Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States was a landmark of literal popular history--a ground-up view of the American experience focusing on the masses of downtrodden, oppressed, and often ignored groups over the powerful elite highlighted in traditional histories. From the first chapter, which chronicles the barbarity inflicted by Columbus on the indigenous Arawaks, Zinn paints a grim picture of events usually sanitized in American classrooms. His heroes are labor leaders, economic insurgents, slave rebels and anti-war activists, not the wealthy or jingoistic who propelled history in their own interests at the expense of others. Since its first publication in 1980, A People's History of the United States, a runner-up for the National Book Award, has sold more than two million copies and been revised and updated several times. It was last published in 2015 with a new introduction by Anthony Arnove (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, $19.99, 9780062397348).
Howard Zinn's death in 2010 marked the loss of a great historian and social activist. In a 2007 letter to the New York Times Book Review, responding to criticism of A Young People's History of the United States, Zinn wrote: "I want young people to understand that ours is a beautiful country, but it has been taken over by men who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties. Our people are basically decent and caring, and our highest ideals are expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which says that all of us have an equal right to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' The history of our country, I point out in my book, is a striving, against corporate robber barons and war makers, to make those ideals a reality." --Tobias Mutter
