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A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.) (Paperback)
by Howard Zinn
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American history, History of civilization |
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Author: Howard Zinn
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Pub. in: August, 2005
ISBN: 0060838655
Pages: 768
Measurements: 7.9 x 5.3 x 1.4 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00231
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0060838652
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- Awards & Credential -
Classic National Bestseller in North America. This book ranks #216 in books out of millions on Amazon.com as of January 27, 2007. |
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- Better with -
Better with
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
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Howard Zinn is a historian, playwright, and social activist. He was a shipyard worker and Air Force bombardier before he went to college under the GI Bill and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has taught at Spelman College and Boston University, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Paris and the University of Bologna. He has received the Thomas Merton Award, the Eugene V. Debs Award, the Upton Sinclair Award, and the Lannan Literary Award. He lives in Auburndale, Massachusetts.
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From Publishers Weekly
According to this classic of revisionist American history, narratives of national unity and progress are a smoke screen disguising the ceaseless conflict between elites and the masses whom they oppress and exploit. Historian Zinn sides with the latter group in chronicling Indians' struggle against Europeans, blacks' struggle against racism, women's struggle against patriarchy, and workers' struggle against capitalists. First published in 1980, the volume sums up decades of post-war scholarship into a definitive statement of leftist, multicultural, anti-imperialist historiography. This edition updates that project with new chapters on the Clinton and Bush presidencies, which deplore Clinton's pro-business agenda, celebrate the 1999 Seattle anti-globalization protests and apologize for previous editions' slighting of the struggles of Latinos and gays. Zinn's work is an vital corrective to triumphalist accounts, but his uncompromising radicalism shades, at times, into cynicism. Zinn views the Bill of Rights, universal suffrage, affirmative action and collective bargaining not as fundamental (albeit imperfect) extensions of freedom, but as tactical concessions by monied elites to defuse and contain more revolutionary impulses; voting, in fact, is but the most insidious of the "controls." It's too bad that Zinn dismisses two centuries of talk about "patriotism, democracy, national interest" as mere "slogans" and "pretense," because the history he recounts is in large part the effort of downtrodden people to claim these ideals for their own.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
(MSL quote)
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COLUMBUS, THEINDIANS, ANDHUMAN PROGRESS
Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:
They... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... They would make fine servants... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.
These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.
Columbus wrote:
As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I tooksome of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might giveme information of whatever there is in these parts.
The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the other side of the Atlantic-the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. For, like other informed people of his time, he knew the world was round and he could sail west in order to get to the Far East.
Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation-states, like France, England, and Portugal. Its population, mostly poor peasants, worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent of the population and owned 95 percent of the land. Spain had tied itself to the Catholic Church, expelled all the Jews, driven out the Moors. Like other states of the modern world, Spain sought gold, which was becoming the new mark of wealth, more useful than land because it could buy anything.
There was gold in Asia, it was thought, and certainly silks and spices, for Marco Polo and others had brought back marvelous things from their overland expeditions centuries before. Now that the Turks had conquered Constantinople and the eastern Mediterranean, and controlled the land routes to Asia, a sea route was needed. Portuguese sailors were working their way around the southern tip of Africa. Spain decided to gamble on a long sail across an unknown ocean.
In return for bringing back gold and spices, they promisedColumbus 10 percent of the profits, governorship over new-foundlands, and the fame that would go with a new title: Admiral of the OceanSea. He was a merchant's clerk from the Italian city of Genoa, part-timeweaver (the son of a skilled weaver), and expert sailor. He set out withthree sailing ships, the largest of which was the Santa Maria, perhaps100 feet long, and thirty-nine crew members.
Columbus would never have made it to Asia, which was thousands of miles farther away than he had calculated, imagining a smaller world. He would have been doomed by that great expanse of sea. But he was lucky. One-fourth of the way there he came upon an unknown, uncharted land that lay between Europe and Asia--the Americas. It was early October 1492, and thirty-three days since he and his crew had left the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they saw branches and sticks floating in the water. They saw flocks of birds.
These were signs of land. Then, on October 12, a sailor called Rodrigo saw the early morning moon shining on white sands, and cried out. It was an island in the Bahamas, the Caribbean sea. The first man to sight land was supposed to get a yearly pension of 10,000 maravedis for life, but Rodrigo never got it. Columbus claimed he had seen a light the evening before. He got the reward.
So, approaching land, they were met by, the Arawak Indians, who swam out to greet them. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.
This was to have enormous consequences: it led Columbus to take some of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailed to what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask presented to Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild visions of gold fields.
On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa Maria, which had run aground, Columbus built a fort, the first European military base in the Western Hemisphere. He called it Navidad (Christmas) and left thirtynine crewmembers there, with instructions to find and store the gold. He took more Indian prisoners and put them aboard his two remaining ships. At one part of the island he got into a fight with Indians who refused to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his men wanted. Two were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. When the weather turned cold, the Indian prisoners began to die. |
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Dirk Willard (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-27 00:00>
Helen Keller, writing to a friend in England, captured the theme of this book (pg. 345):
"Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee..."
Professor Zinn, with this quote, and many other passages describes the path America has been on since Columbus. In his scholarly approach Zinn yanks open dusty curtains in dark rooms of our past, letting in the light on history our high school teachers never talked about. This is a history book for the unwashed multitude, for women, Indians, immigrants, labor, farmers, blacks, Mexicans, and poor white trash - those who are invited to the party through the service entrance.
What was especially startling were the quotes of those beloved "marbleized" men; those whose biographies are promoted by the literary elite as examples of the best that man can become. Eugene Debs was an ordinary man who started out as a railroad union organizer in Terre Haute, Indiana. He evolved into a socialist after being imprisoned for his participation in the 1894 Pullman strike in Chicago. In 1906 Debs spoke out against anti-miner activities in Idaho; he described it as a hellish outrage. His article was published in a paper. "Theodore Roosevelt, after reading this (Deb's speech), sent a copy to his Attorney General, W. H. Moody, with a note: "Is it possible to proceed against Debs and the proprietor of this paper criminally?" (pg. 341)
Rather than fight, Roosevelt chose to adopt the ideas of the Socialist and convince voters so they could stay in power. Otherwise, the Communist revolution of 1918 would have been preceded by one, in this country, in 1916. The Republicans may have adopted the ideas but that was it. Just like other politicians before and since, you can write laws establishing an EPA but secretly cut their funding, or as in the case of the Bush and Clinton, Reagan, and Carter administrations, choose not to follow the law at all to appease a powerful elite. So, we see that the Teddy Roosevelt we love in the history books is really only a shrewd politician.
Later, the Wilson administration (a Democrat) rounded up the socialist and locked them away for their comments against sedition laws and child labor abuses. On his way to prison, Debs said, "I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
Capitalist thought they'd crushed labor again by eliminating its voice. In the 20's and 30's, workers discovered they could shut out the scabs by taking over the factories - they created the "wild-cat strike." These strikes went against the union leadership, which then, and now, are often controlled by forces disinterested in worker's rights. The wild-cat strike is what broke capitalism not big labor unions; this is one of the fallacies that Zinn exposes.
In his conclusion, Professor Zinn ends on a shrill note. He seems uncertain where our dream of America will take us. Will we see a reckoning where the 1% that rule, the autocrats and plutocrats, must share more with the rest of us? Zinn's utopian predictions seem far-fetched for societies divving up scarce resources. Or, will they continue to play groups off against each other while bribing a smaller and smaller portion of the middle class to play along? This has been a successful strategy so far; as you will see if you read the book.
I found this book thoroughly troubling. In the end, as a soldier, an intellectual, and a member of the middle class, with deep roots in this country (since 1642), I find myself still hopeful that the American dream is out there. Now, thanks to Professor Zinn, I am perhaps more politically savvy. Because of this text, I am resolved more than ever to look at my fellow American, white, black, or whatever, with fresh hope. We must put aside our differences and make America anew.
"It is a race in which we can all choose to participate, or just to watch. But we should know that our choice will help determine the outcome. (pg. 688)." I should add that by sitting on your hands you affect the outcome but it may not be to your liking.
If this was helpful in your purchase, please vote. |
Herbert Calhoun (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-27 00:00>
This is a much-needed corrective to mainstream American history. It is an alternative view of our national story - which also includes the perspectives of America's primary historical minorities - Native Americans, Blacks, Women, and Hispanics.
This version of American history seeks to straighten out some of the more obvious distortions caused by the mythical exaggerations and omissions in the story told in mainstream American history of white men only heroics. And on this point, I must say the book is wildly successful. (A milder example of the standard rationalization for the shortcomings of our forefathers for instance is to be found in the recent, Wilkinson's Jefferson's pillow, where the Virginia quartet of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Mason's moral inconsistencies are ironed out as "the ways" of their times, etc.)
In the vein of Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, and WEB Du Bois' Reconstruction in America, Zinn makes no apologies for viewing the economic interests of our founding fathers through a slightly socialistic or Marxist prism. In many ways it is well that he has done so, because as is the case with Beard and Dubois, while Marxist economic analysis may not always be a perfect fit to American history, it is heads-and shoulders above what is offered as the standard historical fare - which to any thinking person is mostly indigestible and often insulting pabulum - always carefully obscuring the economic connections which often are the only important subtexts.
Even though I am not as allergic to Marxist analysis as some of the other reviewers, I was a bit surprised to see both the Bacon's and Shay's rebellions being given such prides of place in Zinn's version of American history. While one cannot disagree that these were indeed important events - that have been underplayed in standard history books (as is also true of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry) - nevertheless, overemphasis raises one's antennae in the same way that the syrupy pseudo-patriotic versions of standard history do (for example the mythical exaggerations of the fight at the Alamo, the battle of Bunker Hill, the Boston Tea Party, etc.).
However, even in these instances, it is to Zinn's credit that he leaves a roadmap to his sources so that the reader can do his own further investigation. This, I did on several occasions, and Zinn's analysis, in my view, has proven to be as close to a "gold plated" standard of scholarship as one is likely to ever get.
The most important point of the book is that Zinn's explanations unerringly connect the dots and threads that run through American history. There are no "blank periods" no unanswered questions as is the case in the standard versions of American history. When you finish reading this manuscript you will have the feeling that you have enough to understand the complete picture. From the founding of the nation to the present, you will have an honest framework upon which to build.
Even though one may not always agree, and may even be suspect of the Marxist twist to economic analysis, one cannot deny that when compared with the more standard versions of American history, where economics is finessed or left out altogether, this one provides us with the "true skinny."
In standard American history books, the patchwork of discontinuities, omissions, embellishments, ideological and patriotic rationalizations, excuses for violence and brutality, puffed up white boy heroics, etc., makes it impossible to connect the dots and see the threads connecting what is going on today with what has happened in the past.
And While the People's History is not the final word, it sets us on a new path towards the whole truth. I am grateful to Dr. Zinn for writing this book. Five stars.
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J. Segal (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-27 00:00>
In A People's History of the United States, author Howard Zinn seeks to present U.S. history through the eyes of ordinary people, depicting the struggles of Native Americans against European and U.S. conquest and expansion, slaves against slavery, unionists and other workers against capitalism, women against patriarchy, African-Americans against racism and for civil rights, and others, as Zinn suggests, whose stories are not often told in mainstream histories. A dissident work, A People's History has become a major success, and was a runner-up in 1980 for the National Book Award, which was won that year by Leon F. Litwack for his epic history Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. A People's History has been adopted in high schools and colleges throughout the United States and frequently updated since its publication in 1980, with the most recent edition covering events through 2003.
According to Dan Flynn of neoconservative David Horowitz's website Front Page Magazine, "The New York Times review opined that the book should be 'required reading' for students. Professors have heeded this counsel. Courses at the University of Colorado Boulder, UMass-Amherst, Penn State, and Indiana University are among dozens of classes nationwide that require the book. The book is so popular that it can be found on the class syllabus in such fields as economics, political science, literature, and women's studies, in addition to its more understandable inclusion in history. Amazon.com reports in the site's "popular in" section that the book is currently #7 at Emory University, #4 at the University of New Mexico, #9 at Brown University, and #7 at the University of Washington. In fact, 16 of the 40 locations listed in A People's History's "popular in" section are academic institutions, with the remainder of the list dominated by college towns like Binghamton (NY), State College (PA), East Lansing (MI), and Athens (GA)."
In a 1998 interview prior to a speaking engagement at the University of Georgia, Zinn told Catherine Parayre he had set "quiet revolution" as his goal in the writing of A People's History.
"A quiet revolution is a good way of putting it. From the bottom up. Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives. It would be a democratic socialism. I'm thinking of the German and the French and the Scandinavian models. Here in the U.S., we need to develop social benefits that we don't have in this country: health care, unemployment insurance, benefits for pregnant women, et cetera. President Clinton thinks he is being generous, but he is not. We still have a long way to go, and we should learn from other countries."
Chapter 1: Christopher Columbus
A People's History begins by looking at the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World from the point of view of the natives on the island of Hispaniola, which is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them water, food, gifts.
Zinn quotes from the diaries of Christopher Columbus:
Columbus wrote: "As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts."
In Chapter 1 of A People's History, Zinn wrote:
The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the other side of the Atlantic--the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. For, like other informed people of his time, he knew the world was round and he could sail west in order to get to the Far East." "...So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians, who swam out to greet them. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears. This was to have enormous consequences: it led Columbus to take some of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailed to what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask presented to Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild visions of gold fields. On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa Maria, which had run aground, Columbus built a fort, the first European military base in the Western Hemisphere. He called it Navidad (Christmas) and left thirty-nine crewmembers there, with instructions to find and store the gold. He took more Indian prisoners and put them aboard his two remaining ships. At one part of the island he got into a fight with Indians who refused to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his men wanted. Two were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. When the weather turned cold, the Indian prisoners began to die..."
In another section, Zinn outlines his ideas about writing history:
It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others... [but] any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest... [T]his ideological interest is not openly expressed... it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability... The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks) - the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress - is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders...
The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.
Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican War as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott's army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American War as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by African-American soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by African-Americans in Harlem, the post-war American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can "see" history from the standpoint of others.
Criticisms:
Although widely praised in leftist political circles, the book is not without its critics, primarily from conservatives, such as Dan Flynn and the liberal Michael Kazin of Dissent Magazine. The main argument of those critical of A People's History is that it is too focused on perceived class conflict in the United States, and wrongfully attributes sinister motives and intentions to the American political elite.
They argue that Zinn's portrayal of U.S. Founding Fathers as "leaders of the new aristocracy" who cynically sought to replace one form of oppressive elite control with another, is disingenuous. They argue that while the founders rhetoric contrasted with their actions - in that some of the founders were themselves slave owners-- they did establish the most liberal democracy in the world and codified into law basic human rights and that these views, reflected in public and private documents, were fundamentally held beliefs, and not just rhetoric. They also find fault with Zinn for what they say is his selective use of the experience of immigrants, focusing only on the hardships faced by immigrants and not on the success that many millions have and continue to experience.
A growing body of scholarship produced since 1975 supports the counter-argument that many of the founding fathers were slave owners, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. For example, Paul Finkelman, legal historian and editor of the 18-volume encyclopedia called Articles on American Slavery established in his book Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson that Jefferson owned more than 500 slaves during his lifetime.
In a 1996 interview with Calvin Simons, fordemocracy.org/speeches/1996-04-22-zinn-howard-interview.htm Zinn discussed Richard Hofstadter's 1948 book, The American Political Tradition: and the Men Who Made It (1948).
The American Political Tradition established how both the liberal and conservative traditions in the United States (including Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover; Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt; the founding fathers; and the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians who followed the founders) "hewed to certain fundamental principles" of nationalism, capitalism and private enterprise." Zinn said those same principles continue to guide the Democratic and Republican parties. Both, he said, "are very closely connected with corporate wealth; they both have the same fundamental foreign policy; they both support enormous military budgets and only differ in small ways on how much social spending there should be to take care of human needs." |
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