A people's history of the United States / Howard Zinn ; introduction by Anthony Arnove.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780061965593
- ISBN: 0061965596
- ISBN: 9781315656519
- ISBN: 1315656515
- Physical Description: xxii, 729, 16 pages ; 21 cm.
- Edition: Thirty-fifth anniversary edition.
- Publisher: New York, NY : HarperPerennial, 2015.
- Copyright: ©2003
Content descriptions
General Note: | Edition statement taken from the introduction, page xiii. Includes an afterword from the author and "P.S.: Insights, interviews & more" (author interview and book discussion, an excerpt from Original Zinn: conversations with David Barsamian, and recommended reading). "A previous edition of this book was published in hardcover in 1999 as the Twentieth Anniversary Edition by HarperCollinsPublishers."--Title page verso. |
Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 689-708) and index. |
Formatted Contents Note: | Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress -- Drawing the Color Line -- Persons of Mean and Vile Condition -- Tyranny Is Tyranny -- A Kind of Revolution -- The Intimately Oppressed -- As Long as Grass Grows or Water Runs -- We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God -- Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom -- The Other Civil War -- Robber Barons and Rebels -- The Empire and the People -- The Socialist Challenge -- War Is the Health of the State -- Self-help in Hard Times -- A People's War? -- "Or Does It Explode?" -- The Impossible Victory: Vietnam -- Surprises -- The Seventies: Under Control? -- Carter-Reagan-Bush: The Bipartisan Consensus -- The Unreported Resistance -- The Clinton Presidency -- The Coming Revolt of the Guards -- The 2000 Election and the "War on Terrorism" -- Afterword. |
Search for related items by subject
Subject: | United States > History. History, Early Modern 1451-1600. History, Modern 1601-. United States. United States > History. HISTORY > United States > State & Local > General. United States. |
Genre: | History. History. |
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Other Formats and Editions
Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Status | Due Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Homer Public Library | 973 ZIN (Text) | 000159067 | Nonfiction | Available | - |
Kirkus Review
A People's History of the United States
Kirkus Reviews
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian--Zinn posits--has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this ""people's history"": ""it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance."" So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do--only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Publishers Weekly Review
A People's History of the United States
Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
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, women's 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 Clinton's pro-business agenda, celebrate the 1999 Seattle anti-globalization protests and apologize for previous editions' slighting of the struggles of Latinos and gays. Zinn's 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." It's 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. (Feb. 16) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved