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 the idea of white European heroes in the founding of the nation. Zinn shows this when he writes,
To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves--unwittingly--to justify what was done (8).
In offering his own view of how history should be written, Zinn makes reference to the statement of Henry Kissinger that histo...