and was struck by their intellectual engagement with the materials.

The next step, of having these different groups of women with diverse concerns try to come to a consensus, provided my students with a wide perspective on the vastness of the struggle. In the end, we were able to create a great list of demands by using Robert’s Rules of Order, which my students really enjoyed. They were surprised by what demands they had that the women did and didn’t share.

After the first run, I know it’s a great lesson and I plan to use it annually. Thank you so much to the Zinn Education Project for making it available!

—Kate Kennedy

High School Social Studies Teacher, Ellsworth, Maine

Related Resource

19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Women’s Right to Vote (1920) at OurDocuments.gov.

The post Seneca Falls, 1848: Women Organize for Equality appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

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.

The post Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution: Teaching a People’s History of Reconstruction appeared first on Zinn Education Project.