I have read this book three times. Each time it has been a different book.
The first time I was seventeen, in a high-school American History class in Reedsport, where the textbook was a Houghton Mifflin product that opened with Columbus and ended with Ronald Reagan and treated every American war, every territorial expansion, and every domestic upheaval as a moral problem that had been correctly resolved by the republic’s constitutional machinery. A teacher I am grateful to handed me Zinn’s book at the end of the year and said — not to the class, just to me, privately — read this in the summer and do not bring it back until you have. I read it in the summer. I did not finish it. I read enough of it. It was the first book that ever told me the textbook was lying, and it gave me the word lying, and it gave me the beginnings of a vocabulary for noticing what the textbook had been doing. I was furious for most of that summer. The fury was productive. I have been reading differently ever since.
The second time I was twenty-eight, out of the Marines, in a rental in Bellingham, reading the revised 1995 edition. By then I had read further into the field. I had read James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me. I had read Eric Foner. I had read the Souls of Black Folk and The Wretched of the Earth and Black Reconstruction and most of Chomsky’s political writing. I could see, the second time, what was impressive about Zinn and what was limited. The impressive part: Zinn’s narrative energy, his commitment to telling the history from below, his refusal to let the standard American myths carry their usual weight. The limited part: Zinn’s tendency to flatten historical actors into moral positions, his insufficient attention to contradictions inside the popular movements he was celebrating, his reluctance to grant agency to figures he found politically uncongenial. A historian I respect had told me once that Zinn was a better polemicist than historian, and on the second reading I could see what that critique meant. The book is not a balanced survey. It is a corrective. It exists to correct a canon that was so systematically weighted in one direction that any corrective has to weight hard in the other direction to produce balance across the culture. The balance is at the level of the library, not the level of the book.
The third time was last year, at the kitchen table in Otaru, through a winter, from a 2015 edition that included a short posthumous introduction by Anthony Arnove — Zinn had died in 2010 and had not lived to see the presidential elections that followed, or the platform collapse, or the long unwinding of the unipolar American moment the book had been arguing against throughout. Reading it a third time, at fifty-three, I saw a different book again. I saw the book as a document of a specific moment in the American academic left — the post-1960s, pre-1990s moment when a certain kind of intellectually serious activist historian was still publishing with mainstream trade houses and reaching millions of general readers. Zinn was the most successful practitioner of that mode. The mode is no longer available. The publishing economy that sustained it is gone. The university appointments that produced it are gone. The general-reading public that bought it is, in its prior form, gone. A People’s History is a monument to a kind of public intellectual production that existed for about thirty years and that cannot be recreated by the current professional infrastructure.
The book has a simple organizing argument: that American history, as usually taught, is told from the perspective of presidents and generals and industrialists, and that the history told from the perspective of the people those presidents and generals and industrialists were doing things to is a different history, and that the different history is the one Zinn is going to narrate. Chapter by chapter, from Columbus through the 1990s, he retells the standard events from the bottom up. The conquest of the Americas, told from the perspective of the Arawak. The American Revolution, told from the perspective of the landless poor who were conscripted into it. The Civil War, told from the perspective of the enslaved and the drafted. The Gilded Age, told from the perspective of the striking workers and the lynched. The New Deal, told from the perspective of the Black sharecroppers it excluded. Every war, told from the perspective of the draft resisters. The narrative is consistent. The perspective is consistent. The book’s signature is the consistency.
What the book got right, forever: the selection. Zinn understood that a people’s history is not just a matter of tone but a matter of which events you select to tell and which you skip. He put the Ludlow Massacre in the twentieth century chapters where most textbooks did not put it. He put the Philippine-American War in the nineteenth century chapters where most textbooks erased it. He put the COINTELPRO operations of the FBI in the mid-century chapters where most textbooks had noted them in footnotes if at all. The selection is the act of historical writing that Zinn excelled at. Even the readers most critical of his interpretive voice admit that the selection was corrective in ways the canon needed.
What the book got wrong, honestly: the movements. Zinn treats the popular movements he celebrates with a grace and a forgiveness he does not extend to the institutional actors he opposes. The labor movement’s internal racism is softened. The early feminist movement’s racial exclusions are underreported. The 1960s New Left’s failures — the sectarian collapses, the Weather Underground’s political incoherence, the way the movement ate its own Black and female participants — are visible in the book only glancingly. Zinn was writing a corrective and the corrective required him to lean toward the popular side. This is understandable. It is also a limit. A reader encountering only Zinn will come away with a cleaner picture of American resistance movements than those movements actually produced.
What to read next, if you start with Zinn: Robin D. G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe. Nikhil Pal Singh’s Black is a Country. Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson series, which is biography but which tracks the institutional side Zinn under-covered. Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams. The list is long. Zinn is an entrance, not an endpoint. He meant himself to be that. He said so publicly. The readers who treated him as an endpoint are the readers he would have disagreed with.
I will read this book again. I already know where. I already know when. The book keeps opening. The country it is about keeps providing the evidence. Howard Zinn is not here to see the current chapter. The method he used is still the right method for seeing it. Whoever writes the next people’s history of the United States, covering the years from the date Zinn’s last edition left off to whatever end date the next writer chooses, will be walking on the ground Zinn cleared. The ground is worth walking on. The book is worth rereading. The country is not done producing the evidence the book was written against. That is the ambiguous tribute, and the correct one.
A related vagobond.com piece: A Question of Authority: Can There Be Authority in an Anarchist Society.
Readers and fans of A People’s History of the United States will really enjoy The Anarchist Manifesto Project 2026 — twenty-six kinds of political refusal, A through Z in the phonetic alphabet, each written from inside its own position. Zinn’s bottom-up method, applied not to the past but to the arguments still being made now, by the people still making them. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
