“A People’s History of the United States”

Howard Zinn

This was one of those books that took me a long time to get through; 650 pages of small print, dense with names and dates, it’s basically my precise weakness in reading. It is also—and, in reading it over the course of several weeks, I assure you I have had time to think about this—one of the most important books I’ve ever read.1 I’ll let Zinn speak for himself in what purpose the book actually serves:

As for the subtitle of this book, it is not quite accurate; a “people’s history” promises more than any one person can fulfill, and it is the most difficult kind of history to recapture. I call it that anyway because, with all its limitations, it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people’s movements of resistance.

That makes it a biased account, one that leans in a certain direction. I am not troubled by that, because the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction—so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people’s movements—that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission. (631)2

This is the counterpart to my “I went to public schools in the USA” education.3 This is the book that points out the things I never think about, because we’re gently guided away from thinking about them.4

It is also, setting aside the aforementioned name-and-date density, very well written. Some choice quotes, where I just truly appreciated the writing style:

In premodern times, the maldistribution of wealth was accomplished by simple force. In modern times, exploitation is disguised—it is accomplished by law, which has the look of neutrality and fairness. By the time of the Civil War, modernization was well under way in the United States. (240)

… one could call that a zinn-ger.5

It had long been true, and prisoners knew this better than anyone, that the poorer you were the more likely you were to end up in jail. This was not just because the poor committed more crimes. In fact, they did. The rich did not have to commit crimes to get what they wanted; the laws were on their side. (516)

And one more quote that I enjoyed enough to copy down:

Vietnam was “lost” (the very word supposed it was ours to lose). (551)

The chapter that felt like the original end to the book, prior to it being updated for the Clinton and Bush administrations, had a little bit of a call-to-action feel to it, but given when it was written, it mostly just made me think oh, this is a really useful way to look at the elections that’ve happened in my adult life.

Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes. (637)

I enjoyed the hell out of this book. I wish I could get my hands on a version that covered up until now, but alas, old historians never die… they just become primary sources. Still, despite being over 20 years old, the only part of it that actually felt dated to me was how little reference to the LGBTQ rights movement there was.6 Absolutely worth the read; check it out.7

It’s also one of the first times in quite a while that I’ve used Ulysses’ little ‘notes’ sidebar to store a set of quotes to maybe insert into my writing, so: brace yourself. ↩

I’m quoting from the 2003 “Perennial Classics” edition; given how many different versions of the book I saw when I picked it up at Powell’s, that may still not be enough to narrow down exactly which version it is, but hopefully the page numbers will at least get you close. The afterword in this edition ended on page 688. ↩

I’m not quite paraphrasing Zinn, but I got close:
> For the United States to step forward as a defender of helpless countries matched its image in American high school history textbooks, but not its record in world affairs. (408) ↩

For example: it’s a little weird that we talk up how close any given presidential election is when, to use 2016 as an example, of the eligible voters in the US, Donald Trump got 25.6% of the vote, and Hillary got 26.8%. ↩

Given how mad at me autocorrect got about trying to type that pun, one probably shouldn’t. ↩

Roughly two paragraphs, all told; one mention of the earlier parts of it, and several chapters later, an admission that it should’ve been covered more. Yep! It should’ve! ↩

This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩