A People's History of the United States

Zinn opens with an account, from the Arawak Indian point of view, of the horrific slaughter and suffering that came to them and Indians on other nearby islands when Columbus and his followers...

In chapter 2 of A People's History of the United States, entitled "Drawing the Color Line," Howard Zinn argues that the first black Americans, though technically considered servants, were likely...

In A People's History of the United States, Zinn disagrees with Kissinger's vision of history because he feels that it silences the voices of people's experience. Zinn feels that Kissinger's...

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) believed that common people were the real driving force behind history. Most historians had traditionally viewed history in much different ways. For example, many historians...

The first chapter presents a challenge to the traditional viewpoint of the progress of the United States. While there has been a great deal of demographic and economic expansion throughout its...

Howard Zinn titled the opening chapter of his A People’s History of the United States “Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress” to further establish his argument, discussed in his introduction,...

One significant motive for Columbus that led him to oppress Indigenous peoples was his lust for gold. He knew that his financing was reliant upon him finding valuable objects to ship back to the...

In A People’s History of the United States, polemicist Howard Zinn devotes chapter 4, titled “Tyranny is Tyranny,” to a protracted denunciation of the formation of the United States, the authors of...

In Chapter Fourteen, Zinn argues that the official justification for American involvement in the war—that it was undertaken to protect free trade and other rights of nations—is nonsense. He quotes...

The primary thesis that emerges out of the third chapter was that there was a strict hierarchy of power and control in American society. Zinn suggests that the narrative of struggling Colonists...

In this chapter, Zinn poses the question of whether the antagonism between blacks and whites is natural or constructed. He answers that it is not natural, stating that in the American colonies in...

The original question had to be edited. I would suggest that one critical point that Zinn makes regarding the writing of history is that it reflects those in the position of power. "Winners write...

Zinn's main purpose in writing is to liberate the discipline of history from stasis and a sense of detachment from impacting political, economic, and social change. Zinn believes that history can...

Zinn is certainly interested in overturning the popular mythology surrounding Christopher Columbus, and he is unsparing in his condemnation of the famous explorer's treatment of the Arawaks....

Howard Zinn's approach to history was both unique and revolutionary. Historians before him focused on the supposedly great accomplishments of white men in American history, but Zinn argued that...

The point of this chapter in Zinn’s book is that the United States government has consistently abused the Native Americans. The title refers to a phrase used by Andrew Jackson in giving...

In Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, the history shared in the book is, in contrast to mainstream history textbooks, not written from the perspective of "the victors." Rather,...

As far as I can tell, the sentence you quote does not actually appear in this book. However, it is still relevant to Zinn’s book and to anyone reading it. This is because Zinn can easily be...

First, Zinn wrote in this way because he fervently believed in the ideological perspective he took in the book. Zinn was active in social justice issues throughout his long life and academic...

Chapter 4 is in many ways a summation of the last fifty years of revisionist interpretations of the American Revolution. In fact, Zinn essentially adheres to the old Progressive interpretation of...

Though labor unions certainly existed long before, the 1930s, under the cloud of the Great Depression, were truly a hotbed for the rise of labor unions and a multitude of other rights groups and...

Howard Zinn's history of the United States correlates to the Federalist or Republican arguments of history in an antagonistic way. Another way to put it: Zinn's history is often at odds with the...

In the chapter "Some Kind of Revolution," Zinn seeks to undermine the traditional American idea that the Revolutionary War was fought by and for the liberty of common American people. Rather,...

The central thesis of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is that, notwithstanding claims of American exceptionalism based on democracy and equality of opportunity, the political...

In chapter one of his indictment of the United States and the United States’ European progenitors, titled “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress,” Howard Zinn attempts to demolish the notion of...

The U.S. made many concessions to slave holders to keep the Union together. For example, the U.S. army put down a slave revolt in New Orleans in 1811. Slave rebellions were seen as threatening to...

The respective approaches of Howard Zinn and Paul Johnson to early American history are almost diametrically opposite. Johnson, as a staunch conservative, takes the colonists’ claims at face value....

Zinn discusses the robber baron era in chapter 11 of his A People's History of the United States. The Horatio Alger story of "rags to riches" was a key component of the late-nineteenth-century...

Zinn sees "the other civil war" as the conflict between the rich and poor in mid-nineteenth century America. Zinn's "other civil war" is meant to challenge the conventional thinking about the Civil...

Chapter 8 of A People's History of the United States portrays the American nation as one obsessed with a desire to expand its territorial boundaries. The then-president of the United States, James...

The title of chapter 9 of A People's History is "Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom," and its subject is antebellum slavery and its decline during the Civil War and...

In this chapter on the U.S. involvement in World War I, Zinn continues a theme that he began in writing about the Civil War: despite the way history books have been written, wars have not been...

Of all the oppressed people that Zinn has highlighted prior to the nineteenth century, he argues that Native Americans could be dealt with by pure force (along with temporary paternalism) because...

Zinn's historical focus is on marginalized groups in American history. Zinn sees the Progressive movement as a way to combat socialism by enacting social reforms without going toward socialism....

Chapter 5 of A People's History is, along with the preceding chapter, one of two dealing with the American Revolution. In it, Howard Zinn advances an interpretation of the Revolution that...

In using this title, Zinn simply means that, as well as the Civil War between North and South (the actual armed conflict), there was another civil war going on in the United States: a civil war...

Chapter 15, entitled, "Self-help in Hard times," takes a dim view of both the prosperity of the 1920s and the New Deal reforms brought on by the Great Depression. Zinn documents that most of the...

The ultimate fate of the Arawak Indians was to die out. They were killed off by a variety of factors that were connected to the coming of the Spaniards to the New World. In Chapter 1 of this book,...

While many Americans view the Constitution as a revolutionary document that embodies the principles of democracy, Howard Zinn does not see it the same way. He disagrees with this based on the idea...

In chapter 6 of this book, titled "The Intimately Oppressed," the author examines the status of women in early America. He explains how and why their status was inferior. Women could not vote....

To understand why this would be so, think about an analogy in our modern world. Let us imagine that a union was going to go on strike. Would we think that it was strange if its black members and...

In chapter 13 of his A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn argues that American capitalism and its associated imperialism came under mainstream critique by the early 1900s. Though...

There are many different points that Zinn makes in his analysis of Columbus's entry to the "New World." The first point comes in the opening of the chapter. Zinn makes the point that Columbus's...

For Zinn, the differences between both the Federalist and the Democratic- Republicans were cosmetic. Both parties were not actively involved in the enlargement of wealth to more people or...

In Chapter 16 of A People's History of the United States, the author describes the contradictory actions of the US government regarding the officially stated reason to enter World War II. The...

For Zinn, the fundamental argument that establishes the American Revolution was one on economic power and control. Zinn argues that the founding fathers were more concerned about consolidating...