A People's History of the United States

History from the bottom up

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, first published in 1980, is a one-volume history of America told from the point of view of ordinary and oppressed people. It runs from Columbus's arrival in 1492 to the present, and later editions extend it to the 2000s. It has sold millions of copies and is widely used in high schools and colleges, often as a counterweight to standard textbooks.

Zinn was a historian and an activist in the civil rights and antiwar movements. He taught at Spelman College, a Black women's college in Atlanta, until it fired him in 1963 after he supported student protests, and then at Boston University. He had flown as a bombardier in World War II, and his doubts about that war shaped his view of history.

In the first chapter, Zinn states his method openly. All history involves choosing what to include, he says, and every choice serves some interest. Standard histories tell the story of nations as if everyone in them shared the same interests. Zinn argues that this hides deep conflicts between rulers and ruled, rich and poor, men and women, and white and nonwhite people. He chooses to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, the Constitution from the viewpoint of slaves, and the Civil War from the viewpoint of Irish workers in New York. He does not claim to be neutral. The 25 chapters of the latest editions run in time order, and many take their titles from the voices of the period, such as "Tyranny Is Tyranny," "War Is the Health of the State" and "Or Does It Explode?"

Columbus, conquest and the color line

The book opens with Columbus and the Arawaks of the Bahamas and Hispaniola. Zinn uses Columbus's own journals and the writings of the priest Bartolomé de las Casas to describe how the Spanish enslaved the native people, forced them to search for gold and killed many who resisted. Within decades, much of the native population had died from violence, forced labor and disease. Zinn argues that textbooks celebrate Columbus as a hero while mentioning this cost in a line, if at all.

He then turns to the English colonies. He describes the wars against the Powhatan and the Pequot. He traces how slavery grew in Virginia and how a firm color line between Black and white servants was drawn by law. In Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, poor white and Black servants joined in an uprising in Virginia. Zinn argues that colonial elites then worked to divide poor whites from enslaved Black people, giving whites small privileges so they would side with the rich. This idea, that elites divide the poor by race to prevent joint revolt, runs through the whole book.

Revolution and Constitution

Zinn sees the American Revolution as a conflict in which colonial leaders turned popular anger against England, and away from themselves. Many poor colonists were already rioting against local elites. By leading the fight for independence, Zinn argues, the founders kept control of a restless population. He notes that the Declaration of Independence's promise that all men are created equal left out women, enslaved people and Native Americans. He also describes mutinies by unpaid soldiers of the Pennsylvania and New Jersey lines, which the army put down.

He draws on the historian Charles Beard to argue that the Constitution protected the interests of property owners, creditors and slaveholders. Women, enslaved people, Native Americans and men without property had no voice in making it. He describes Shays' Rebellion, an uprising of indebted farmers in Massachusetts, as a key reason the elites wanted a stronger central government.

Removal, war and slavery

Zinn describes Indian removal under Andrew Jackson, including the forced march of the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears. He describes the Mexican War of 1846 as a war of conquest that many soldiers and citizens opposed. He gives space to women's lives in the 19th century: their legal limits, their work in the textile mills of Lowell, and the rise of the women's rights movement at Seneca Falls.

On slavery, he stresses the resistance of enslaved people: escapes, revolts such as Nat Turner's, and the Underground Railroad. He argues that the federal government ended slavery for its own reasons, under pressure. He cites Lincoln's 1862 letter to the editor Horace Greeley, which says his main goal is to save the Union, with or without freeing the slaves. In Zinn's account, emancipation came from military need and from the resistance of enslaved people, and the government then abandoned Black Southerners after Reconstruction. The result was a new system of control through sharecropping, Jim Crow laws and terror.

The other Civil War: workers and capital

A large part of the book covers class conflict. Zinn describes the rise of the industrial robber barons and the government's support for them through land grants, tariffs and troops. He tells the story of the great strikes and labor struggles: the railroad strike of 1877, the Haymarket affair, the Homestead and Pullman strikes, the Lawrence textile strike and the Ludlow massacre in Colorado. He gives attention to the Socialist movement of Eugene Debs and to the Industrial Workers of the World.

He argues that the reforms of the Progressive Era and the New Deal were real gains, but that they came from pressure from below, and that they also served to save the system from deeper change. In the Great Depression, he describes hunger marches, rent strikes, the sit-down strikes in the auto plants and the Bonus Army of veterans driven out of Washington by troops. The New Deal, in his view, gave relief and recognized unions in order to calm this unrest, while leaving the basic distribution of wealth in place.

Empire and war

Zinn is critical of American wars. He presents the Spanish American War and the brutal war in the Philippines as the start of an overseas empire. He describes opposition to World War I and the jailing of critics under the Espionage Act. He calls World War II a "people's war" in the minds of most Americans, then questions it. He points to the internment of Japanese Americans, segregation in the armed forces and the bombing of civilians in Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Drawing on his own experience as a bombardier, he argues that even a war against fascism used methods that should be judged. He describes a raid he flew in April 1945, weeks before the war in Europe ended, in which American planes dropped napalm on the French town of Royan.

He treats the Vietnam War as a failure of American power and a victory for the movement against it. He describes the massacre at My Lai, the bombing of Cambodia and the government's own secret history of the war in the Pentagon Papers. He gives the antiwar movement, including soldiers and veterans who turned against the war, a central place. In his account, the war ended because the Vietnamese would not give up and because opposition at home made it too costly to continue.

Movements and the "guards"

The later chapters cover the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the American Indian Movement, prison protests and the gay rights movement. Zinn argues that each won change through protest, not through the goodwill of leaders. He tells the civil rights story through local people as much as through national leaders: the students at the Greensboro lunch counter, the Freedom Riders, and the organizers of SNCC who risked their lives to register voters in Mississippi. He notes that the federal government often moved only when violence made headlines. On the 1970s, Zinn argues that the system protected itself during Watergate. Removing President Nixon let the country believe the problem was one bad man, while the congressional hearings on illegal FBI and CIA operations led to little lasting change. He then describes the decades after the 1970s as a bipartisan consensus, in which both parties served corporate interests and military power. A chapter on "unreported resistance" lists the protests of those years that the national press gave little attention.

Near the end, he describes what he calls the revolt of the guards. The middle class, he argues, acts as a buffer between the rich and the poor. Teachers, police, soldiers and office workers are paid to keep the system running. Zinn hopes these guards will see that their interests lie with the poor and will join them. Later editions add chapters on the Clinton years, the 2000 election and the "war on terrorism."

What the critics say

The book has been both influential and sharply criticized. Many readers and teachers credit it with bringing Native Americans, enslaved people, women and workers into the story. Many historians, including some on the left such as Michael Kazin, argue that it reduces American history to a simple story of elites oppressing everyone else. Critics say it leaves out evidence that does not fit, gives little sense of how ordinary people also supported the system, and judges the past without enough context. The education scholar Sam Wineburg criticized its certainty and its handling of sources. Zinn replied that standard textbooks are biased too, and that he was simply open about his own point of view. The book has also been the target of political efforts to keep it out of schools. In 2013, emails showed that Indiana governor Mitch Daniels had asked in 2010 that the book not be used in the state's classrooms.

Who should read it

Read it if you want to hear the voices standard textbooks leave out, and if you are ready to argue with what you read. Pair it with a conventional survey or a critical review to see how historians weigh the evidence.