finally finished this after slogging through it for two weeks, and it was definitely worth it, Besides being a good refresher in U, S. history, particularly from a nonnationalist perspective, I learned a lot about people's movements, and the ways that people as opposed to 'the great men of history' have created change in our country.
It's good to know that some of what Zinn covers in A People's History, even though unorthodox at the time he wrote it, has already filtered into public education.
For instance, it was very clearly taught in my high school U, S. history course that Columbus was not the genteel 'discoverer' of the Americas but rather the wealthobsessed leader of a genocide against indigenous people in the Caribbean,
However, we didn't cover the fact that even as late as thes and 's the U, S. government was supporting violence against American Indians, Or that 'equal protection' under theth amendment was granted to corporations many decades before it was granted to women, Literally, judges declared that corporations were considered 'persons' just as they had finally said black men were persons and not just property and then they later ruled that the term didn't apply to women.
And we certainly didn't cover the continuous use of military forces by both corporations and government against worker protests, events like the Ludlow Massacre a strike by miners against the Rockefeller family's Colorado Fuel amp Iron Corporation, where first the Rockefeller's own hired thugs, and then the government's attempts to bring in strikebreakers, did not break the determination of the workers, and eventually the National Guard launched machine gun fire on a tent colony of workers and their families.
And while we maybe mentioned the death of civilians at Hiroshima, we didn't talk about the millions of civilians killed by U, S. troops in the Philippines, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and both directly/indirectly in numerous Central and South American countries,
The gist of Zinn's book and this is a long gist, but it's a long book: the U, S. was founded to protect the interests of the wealthy, and continuous class conflict has been suppressed regularly through the creation of nationalist sentiment, as well as through the pitting of oppressed social groups one against the other for instance, poor blacks against poor whites, or the lower class against the middle class.
Furthermore, as we have accepted 'history' as it has been given to us in school textbooks, we've allowed ourselves both to believe the myth that 'the people' are actually represented by the government, and that we have democracy, while allowing a rich elite to maintain power and help create the continuous war economy we now live in, in which we continuously say we cannot afford to provide people with jobs, food, or education, but yet somehow shell out trillions to military contractors to create weapons we should never even be thinking about using.
Some of this I had already picked up here and there, but Zinn's book is a sort of a thick concentration of it all, a thorough look at who "we" as the United States really are.
While certainly not a pretty selfportrait, it does end on a hopeful note: 'the people' have created change, and we can do it again,
The catch: change has always been achieved by direct action violent and nonviolent, It has never been achieved by voting, Why write a history of the United States when you know it is onesided and basically propaganda I understand his stated reasons for writing the book but I think the truth is better than "this is propaganda to fight mainstream history that I think is propaganda.
" Any onesided historical accounts are not worth people's time and knowingly writing one is a waste of time, The truth remains obscured. History as it's told in our high school history textbooks is history that focuses on American leaders, whether political, military, or business, Zinn argues convincingly that we need also to see history as it happened to "the people," and that this perspective is by no means synonymous with that of America's elites.
In fact, the official line in America's history and politics has been that America is basically one big middle class, Certainly, America long had a larger middle class than most of the rest of the world, but as Zinn points out, we are "a middle class society governed for the most part by its upper classes.
" And what we see time after time as in the present day is that those who govern us have worked consistently for their own class first and for the countryasawhole second.
Zinn takes a hard look at the slaughter of the native Americans, at the exploitation of blacks and poor whites, at the alliance between government and business interests, at the struggles for the abolition of slavery, for labor rights, for civil rights, for women's rights.
. . and over and over we see politicians taking action, passing and enforcing legislation only when popular movements force them to do so, Not simply when the electorate that voted them into office wants it, but when the people demand it in ways that cannot be easily ignored as the polls more or less can when both parties are so similar on many basic issues.
Voting, in fact, can be seen as consitently as a device for making people feel empowered while changing little,
I'll let Zinn speak for himself a bit,
“My viewpoint, in telling the story of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own, Nations are not communities and never have been, The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest sometimes exploding, most often repressed between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex.
And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert
Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.
”
Zinn puts himself consistently on the side of "the people," inasmuch as there can be said to be such a groupcertainly it's not a unified group, and Zinn recognizes this.
Still, Zinn would argue, the diversity represented by "the people" have more in common with one another as much as they have been prevented from seeing it than they do with the elites who run the country.
Fair warning: it's a long read, and pretty dense, Definitely not what we used to call "drunkonthebeach reading, " In fact, if you want to read a book that shares some insights with this book without the exhaustive focus, you might start with James Loewen's sitelinkLies My Teacher Told Me.
Really, these are two books that should be read by anyone who wants to understand our country and its history, If it's true that "those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it," then I think a necessary corollary is that "those who don't know the truth about history are doomed to repeat it.
" This book should be required reading in high school,
I finally get it, The rich always want to get richer at the expense of the poor, The object of the game is always control, If you want certain rights or freedom you always have to fight for them because they are not going to give them out of the goodness of their hearts.
And that is history in a nut shell, .