A People’s History of the United States

A People’s History of the United States, nonfiction work of history by American historian Howard Zinn that was originally published in 1980, with an updated edition that appeared in 2003. It offers a clear and acknowledged point of view and tells U.S. history with a focus on those who were acted upon by the heroes of the more usual top-down versions of history.

As the book’s subtitle, 1492–Present, suggests, the history begins with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas, told from the perspective of the Arawak peoples living where Columbus landed. It continues through the conquest by Europeans of Central and eastern North America. Subsequent chapters cover the slave trade, the conditions of poor people living in the 13 colonies, the American Revolution, and the resistance to the injustices of the new government. Zinn goes on to cover the subjugation of women, the wars and policies of Indian removal, slave rebellions and abolition movements leading to the Civil War, and the rise of both labor unions and robber barons. The history describes social movements and anti-progessive government actions throughout the 20th century, and, in its updated edition, up to the war on terrorism of the beginning of the 21st century.

Zinn’s epic history of the United States is an attempt to chronicle and venerate those who represented a different America. Enthusiastically partisan, A People’s History of the United States eschews the perceived objectivity of dominant narratives of American history and reconfigures that history from the standpoint of the marginalized, the oppressed, and the resistant. The America which emerges from this book is one that is marked by internal conflict and struggle. Zinn’s eloquent and passionate account of America’s dissident historical subjects fighting slavery, racism, labor exploitation, and corporate greed is also a call for the continuation of that struggle. Though many historians regarded the book’s clear advocacy as disqualifying it as true history, it is often assigned as supplemental reading in high school and college history classes, and it arguably brought about a change in the conventions of both the writing and the teaching of history.