A People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn

   1980; 246 pages (first ten chapters only.)  New Author? : No.  Genres : U.S. History, Social Justice, Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    I remember it well: it was the first time I questioned what they were teaching us in American History class.

 

    We had facts to memorize about the Civil War.  It started in 1861 at Fort Sumter.  It ended in 1865 at Appomattox.  It was fought to free the slaves, which Abraham Lincoln did on January 1, 1863 when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

 

    And my junior high school brain wondered:  why was there a two-year gap between the start of the war and when the slaves were freed?  What were we fighting for in 1861-62?  Why isn't the teacher telling us about that time gap?

 

    Later on, in high school or college, I learned that technically, the Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in states that had seceded from the Union.  It did not apply to the slaveholding “border states” of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware.

 

    That made me wonder if there was a lot more of what we were being taught as "United States history" also omitted key information.  And why.

 

What’s To Like...

    Note: The full version of Howard Zinn’s 1980 book, A People’s History of the United States, has 21 chapters, and covers topics from Columbus to Watergate.  Later, an “updated” issue was published comprising Chapters 11 onward, with a couple of added chapters that addressed more-recent events.  That book is titled The Twentieth Century – A People’s History; I’ve read it; it’s fantastic, and it is reviewed here.   This present review is for the first ten chapters of the original book, which are:

 

01.  Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress (the Discovery of the New World)

02. Drawing the Color Line (the Birth of Slavery)

03. Persons of Mean and Vile Condition (First Rebellions)

04. Tyranny is Tyranny (All Men are Created Equal, except...)

05. A Kind of Revolution (The War of Independence, the Constitution)

06. The Intimately Oppressed (Women’s Suffrage)

07. As Long as Grass Grows or Water Runs (Indian Removal from the Eastern US)

08. We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God (the Mexican-American War)

09. Slavery without Submission, Emancipation without Freedom (the Civil War)

10. The Other Civil War (Labor Unrest in the 1800s)

 

    Howard Zinn was politically an unabashed Socialist, and a prodigious author.  He wrote a series of “People’s History” books, starting with this one, which inspired other authors to take up the cause of writing history from the common man’s point of view.  (See the first excerpt, below.)

 

    That shift of focus makes this book a reading treasure for any American history enthusiast.  It was enlightening to learn about the brilliant Seminole chief, Osceola, and meet the feisty women’s suffragette champion, Sojourner Truth.  Andrew Jackson is aptly described as “the most aggressive enemy of Indians in US history”, and the eloquence of the writings Frederick Douglass was awe-inspiring.

 

    Neither George Washington nor Abraham Lincoln rate very high in Howard Zinn’s opinion.  The former was one of the richest persons in colonial America, and was more interested in preserving the "favored" status of the upper class to which he belonged.  Lincoln was a shrewd politician who knew when to give pro-abolition speeches, and when to give pro-slavery ones.

 

    I learned a lot about workers’ strikes and labor protests, starting as early as the 1600s.  These were never mentioned in my high school history classes: Shays’ Rebellion, Bacon’s rebellion, the Anti-Renter Movement, the Flour Riot of 1837, and many more.  I chuckled to see my boyhood city of Reading, Pennsylvania mentioned.  There, during a strike against the railroad for withholding wages: “two thousand people gathered, while men who had blackened their faces with coal dust set about methodically tearing up tracks, jamming switches, derailing cars, setting fire to cabooses and also to a railroad bridge.” (pg. 243)

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.7/5 based on 14,543 ratings and 3,302 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.07/5 based on 232,910 ratings and 6,782 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Cliometricians (n., plural) : statistical historians.

 

Excerpts...

    In that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokee, 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 industrialization as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills…   (pg. 10)

 

    They organized.  Women struck by themselves for the first time in 1825.  They were the United Tailoresses of New York, demanding higher wages.  In 1828, the first strike of mill women on their own took place in Dover, New Hampshire, when several hundred women paraded with banners and flags.  They shot off gunpowder, in protest against new factory rules, which charged fines for coming late, forbade talking on the job, and required church attendance.  They were forced to return to the mill, their demands unmet, and their leaders were fired and blacklisted.  (pg. 223)

 

“The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.”  (pg. 10)

    There’s not much to quibble about in A People’s History of the United States.  In the entire 246 pages of those first 10 chapters, there was only one cussword, a damn, and that was because it was in a direct quote.

 

    Speaking of direct quotes, Howard Zinn knew that there’d be pushback to his “People’s History” tome.  He therefore included a slew of direct quotes in the text, and is to be commended for that.  But be aware that vocabulary, spelling, and capitalization rules in English have changed considerably since the 16^th-19^th centuries.  Reading this book can sometimes be slow and laborious.. But that’s in no way a criticism, and kudos to Zinn for adhering to word-for-word quotations of historical speeches and writings.

 

    We live in a world where books are banned and schoolteachers are muzzled so that only the “my country is always right” side of our nation’s past is presented.  Today, it’s more important than ever to make sure that the complete history of the United States is available for all those who want to learn about it.   Many thanks to Howard Zinn and others for penning this “People’s History” series.

 

    9½ Stars.    And for the record, yes, I did finally learn why the Emancipation Proclamation came out two years after the Civil War started and why it only applied to slaves in the states that had seceded from the US.