"There is an underside to every age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged."
"A brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those who have been exploited politically and economically and whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories." - Library Journal
A classic since its original landmark publication in 1980, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is the first scholarly work to tell America's story from the bottom up—from the point of view of, and in the words of, America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. From Columbus to the Revolution to slavery and the Civil War—from World War Two to the election of George W. Bush and the "War on Terror" - A People's History of the United States is an important and necessary contribution to a complete and balanced understanding of American history.
"One of the most important books I have ever read in a long life of reading...It is a wonderful, splendid book—a book that should be read by every American, student or otherwise, who wants to understand his country, its true history, and its hope for the future." - Howard Fast
"Zinn's work is a vital corrective to triumphalist accounts." –Publishers Weekly
"It has been Zinn's life work to illuminate the subjectivities others have ignored." - Boston Phoenix"
Containing just the twentieth-century chapters from Howard Zinn's bestselling A People's History of the United States, this revised and updated edition includes two new chapters -- covering Clinton's presidency, the 2000 Election, and the "war on terrorism."
Highlighting not just the usual terms of presidential administrations and congressional activities, this book provides you with a "bottom-to-top" perspective, giving voice to our nation's minorities and letting the stories of such groups as African Americans, women, Native Americans, and the laborers of all nationalities be told in their own words.
Chapter One
The Empire and the People
Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in the year 1897: "In strict confidence... I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."The year of the massacre at Wounded Knee, 1890, it was officially declared by the Bureau of the Census that the internal frontier was closed. The profit system, with its natural tendency for expansion, had already begun to look overseas. The severe depression, that began in 1893 strengthened an idea developing ',;within the political and financial elite of the country: that overseas markets for American goods might relieve the problem of `' underconsumption at home and prevent the economic crises that in the 1890s brought class war.And would not a foreign adventure deflect some of the rebellious energy that went into strikes and protest movements toward an external enemy? Would it not unite people with government, with the armed forces, instead of against them? This was probably not a conscious plan among most of the elite-but a natural development from the twin drives of capitalism and nationalism.Expansion overseas was not a new idea. Even before the war against Mexico carried the United States to the Pacific, the Monroe Doctrine looked southward into and beyond the Caribbean. Issued in 1823 when the countries of Latin America were winning independence from Spanish control, it made plain to European nations that the United States considered Latin America its sphere of influence. Not long after, some Americans began thinking into the Pacific: of Hawaii, Japan, and the great markets of China.There was more than thinking; the American armed forces had made forays overseas. A State Department list, "Instances of the Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad 1798-1945" (presented by Secretary of State Dean Rusk to a Senate committee in 1962 to cite precedents for the use of armed force against Cuba), shows 103 interventions in the affairs of other countries between 1798 and 1895. A sampling from the list, with the exact description given by the State Department:
1852-53--Argentina. Marines were landed and maintained in Buenos Aires to protect American interests during a revolution.1853--Nicaragua--to protect American lives and interests during political disturbances.1853-54--Japan--The "Opening of Japan" and the Perry Expedition. [The State Department does not give more details, but this involved the use of warships to force Japan to open its ports to the United States.]1853-54--Ryukyu and Bonin Islands--Commodore Perry on three visits before going to Japan and while waiting for a reply from Japan made a naval demonstration; landing marines twice, and secured a coaling concession from the ruler of Naha on Okinawa. He also demonstrated in the Bonin Islands. All to secure facilities for commerce.1854--Nicaragua--San Juan del Norte [Greytown was destroyed to avenge an insult to the American Minister to Nicaragua.]1855--Uruguay--U.S. and European naval forces landed to protect American interests during an attempted revolution in Montevideo. 1859-China-For the protection of American interests in Shanghai.1860--Angola, Portuguese West Africa--To protest American lives and property at Kissembo when the natives became troublesome.1893--Hawaii--Ostensible to protect American lives and property; actually to promote a provisional government under Sanford B: Dole. This action was disavowed by the United States.1894--Nicaragua--To protect American interests at Bluefields following a revolution.
Thus, by the 1890s, there had been much experience in...
For much of his life, historian Howard Zinn has been chronicling American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version taught in schools - with its emphasis on great men in high places - to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace.
Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, Zinn's A People's History of the United States is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of - and in the words of - its women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers. Here we learn that many of our country's greatest battles - labor laws, women's rights, racial equality - were carried out at the grassroots level, against steel-willed resistance. This edition of A People's History of the United States features insightful analysis of some of the most important events in this country in the past one hundred years.
Featuring a preface and afterword read by the author himself, this audio continues Howard Zinn's important contribution to a complete and balanced understanding of American history.
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In his conclusion to the essay “Just and Unjust War,” Howard Zinn writes, “It remains to be seen how many people in our time will make that journey from war to nonviolent action against war. It is the great challenge of our time: how to achieve justice, with struggle, but without war.” In this powerful collection of new and selected essays, Zinn explores our warring ways over the last hundred years, as well as his own transformation from bombardier to pacifist, from Brooklyn Navy Yard shipfitter to anti-war activist.
Howard Zinn on War includes the essays “Violence and Human Nature,” “Non-Violent Direct Action,” “The Bombing of Royan,” “Of Fish and Fisherman,” “A Speech for LBJ,” “Dow Shalt Not Kill,” “Aggressive Liberalism,” “The Curious Chronology of the Mayaguez Incident,” “The CIA, Rockefeller, and the Boys in the Club,” “ What Did Richard Nixon Learn?,” “Machiavellian Realism and U.S. Foreign Policy: Means and Ends,” “Terrorism Over Tripoli;” and others.
To celebrate the millionth copy sold of Howard Zinn's great People's History of the United States, Zinn drew on the words of Americans -- some famous, some little known -- across the range of American history. These words were read by a remarkable cast at an event held at the 92nd Street YMHA in New York City that included James Earl Jones, Alice Walker, Jeff Zinn, Kurt Vonnegut, Alfre Woodard, Marisa Tomei, Danny Glover, Myla Pitt, Harris Yulin, and Andre Gregory.
From that celebration, this book was born. Collected here under one cover is a brief history of America told through dramatic readings applauding the enduring spirit of dissent.
Here in their own words, and interwoven with commentary by Zinn, are Columbus on the Arawaks; Plough Jogger, a farmer and participant in Shays' Rebellion; Harriet Hanson, a Lowell mill worker; Frederick Douglass; Mark Twain; Mother Jones; Emma Goldman; Helen Keller; Eugene V. Debs; Langston Hughes; Genova Johnson Dollinger on a sit-down strike at General Motors in Flint, Michigan; an interrogation from a 1953 HUAC hearing; Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper and member of the Freedom Democratic Party; Malcolm X; and James Lawrence Harrington, a Gulf War resister, among others.
NarratorMy viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.
Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can "see" history from the standpoint of others.
My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those wars, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run, the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.
Stiff, understanding the complexities, I will be skeptical of governments and their attempts, through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest. I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don't want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: "The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is."
Historian, activist, and bestselling author Howard Zinn has been interviewed by David Barsamian for public radio numerous times over the past decade. Original Zinn is a collection of their conversations, showcasing the acclaimed author of A People's History of the United States at his most engaging and provocative.
Touching on such diverse topics as the American war machine, civil disobedience, the importance of memory and remembering history, and the role of artists -- from Langston Hughes to Dalton Trumbo to Bob Dylan -- in relation to social change, Original Zinn is Zinn at his irrepressible best, the acute perception of a scholar whose impressive knowledge and probing intellect make history immediate and relevant for us all.
Can the System be Fixed?
Kgnu, Boulder, Colorado
August 8, 2002
I want to start with something from F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, a novel about the Roaring Twenties and the excesses that characterized that period just before the Great Depression. Fitzgerald wrote, "They were careless people. . . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
It's interesting that you should quote Fitzgerald. The twenties have much in common with what we are seeing today. Then there were governments in power that insisted on distributing the wealth of the country in such a way that the rich got richer and the poor were stuck where they were or got even poorer. Wild speculation took place. Vast fortunes were made, while people in poor areas of cities were struggling to pay the rent and put food on the table. It was capitalism run amok. Interestingly, Pope John Paul II, in an interview in an Italian newspaper, talked about "savage, unbridled capitalism." That's what we saw in the twenties and that's what we are seeing today. Except that today it is even more unbridled, more savage. And it is running amok on a global scale. It is causing havoc in various countries. Here in the United States many people are in desperate circumstances without medical care, adequate housing, and education.
Why is it that crime in the streets has historically attracted much more attention than what Ralph Nader calls crime in the suites, white-collar crime?
There are several reasons. The people who define crime are connected to those in the suites. They are the ones who say what it is. If somebody holds up a store or robs someone on the street, of course those are crimes. If somebody robs consumers of millions of dollars or robs workers of their lives because of unsafe work conditions, that's not crime. That's business. The media constantly focus on mayhem being done by ordinary people. But what is being done by the corporate giants usually doesn't get into the media until it explodes in a wave of scandals as we have now. There are other reasons for the emphasis on street crime over corporate crime. Street crime is overt, whereas the corporate variety is secret. It is therefore important to have some individuals point out what is being done in secret. At the turn of the century, they were called muckrakers. People like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell exposing the doings of the Standard Oil Company. In the twenties, there was Fiorello LaGuardia, a congressman from East Harlem, who criticized the rich because the poor in his district were struggling to make ends meet. And today we have our muckrakers. There's Jim Hightower and Barbara Ehrenreich. Ralph Nader has long fought corporate crime. We need to seek out the information that the muckrakers of our time are putting out so that they we aren't completely ignorant of what is going on.
To provide more historical context, how would you compare the current era to that of the robber barons in the late nineteenth century? And explain who they were.
There is a remarkable book by Matthew Josephson entitled The Robber Barons. They were the great corporate executives and moguls of the late nineteenth century, such as the Vanderbilts, Hills, and Harrimans who controlled the railroads; the Carnegies and Mellons who controlled steel and aluminum; the J. P. Morgans who worked out deals by merging companies and making huge profits thereby. They were the people who manipulated the money market. The robber barons owned the factories where workers toiled for fourteen hours a day.
From that event, this audio was born. It includes selections from Christopher Columbus, a Lowell mill worker, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Eugene Debs, a HUAC interrogation, Malcolm X, and a Gulf War resister, which are interwoven with commentary by Howard Zinn. This makes for exciting listening and is on its own an invaluable contribution to understanding American history.
"A brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those who have been exploited politically and economically and whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories." –Library Journal
A classic since its original landmark publication in 1980, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is the first scholarly work to tell America's story from the bottom up—from the point of view of, and in the words of, America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. From Columbus to the Revolution to slavery and the Civil War—from World War Two to the election of George W. Bush and the "War on Terror"—A People's History of the United States is an important and necessary contribution to a complete and balanced understanding of American history.
"One of the most important books I have ever read in a long life of reading...It is a wonderful, splendid book—a book that should be read by every American, student or otherwise, who wants to understand his country, its true history, and its hope for the future." —Howard Fast
"It has been Zinn's life work to illuminate the subjectivities others have ignored." —Boston Phoenix"
Growing numbers of people are disgusted by the disaster of poverty, war, oppression, and environmental destruction caused by global capitalism. But is there an alternative? Author Alan Maass argues that socialism—a democratically planned economy based on workers' control—is rational, necessary, and possible. With an afterword by Howard Zinn. Alan Maass is the editor of the website SocialistWorker.org.
