Howard Zinn looks at the way history has been written and finds a high degree of conformity, with most American history beginning with a celebration of the conquest of the New World by Columbus. The emphasis is on heroic discovery, and this also involves highlighting the important characters like Columbus and either ignoring or downplaying their faults. Zinn finds that Samuel Eliot Morison, for instance, is too good a historian to ignore the truth completely, but he gives the unpleasant details no more than a mention and then passes on to something more in keeping with the emphasis on the hero and on progress.
Zinn makes the valuable point that history is generally written from the standpoint of the collective memory of the state. The state in this case is the American state, and it has been built by the white European settlers who conquered the Native Americans and created the current society. In the broadest sense, history is written by the winner, and the winner aggrandizes his or her own accomplishments and describes issues in heroic terms, with the ancestors of the present state being the heroes who produced this state. Such a history is narrow in focus, resulting from the social order in which it is written and seeing the world in divided terms, with an "us-against-them" orientation. That is, there is the state that is "remembering" history, and there are the outsiders who are seen as enemies or at best allies of the most important state. This is an internalized and centrist point of view that colors every aspect of written history.
What Zinn calls for is a true people's history, recognizing that nations are artificial constructs which divide people when in fact all people are really alike and united in their humanness. This people's history would have a wider focus than traditional history and would cross borders and other divisions such as ethnic, racial, and sexual as well as national. Zinn is not simply viewin...