“It’s 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, author of Spartacus andThe Immigrants “[It] should be required reading.” —Eric Foner,New York Times Book Review Library Journal calls Howard Zinn’s iconic A Peoples History of the United States “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those…whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.” Packed with vivid details and telling quotations, Zinn’s award-winning classic continues to revolutionize the way American history is taught and remembered. Amazon Review Consistently lauded for its lively, readable prose, this revised and updated edition of A Peoples History of the United States turns traditional textbook history on its head. Howard Zinn infuses the often-submerged voices of blacks, women, American Indians, war resisters, and poor laborers of all nationalities into this thorough narrative that spans American history from Christopher Columbuss arrival to an afterword on the Clinton presidency. Addressing his trademark reversals of perspective, Zinn--a teacher, historian, and social activist for more than 20 years--explains, My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)--that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. If your last experience of American history was brought to you by junior high school textbooks--or even if youre a specialist--get ready for the other side of stories you may not even have heard. With its vivid descriptions of rarely noted events, A Peoples History of the United States is required reading for anyone who wants to take a fresh look at the rich, rocky history of America. From Publishers Weekly According to this classic of revisionist American history, narratives of national unity and progress are a smoke screen disguising the ceaseless conflict between elites and the masses whom they oppress and exploit. Historian Zinn sides with the latter group in chronicling Indians struggle against Europeans, blacks struggle against racism, womens struggle against patriarchy, and workers struggle against capitalists. First published in 1980, the volume sums up decades of post-war scholarship into a definitive statement of leftist, multicultural, anti-imperialist historiography. This edition updates that project with new chapters on the Clinton and Bush presidencies, which deplore Clintons pro-business agenda, celebrate the 1999 Seattle anti-globalization protests and apologize for previous editions slighting of the struggles of Latinos and gays. Zinns work is an vital corrective to triumphalist accounts, but his uncompromising radicalism shades, at times, into cynicism. Zinn views the Bill of Rights, universal suffrage, affirmative action and collective bargaining not as fundamental (albeit imperfect) extensions of freedom, but as tactical concessions by monied elites to defuse and contain more revolutionary impulses; voting, in fact, is but the most insidious of the controls. Its too bad that Zinn dismisses two centuries of talk about patriotism, democracy, national interest as mere slogans and pretense, because the history he recounts is in large part the effort of downtrodden people to claim these ideals for their own. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 05:00:51 +0000
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