A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.) by Howard Zinn Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.)
Book Review: My child will read this book (hopefully)
Summary: 5 Stars
This book inspired me to learn more about the country that I live in. Zinn wrote an absolute classic. I read it about two years ago and will give it another read in a few years as a refresher...& yes I will encourage my child to read this book, probably around the high school age so he can get a real grasp of a people's point of view towards this country's past.
A must read!
Book Review: History from a different vantage point.
Summary: 5 Stars
Any student of history or lay person with a passing interest in the history of this country should read this. Some would complain that this has a "leftist" P.O.V., but I would content as Zinn does that this is simply a history by and for the people.
Matt Zarnstorff
Book Review: Good companion to a "conventional" history.
Summary: 4 Stars
I've read this book more than once over the years. It is certainly the most thorough, and well written, book of its kind. It's not quite so radical as it once was because texts have added more social material like this since Zinn first published his books.
I have noticed, though, that the academic histories of every other country is going in the opposite direction. Whitewash is in order for everywhere else, and academic conferences have been open about this bowdlerizing of non-American history, done to fight American "arrogance." But it results in the histories of other countries being a bigger joke than America's history ever was. (examples; Mexico's slaughter of indigenous people isn't dealt with aside from Cortez, ignoring nineteenth and twentieth century massacres; Mexican forces are STILL fighting in the Yucatan. Another example is the alleged "peace and love" Muslims used to spread in India--when even Muslim accounts describe brutal mass murder and temple burning instead of tolerance. As a graduate students in history I learned of HUNDREDS of things like these that historians don't want to publicize.)
Book Review: Bitter Medicine for an Election Year
Summary: 4 Stars
Zinn's history of social struggle in America is nothing short of brutal. I just finished it. When all the atrocities against poor Americans and the rest of the world are portrayed without the usual flag-waving patriotic rhetoric and justification associated with it, we see a stark and persuasive condemnation of American domestic and foreign policy. It is a difficult read and not without slanting of its own, but compared to the standard representations of American history, they are minor. I was aware of Native American history since I've studied that for a long time. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown is a classic. But new to me was the organic generation of the labor movement. Unions evolved from spontaneous uprisings against oppressive business practices, not as a result of socialist agitation. Imagine, only 100 years ago in America, people were struggling to reduce child labor from 10 hour days! As many people were dying in industrial accidents then as in automobiles today - mining, railroad, steel, construction, farming and factory were all dangerous occupations with absolutely no compensation owed to the injured or killed. It took demonstrations, strikes, and class-action lawsuits to improve these atrocities. Today we see some trying to eliminate the class-action process, mislabeling it the cause of increased medical and insurance costs!
Slavery is another important ingredient in this history and does much to illuminate the rift between white America and black. To have an ancestry who were literarily bought and sold, denied education, prohibited from marrying, and defined in public policy as inferior or even sub-human leaves an irrepressible scar in the psyche of an entire race. The violent counteraction to the on-going suppression of blacks is met with prisons and punishment only slightly more refined than lynching but with the same general inspiration and purpose. Immigrants, the women's movement, worker's rights, minorities, the poor and jobless, gay rights, non-Christian and atheist rights, the struggle goes on and on while the richest 1% in America determine the political structure, balance of power, candidates for public office, legislation, and foreign policy. Our foreign policy today can be neatly summarized - as in George Orwell's 1984 - as a perpetual state of war to promote unopposed patriotism and industrial welfare. When necessary, we switch partners and the dance goes on. We've propped up dictators, overthrown democracies, and armed death squads against revolutionaries modeling their cause on our own American Revolution - all for economic domination that seems beyond reproach for monetary stability and growth. We've lost our recent wars against indigenous opponents for exactly the same reasons our founding republic defeated the most powerful nation on earth in our own War of Independence. When its your home, you have everything to lose and will never give up the fight.
The same brutal attenuation of the character and value of other cultures is seen today as justification for a continued militancy in foreign policy extended from that applied to non-whites here at home. Surrounded by mountains of civilian corpses in Iraq, we have the audacity to claim we are trying to establish freedom and democracy. With our shiny-new foreign policy of preemptive war, if we were to relive the Cold War, we would have struck the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with hundreds of nuclear bombs in 1949 - surprise!
Mostly, Zinn establishes the argument that the America government is now, and mostly always has been, a tool for the wealthy to control the population at large while establishing institutions and rules of law that justify and promote that structure. Today we see the out-sourcing of manufacturing, pharmaceutical, software, and research jobs from America to foreign shores for the sole benefit of mega-corporations more intent on the short-range goals of increased profit margins - already fabulously high - then a concern for the well being at home and world leadership based upon a humanitarian America. We continue to maintain an armed force geared to fighting the Soviet Union and Red China (two mythical monsters) while the rest of the world looks at us as a once reliable power now sickened by its own self-interest, Christian dogma, a furious economy that relies on threats and enemies for its continued inferno, and a military-industrial complex that the supreme commander of the monstrous military machine that ground across Europe to victory in the second world war warned against as the most serious threat to American democracy. We see government institutions today - from the Supreme Court, and Congress and White House, to governmental departments like Defense, Labor, Justice, and Environmental Protection, the State Department and CIA that promote a democracy that ensures the well being of the ultra rich and privileged.
Zinn portrays a history where every freedom, right, and protection under the law has been won by people uniting to rise up and rile against the power of the establishment - from emancipation to voter rights and integration to a 40-hour work week. And the establishment has always feared most the power of unification. So we have today the knife-edge divide between liberals and conservatives, blue states and red, Christians and heathens, allies and enemies, gays and straights, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Muslims, Cops TV and nightly news broadcast featuring black male suspects.
But Zinn fails to acknowledge that America has in fact progressed, arduous and painful as has been the process and is today comparatively ahead of many other societies. Historically, progress has often entailed social enlightenment that broke the bonds of discrimination and injustice practiced worldwide and not unique to America. But this is still a powerful work that can change one's recognition of the origins of social unrest within our boarders and cast light on a militant foreign policy with haunting awareness.
Book Review: Inaccurate at Best.
Summary: 2 Stars
A historian has two duties. The first is to get the facts right about what happened. The second is to interpret them honestly and impartialy. This book fails on both counts.
The problem with this book is not the author's political views; many political extremists wrote excellent history. Nor is it that his political views influence his work: many historians fail the imparitality test, and still can at least give an interesting, if biased, account of why things happened as they did. The problem is that the book is that it is, first, dishonest: the author deliberatly leaves out "inconvenient" facts and puts in inaccurate claims that support the author's thesis ("noble savage opressed by greedy capitalists"). The second problem is that it is simply wrong: quite a few of the "facts" it presents are simply wrong. A biased history book is one thing; a dishonest, inaccurate history book is something else altogether.
For example, it is simply not true that the English settlers in Virginia genocided the Powhatan Indians; it is not true that the Chesapeake colonies avidly desired slaves, or that income inequality increased in the 18th century colonies; it is not true that Lincoln "changed his views to suit his audience"; it is not true that a woman named Polly Baker was "tried for having children out of wedlock" (it is a well-known literary hoax perpetuated by Benjamin Franklin to call attention to the mistreatment of women by the justice system); it is not true that the Tet offensive was a Northern victory (quite the opposite, in fact, dramatic TV footage to the contrary notwithstanding).
And so on and so forth. The non-facts presented as "history" in this book could fill a volume--and they did (at least, they filled quite a few pages in Prof. Oscar Handlin's review of the book, back in 1980). It is hard to decide whether Zinn is simply a careless, incompetent historian or whether he is knowingly distorting and inventing "facts", that is, if he's lying. This, however, is a moot point, since this is hardly the only general history book available about the United States. With so many good books out there, why bother with this one?