A People's History of the United States Howard Zinn

A People's History of the United States

Author: Howard Zinn

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Publication Date: 02 August, 2005

ISBN: 9780060838652

Pages: 768

Subjects: History

Available as: Trade Paper, 978-0-06-083865-2 Trade Cloth, 978-0-06-019448-2 Trade Cloth, 978-1-56584-366-0 Trade Cloth, 978-0-06-014803-4 Trade Paper, 978-0-582-48948-6 Trade Paper, 978-0-06-196558-6 Trade Paper, 978-0-06-196559-3 Trade Paper, 978-1-56584-826-9 Trade Paper, 978-0-06-052837-9 Trade Paper, 978-0-06-093731-7 Trade Paper, 978-1-56584-379-0 Trade Paper, 978-0-06-092643-4 Trade Paper, 978-0-06-090792-1 E-Book - Epublication content package, 978-0-06-198983-4

Description:

Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History of the United States is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

PW Publishers Weekly

Review Source: Publishers Weekly

Review Date: 2003-02-15

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