A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is an attempt to redress imbalances and ethnocentrism embodied in earlier historical accounts of the history of the United States. He examines first the ways in which American history has been written, some of the biases that have been displayed in such writing, and then sets out to offer a different point of view with a historiography that avoids the problems of the past and provides an alternative assessment of how this country developed, one not steeped in patriotic fervor and racial and ethnic prejudices.

Zinn finds that history in the past has been written as if all those who read history have common interests which the historian is dedicated to serving. He says historians are not being intentionally deceptive, though clearly he does feel that deceptions are inherent in the work as they are approaching it. He says that the historian is trained in a society that suggests that learning and education are seen as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, and yet history as written shows that in some way what is being written serves as such a tool to allow the majority class to aggrandize its own accomplishments and to demonize those who have been seen as standing in the way of progress. Even historians who have a broader view of the truth, such as Samuel Eliot Morison, is described as having told the truth but in a way that glosses over the unpleasant details and again promotes

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ing tensions and rights and wrongs to determine who is right and who is wrong and to take a stand with the right, often with the victims. Zinn thus chooses to write from the standpoint of the victims--the Arawaks, the slaves, the Cherokees, the New York Irish, all the downtrodden and destroyed peoples in every confrontation with white European and then American majority power. In the long run, says Zinn, the oppressors are also victims, and he sees the need to hear the voices of the oppressed to understand their story, to understand the processes of history, and to see where we might be heading in the future: I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare (11). In Chapter 2, "Drawing the Color Line," Zinn describes history for the point of view of the blacks who were brought to this country as slaves. He begins his chapter with a quotation from a black American writer, J. Saunders Redding, describing the arrival of a slave ship in 1619. Slavery is not glossed over at all as it is in some histories, and instead Zinn examines the issue from the beginning, asking why slavery was adopted in the first place and show

Category: History - A