★★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: A People’s History Of The United States
• Author: Howard Zinn
• Year: 1980 (mine was 2015 trade paperback)
• Pages: 688*
• Genre: History, non-fiction
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• ISBN 978-0-06-239734-8 (paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

(* not including bibliography, index, “post script”, etc.)

 

Summary

Zinn’s A People’s History Of The United States was intended to show the side of U.S. history so often ignored in the bulk of history books: our side, the people’s side. His experience in learning history was much like my own (though he was 50 years ahead of me), in which we learned the names of statesmen, generals, the wealthiest business owners and newspaper magnates — and the dates on which those people did things. But very little about the vast bulk of U.S. residents. In most history books, we are called “the troops”, “the townspeople”, or “protesters” — nameless and faceless background characters who are mostly unimportant. Zinn tried to tell as much of that other history as he could. In his own words:

“...It is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people’s movements of resistance. That makes it a biased account, one that leans in a certain direction. I am not troubled by that, because the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction — so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people’s movements — that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission.”

—page 631

The book was regularly updated, so I’m not certain what the original would look like in comparison. As early as page 563 (125 pages before the end), I began to notice dates, people, and events that occurred after the original publication date (1980), and so they must have been added later.

 

Commentary

The book is well-written, in the sense that the prose is easily understandable. Zinn doesn’t waste space with flowery descriptions or convoluted sentence structure. It is also well-researched. The bibliography is 20 pages long, listing hundreds of cited works.

He begins where so many old U.S. history books begin — with Columbus floating up to what he thought was some part of Asia. Columbus wrote in his journal of the people he found: “They would make fine servants.” This is significant, because he never once thought of them as possible partners, allies, or equals — and such an attitude was to dominate the entirety of U.S. history, in which enriched men of European descent were to trample on everyone else for five centuries.

Moving forward through genocide of the Native Americans, slavery of imported Africans, indentured servitude for poor whites, and maltreatment of nearly everyone else, Zinn shows what living in the U.S. (and pre-U.S. North America) must have been like for everyone who wasn’t in charge — which was almost everyone.

I know that historians’ presentation of this material has changed over the years. In the fifty years between Zinn’s primary schooling and my own, textbooks had changed from outright promoting and praising “Manifest Destiny” to merely stating that such a thing was believed at the time. Zinn goes a step further and points out that it was mainly believed and promoted by those who would benefit from it — land speculators and East Coast leaders hoping to relieve population pressure. It was certainly not a good idea from the point of view of those displaced and killed by it or those who fell prey to the false advertisements of a Western utopia.

One thing the book addressed, which I think I already understood but have had a difficult time expressing coherently, is that the system is set up to drain off frustration via the political process — channeling angst into the “two sides” of each election rather than against the ruling class that controls both parties. Zinn also poked at the system’s primary feature: its ability to appear self-correcting, when in fact it happily punishes a few bad apples who “say the quiet part out loud” and continues with business as usual.

“There was also a need to satisfy a disillusioned public that the system was criticizing and correcting itself. The standard way was to conduct publicized investigations that found specific culprits but left the system intact. Watergate had made both the FBI and the CIA look bad — breaking the laws they were sworn to uphold, cooperating with Nixon in his burglary jobs and illegal wiretapping. In 1975, congressional committees in the House and Senate began investigations of the FBI and CIA...

“Valuable information came out of the investigations, but it was just enough, and in just the right way — moderate press coverage, little television coverage, thick books of reports with limited readership — to give the impression of an honest society correcting itself.”

—pages 554-555

 

Addressing Complaints/Criticism

Zinn’s work has been criticized, both by traditional historians and other reviewers. One critic called the book “unworthy”, a “failure... better suited to a conspiracy-monger’s website”. But beyond these character attacks, I found little of worthwhile substance in these critiques. For example, when forced to cite specifics, critics complain that Zinn painted Lincoln as a “cautious politician who left slavery alone as long as possible” — which is a weird choice for complaint since that’s entirely accurate. So they’re kind of making his point for him.

One conservative critic complained Zinn “barely mentions either conservatism or Christianity”. Also weird; that critic wouldn’t like what Zinn might have said if he’d mentioned Christianity more often; certainly Christianity as a broad group didn’t play the most excellent role in this history. And conservatism, well, it is heavily featured in the book — as the antagonist.

Zinn was also accused of “blatant omissions of important historical episodes” and “systematic failures to examine opposing views”. As for the former, I didn’t find specific omissions mentioned by the critics — yet every historian writing a broad overview of a large period of history must omit many things. Certainly they will omit “episodes” that don’t fit the theme. The latter, though, is entirely ridiculous. The whole point of this book was a reaction to “opposing views”, the traditional histories that highlight the “heroes” while ignoring the masses.

 

Points Off For...

What bugged me the most in this book was the conflation of entire time periods with specific dates. When Zinn wants to show what led up to a particular worker’s movement, he names various incidents jumping around in time and cites letters or articles written in the general time period, but some of those dates are after the particular incident in question. Yes, a strike in Pennsylvania in 1870 might be related to a riot in St. Louis in 1855, but it certainly didn’t lead up to it. (I made up those dates and locations, as examples.) This happened repeatedly throughout the book. A speedy reader might not spot the dates jumping around and just assume “all these events led up to this other event” because of the way they’re presented, but a careful notation of the dates will show that some of the “related” citations occurred well after the main thing we’re talking about.

I don’t see this is as a serious infraction, because I don’t think Zinn intended it to be misleading, but it often comes across this way.

I also took off points for repeated uses of “coloreds”, “Negro”, and other antiquated terms for black people in America. Yes, I’m aware that the NAACP says “colored” “isn’t derogatory” (the organization obviously still uses it in its name), but others disagree, noting the word “harkens back to an era of exclusion, a time when Jim Crow was in full force, and blacks used water fountains marked ‘colored’ and sat in the ‘colored’ sections of buses, beaches, and restaurants. In short, the term stirs up painful memories.” Even in the 1980s — when the original version of this book was written — we suburban white people knew that “Negro” was antiquated, that “colored” was to be avoided. “They’re called African Americans now, Grandpa”, was a phrase heard fairly often in white households of the time. I wouldn’t complain if these terms were only parts of quotations, but he uses them fairly often in his own prose. I notice he did not use out-of-date slang for other ethnic or racial minorities, referring to them as “immigrants from Italy” or Eastern Europe, or whatever term was appropriate.

The first few times, I wondered “Is this merely for effect, to show us how they were treated in those times?” But it kept going and I got the impression these are simply the words Zinn used to refer to black people in the U.S., and no editor ever had any drive to correct him of it. I know Zinn didn’t mean any harm by it — because the entire point of the book was to present history from the point of view of marginalized groups — but it was confusing and distracting.

If not for these two irritations, I think I would have rated this book with a rare five stars.

 

Read It Online

I did not know until about halfway through the book, but most of it is available online — though I doubt it’s entirely legal. I found it here, on a lyrics site, with the text of each chapter listed as “lyrics”, each chapter listed as a “song”, and the book listed as an “album”. Don’t depend on that text, though. Not only are two chapters missing (nine and fifteen), but a couple of chapters are out of order, one has a different chapter name, and it entirely ignores Zinn’s formatting, especially italicized words and the indentation of long quotations.

 

Conclusion

This book is depressing, especially reading it when I did, in the current chaotic state of our plutocracy. I wish I had been handed a copy in 1988, when I was more naive but also more curious — about the same year I read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Frank Norris’ The Octopus. Both those novels opened my eyes a bit to the plight of workers (versus America’s aristocracy, the capitalists), though they both seemed isolated and distant. Zinn’s A People’s History would have, I think, placed everything in a greater perspective for me, showing there was no isolation to these incidents; they were continuous throughout history. And in those days, I had enough youthful verve and optimism that I could have taken the lessens without them feeling quite so heavy and intractable.

The saving grace is that I had already become aware of much of the content over the past few years of reading histories and biographies of one thing or another. So the force of this book’s message came to me like an added burden rather than a killing blow out of nowhere.

If you’re already convinced the whole “American dream” is a sham, that our entire system has been a corrupt facade from the beginning, then you might have no reason to read it. But if you still cling to fantastical notions about the U.S. being a beacon of equality, financial upward mobility, liberty and justice for all, and taco trucks on every corner, then you might yet need an eye-opener or two and A People’s History Of The United States could be just the thing to do it.

 

 

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