A People's History of the United States: 1492 to the Present
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A People's History of the United States: 1492 to the Present description
Consistently lauded for its lively, readable prose, this revised and updated edition of A People's 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 Columbus's 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 you're 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 People's History of the United States is required reading for anyone who wants to take a fresh look at the rich, rocky history of America. |
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A People's History of the United States: 1492 to the Present Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Inaccurate at Best.
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A historian has two duties. The first is to get the facts right about what happened. The second is to interpret them honestly and impartialy. This book fails on both counts.
The problem with this book is not the author's political views; many political extremists wrote excellent history. Nor is it that his political views influence his work: many historians fail the imparitality test, and still can at least give an interesting, if biased, account of why things happened as they did. The problem is that the book is that it is, first, dishonest: the author deliberatly leaves out "inconvenient" facts and puts in inaccurate claims that support the author's thesis ("noble savage opressed by greedy capitalists"). The second problem is that it is simply wrong: quite a few of the "facts" it presents are simply wrong. A biased history book is one thing; a dishonest, inaccurate history book is something else altogether.
For example, it is simply not true that the English settlers in Virginia genocided the Powhatan Indians; it is not true that the Chesapeake colonies avidly desired slaves, or that income inequality increased in the 18th century colonies; it is not true that Lincoln "changed his views to suit his audience"; it is not true that a woman named Polly Baker was "tried for having children out of wedlock" (it is a well-known literary hoax perpetuated by Benjamin Franklin to call attention to the mistreatment of women by the justice system); it is not true that the Tet offensive was a Northern victory (quite the opposite, in fact, dramatic TV footage to the contrary notwithstanding).
And so on and so forth. The non-facts presented as "history" in this book could fill a volume--and they did (at least, they filled quite a few pages in Prof. Oscar Handlin's review of the book, back in 1980). It is hard to decide whether Zinn is simply a careless, incompetent historian or whether he is knowingly distorting and inventing "facts", that is, if he's lying. This, however, is a moot point, since this is hardly the only general history book available about the United States. With so many good books out there, why bother with this one? |
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