[In the following review, Kuklick claims that while A People's History is a radical textbook, it exhibits many of the problems common to textbooks in general.]

Howard Zinn admits that “a people's history” is not the best description of his work, and I've tried to understand it by figuring out what would be the best description. The book is clearly about the oppression of the people: there are eloquent renditions of the destruction of Indian culture and rich analyses of the torment of the slaves, their revolts and their degradation after the Civil War. There are long explorations of the misery of the working class, its attempts to avoid becoming cannon fodder in American wars, and its struggles to form unions. Much time is also devoted to the study of left and radical politics. Finally, Zinn writes of the subjugation of women, although here I was struck by the brevity of his treatment, as if he were a relative latecomer to feminism who hadn't fully integrated its views into his own.

At the same time, Zinn has almost nothing to say about the daily texture of the social life of the people and, what is more surprising, there is no discussion of the people's religion—surely a central aspect of American experience in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and an important element in much of the nineteenth.

On its face, then, Zinn has written a book about class conflict and the awareness of such conflict among the masses. Eric Foner, writing for The New York Times, has pointed this out in arguing that Zinn has related only part of our history. What is needed, Foner says, is an integration of Zinn's narrative with a similar narrative about the elite. But Foner's analysis also falls short of understanding what Zinn is doing.

When Zinn comes to the post-1945 period, he actually spends much of his time exploring the doings of the elite. There is an extended summary of cold-war diplomacy from a “revisionist” standpoint and lengthy examinations of the connections among corporate, business and military leadership. Watergate is nothing if not an elite affair; yet Zinn has much to say about it.

The book is actually a radical textbook history of the United States. It's designed to give the left a usable past and, I think Zinn hopes, to inculcate into students a certain view of America. One gets a sense of this from the historical tempo. Zinn's 600 pages cover almost 500 years of history; yet one-third of the book is on the last sixty years, one-quarter on the last thirty. Fifteen percent of the book is spent on Zinn's favorite decade in the history of humankind—the 1960s.

I don't mean to derogate A People's History by assessing it as a radical textbook. Zinn writes clearly and articulately; his narrative is coherent and thematically unified. On the assumption that textbooks are socializing agents I prefer this sort of text to the usual ones celebrating industrialists and Presidents, texts for which Zinn has an ill-concealed but justifiable contempt.

At the same time, the book suffers the defects of the textbook genre. Its comprehension of issues is stunted; its understanding of materials is unnuanced. A People's History doesn't rise above these standard textbook problems in the way that, say, a rare sort of text like Carl Degler's Out of Our Past (1959) does. Degler's biases are liberal, but he brought to his task a subtlety and sophistication that Zinn doesn't possess.

Take Zinn's neglect of religion. Most of the time, I suspect, he believes it's the opiate of the masses, and wants to dismiss discussion of “the people” in their drugged state. But such a view not only ignores something important about the people but also overlooks the revolutionary and anti-elite dimension to American religious belief. The Massachusetts antinomian controversy, the Salem witch trials, the periodic revivals and contemporary cult movements all display this potential, yet Zinn neglects them all.

Another set of examples: his radicalism to the contrary, Zinn is unable to realize that the resilience and shrewdness of American liberalism are the greatest enemies of the left reform he hopes for. He can't resist writing some sympathetic words about the New Deal, despite the fact that Franklin Roosevelt, more than any other single person, is responsible for the twentieth-century success of the system Zinn abhors. When he treats Joe McCarthy, he goes no further than the liberal notion that the Wisconsin Senator was a grotesque anti-Communist. Zinn doesn't see that McCarthy saw through a glass darkly: part of his message to “the people” was that internationalist diplomacy was the product of a smug ruling class whose policies had the chief consequence of sending the ruled off to needless wars. This veiled message was also surely part of McCarthy's appeal.

Perhaps the most significant example comes from reviewing Zinn's attempts to grasp the failures of “the people” over five centuries. His story is of continuous expressions of class consciousness and solidarity. For Zinn, the workers, the poor, the oppressed know who their enemies are, and their history is one of persistent and recurring attempts to throw off the oppressors' yoke. Yet they never succeed; indeed, Zinn effectively admits that they've failed again and again by noting how successful “the system” has been at containing or transforming protest. How do we explain the people's constant failure and the elite's constant success?

Zinn's text is so blunted that it has only mechanistic answers to this question. The ruling group found “a wonderfully useful device,” the symbols of nationhood; “the profit system” began to look overseas; the system had “an instinctual response” for survival; “American capitalism” needed international rivalry and demanded a national consensus for war, and “the system” always responded to pressures by “finding new forms of control.”

I don't find these explanations very sensitive; they reflect, again, the failures of the textbook genre. But all this is not to say that Zinn's is not an excellent text. It's rather to say that one should read Carl Degler first.