A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.) | Howard Zinn

A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.) | Howard Zinn | Bitter Medicine for an Election Year

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A People's History...

	A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.) Howard Zinn Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005 - 768 pages average customer review:based on 639 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Shocking look at history

Very interesting read. Many of us were told in elementary school the winners write history. Well this book is told from the "losers" point of view. It gives a more rounded view of U.S. history you thought you knew in and out. The making of America was a hostile take over, not the romantic fairy tale we memorize about equality of ALL men (and women), or the fact that our ancestors were looking for religious freedom. Europeans wiped out Native Americans who taught them how to farm and live off the land, ironically we celebrate this with Thanksgiving, but forget about clan who made it possible. When you finish reading this you will realize the many things you celebrate today is because of a systematic injustice of others.

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Bitter Medicine for an Election Year

Zinn's history of social struggle in America is nothing short of brutal. I just finished it. When all the atrocities against poor Americans and the rest of the world are portrayed without the usual flag-waving patriotic rhetoric and justification associated with it, we see a stark and persuasive condemnation of American domestic and foreign policy. It is a difficult read and not without slanting of its own, but compared to the standard representations of American history, they are minor. I was aware of Native American history since I've studied that for a long time. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown is a classic. But new to me was the organic generation of the labor movement. Unions evolved from spontaneous uprisings against oppressive business practices, not as a result of socialist agitation. Imagine, only 100 years ago in America, people were struggling to reduce child labor from 10 hour days! As many people were dying in industrial accidents then as in automobiles today - mining, railroad, steel, construction, farming and factory were all dangerous occupations with absolutely no compensation owed to the injured or killed. It took demonstrations, strikes, and class-action lawsuits to improve these atrocities. Today we see some trying to eliminate the class-action process, mislabeling it the cause of increased medical and insurance costs!

Slavery is another important ingredient in this history and does much to illuminate the rift between white America and black. To have an ancestry who were literarily bought and sold, denied education, prohibited from marrying, and defined in public policy as inferior or even sub-human leaves an irrepressible scar in the psyche of an entire race. The violent counteraction to the on-going suppression of blacks is met with prisons and punishment only slightly more refined than lynching but with the same general inspiration and purpose. Immigrants, the women's movement, worker's rights, minorities, the poor and jobless, gay rights, non-Christian and atheist rights, the struggle goes on and on while the richest 1% in America determine the political structure, balance of power, candidates for public office, legislation, and foreign policy. Our foreign policy today can be neatly summarized - as in George Orwell's 1984 - as a perpetual state of war to promote unopposed patriotism and industrial welfare. When necessary, we switch partners and the dance goes on. We've propped up dictators, overthrown democracies, and armed death squads against revolutionaries modeling their cause on our own American Revolution - all for economic domination that seems beyond reproach for monetary stability and growth. We've lost our recent wars against indigenous opponents for exactly the same reasons our founding republic defeated the most powerful nation on earth in our own War of Independence. When its your home, you have everything to lose and will never give up the fight.

The same brutal attenuation of the character and value of other cultures is seen today as justification for a continued militancy in foreign policy extended from that applied to non-whites here at home. Surrounded by mountains of civilian corpses in Iraq, we have the audacity to claim we are trying to establish freedom and democracy. With our shiny-new foreign policy of preemptive war, if we were to relive the Cold War, we would have struck the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with hundreds of nuclear bombs in 1949 - surprise!

Mostly, Zinn establishes the argument that the America government is now, and mostly always has been, a tool for the wealthy to control the population at large while establishing institutions and rules of law that justify and promote that structure. Today we see the out-sourcing of manufacturing, pharmaceutical, software, and research jobs from America to foreign shores for the sole benefit of mega-corporations more intent on the short-range goals of increased profit margins - already fabulously high - then a concern for the well being at home and world leadership based upon a humanitarian America. We continue to maintain an armed force geared to fighting the Soviet Union and Red China (two mythical monsters) while the rest of the world looks at us as a once reliable power now sickened by its own self-interest, Christian dogma, a furious economy that relies on threats and enemies for its continued inferno, and a military-industrial complex that the supreme commander of the monstrous military machine that ground across Europe to victory in the second world war warned against as the most serious threat to American democracy. We see government institutions today - from the Supreme Court, and Congress and White House, to governmental departments like Defense, Labor, Justice, and Environmental Protection, the State Department and CIA that promote a democracy that ensures the well being of the ultra rich and privileged.

Zinn portrays a history where every freedom, right, and protection under the law has been won by people uniting to rise up and rile against the power of the establishment - from emancipation to voter rights and integration to a 40-hour work week. And the establishment has always feared most the power of unification. So we have today the knife-edge divide between liberals and conservatives, blue states and red, Christians and heathens, allies and enemies, gays and straights, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Muslims, Cops TV and nightly news broadcast featuring black male suspects.

But Zinn fails to acknowledge that America has in fact progressed, arduous and painful as has been the process and is today comparatively ahead of many other societies. Historically, progress has often entailed social enlightenment that broke the bonds of discrimination and injustice practiced worldwide and not unique to America. But this is still a powerful work that can change one's recognition of the origins of social unrest within our boarders and cast light on a militant foreign policy with haunting awareness.

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Good companion to a "conventional" history.

I've read this book more than once over the years. It is certainly the most thorough, and well written, book of its kind. It's not quite so radical as it once was because texts have added more social material like this since Zinn first published his books.
I have noticed, though, that the academic histories of every other country is going in the opposite direction. Whitewash is in order for everywhere else, and academic conferences have been open about this bowdlerizing of non-American history, done to fight American "arrogance." But it results in the histories of other countries being a bigger joke than America's history ever was. (examples; Mexico's slaughter of indigenous people isn't dealt with aside from Cortez, ignoring nineteenth and twentieth century massacres; Mexican forces are STILL fighting in the Yucatan. Another example is the alleged "peace and love" Muslims used to spread in India--when even Muslim accounts describe brutal mass murder and temple burning instead of tolerance. As a graduate students in history I learned of HUNDREDS of things like these that historians don't want to publicize.)

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