A People's History of the United States
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
As seen in the award-winning feature film, Lady Bird.
A classic since its original landmark publication in 1980, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is the first scholarly work to tell America's story from the bottom up the point of view.
There is an underside to every age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged.
Historian and social activist Howard Zinn relays history in the words of America's women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant labourers. From Columbus to the Revolution to slavery and the Civil War – from World War II to the election of George W. Bush and the "War on Terror" – A People's History of the United States is an important and necessary contribution to a complete and balanced understanding of American history.
'A brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those who have been exploited politically and economically and whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.' – Library Journal
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.
