The historian wants to shatter your old notions about U.S. However, in A People’s History and later in A Young People’s History of the United States, as well as throughout the book you hold in your hands, right there along with the struggle and suffering is Zinn’s idealism, embodied in a tableau vivant of new heroes along with the new perspectives.
In 1980, the lives and struggles of ordinary people had to muscle their way into the story to take up a place alongside generals on horseback, stirring words of historical documents, and Manifest Destiny. Moving economics closer to the center of American history is more common today. They all are characters in Zinn’s American drama. The horrors are there all right, and Zinn is clear-eyed and persistent in forcing us to look at them.Įconomic exploitation is never far from Zinn’s mind as he recounts the history of the robber barons of the nineteenth century, the poor and working-class men of the South who took up arms for the Confederacy, the “girls” of the mill towns in Massachusetts who walked away from their machines to fight for better pay, the farmers driven to revolt by ruinous taxes on land. Well, a historian’s job is to find out what actually happened. Some complain that his iconoclasm, his tearing down of long-revered heroes, and his corrections to the record leave only a dreary slog through centuries of oppression, struggle, and suffering. In the nearly forty years since the first edition of A People’s History appeared, Zinn’s critics have tried to sandbag him. Suarez’s probing questions and Zinn’s humane (and often humorous) voice-along with his keen moral vision-shine through every one of these lively and thought-provoking conversations, showing that Zinn’s work is as relevant as ever. Longtime admirers and a new generation of readers alike will be fascinated to learn about Zinn’s thought processes, rationale, motivations, and approach to his now-iconic historical work. imperialism from the Indian Wars to the War on Terrorism, World Wars I and II, the Cold War, and the fight for equality and immigrant rights, all from an unapologetically radical standpoint. Viewed through the lens of Zinn’s own life as a soldier, historian, and activist and using his paradigm-shifting A People’s History of the United States as a point of departure, these conversations explore the American Revolution, the Civil War, the labor battles of the 19th and 20th centuries, U.S. Truth Has a Power of Its Own: Conversations About A People’s History is a collection of never-before-published conversations with Howard Zinn, conducted by the distinguished broadcast journalist Ray Suarez in 2007, that covers the course of American history from Columbus to the War on Terror from the perspective of ordinary people-including formerly enslaved, workers, immigrants, women, and Native Americans.
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