Howard Zinn
1980
Howard Zinnʻs celebrated 'peopleʻs history' was a response to the widespread demand for a serious general history of the United States written from a radical, non-Establishment point of view. it was intended as a counterweight to the many conventional American histories which chronicle the country's story through the activities of political leaders, heroes and saviours of the nation. Here instead is history 'from the bottom up'. Powerful, fluent and argumentative, its vigorous reinterpretation of the American achievement, and its cost, has provoked debate amongst historians and laymen alike. Professor Zinn tells the story of Columbus's arrival in American from the standpoint of the Indians who welcomed him to the Bahamas. He looks at colonial America from the standpoint of the black slave, the white indentured servant, and women; and at the American Revolution through the popular rebellion the Founding Fathers sought to control. The story of the Civil War is not centered on Lincoln but on black abolitionists and workers against the draft; the story of the late nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution is centered on the agrarian rebels, striking workers and exploited immigrants; the 'Age of Reform' in the twentieth century, from Roosevelt to Roosevelt, is set in the context of labour struggles, radical trade unionism, and the socialist and communist movements. There is an unorthodox essay on the Second World War, and Vietnam is studied from the vantage point of civilian and military dissidents. This passionate and dramatic account turns orthodox American history upside down, portraying the suffering and turmoil behind 'the march of progress'. Where Howard Zinn deals with governments and their policies he is critical, even disrespectful; but he does not try to whitewash the popular movements that occupy the centre of the stage, and his "People's History" remains the work of a scholar as well as a radical.
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