A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

At 700 pages, this book has kept me quiet for many weeks now, interspersed with a couple of lighter reading moments. It should be required reading. We’ve all heard people complaining about bias in history books; well this one tries to address that bias by telling the history of America from the point of view of everybody other than rich, white, powerful men. Zinn writes about class warfare in the USA, which began with the enslavement of blacks and the annihilation and displacement of the Indians, and continued with tenant uprisings, slave revolts, abolitionist agitation, the feminist upsurge, the Indian guerilla warfare. ‘After the Civil War,’ he writes, ‘a new coalition of southern and northern elites developed, with southern whites and blacks of the lower classes occupied in racial conflict, native workers and immigrant workers clashing in the North, and the farmers dispersed over a big country, while the system of capitalism consolidated itself in industry and government.’ The book is the story of land grabs and economic favouritism, unconscionable governments (both Democrat or Republican) favouring the wealthy elite who were and still are integral to their rule, their flagrant disregard of laws that were instituted to protect ‘the people’ and their rights and, at the centre of all this, war: imperialist war motivated by the desire for markets, the desire to keep a war economy ticking over, the desire to impress the world with America’s military might. Zinn includes a chapter on hope, where he details the small but determined groups who stand up to the government on behalf of the ‘little’ people, the women, the migrants, the blacks, the Indians, the poor and disabled. But this book was written in the 1990s and revised before the second invasion of Iraq and I seriously wonder how Zinn would view the changes to the American psyche as a result of that.