A People’s History of the United States

Most Americans grew up with a familiar story. Columbus discovered America in 1492. Brave explorers tamed a wilderness. The Founding Fathers created a democracy. Great men led the nation through wars and crises toward progress and prosperity.

Howard Zinn says that story is a lie.

It's not that the facts are wrong, exactly. It's that the entire framework is designed to serve the wealthy and powerful. Traditional American history, Zinn argues, is propaganda for the ruling class. It celebrates conquerors and presidents while ignoring the millions of ordinary people who actually built the country and fought for their dignity.

Zinn's A People's History of the United States, first published in 1980, offers a radically different version of the American story. It has sold over two million copies and become one of the most influential American history books ever written. The book was nominated for the American Book Award. It's mentioned in the film Good Will Hunting and the television show The Sopranos. Bruce Springsteen said the book inspired his album Nebraska.

The book's popularity comes from two things. First, it covers the full sweep of American history, from Columbus's first voyages to the War on Terror. Second, it advances a clear, coherent argument that organizes this vast material under a few key themes.

That argument is controversial, but it shapes every page. Zinn adopts a version of Marxist theory known as historical materialism. The basic idea is simple: economics drives history. The struggle between those who own the wealth and those who do the work is the fundamental force shaping society. Politics, culture, even ideas about freedom and democracy—all of these are shaped by this underlying class conflict.

Zinn argues that American politics has been defined by a struggle between the impoverished working class and the elites. Europeans landed in North America in the late 15th century. Within a generation, they had established themselves as masters over both the Indigenous peoples and a new group of immigrants forcibly imported from Africa. From this point forward, America was defined by this class structure.

Even though the United States was blessed with abundant resources, elites worked diligently to share only what they had to with the common people. They developed sophisticated methods of control: laws, courts, police, armies, schools, newspapers, and patriotic celebrations. All of these institutions, Zinn argues, served to maintain the power of the few over the many.

But Zinn is not just telling a story of oppression. He focuses equally on how popular movements and everyday people fought back. These movements—strikes, rebellions, protests, and organizing campaigns—have been suppressed by historians who have, intentionally or otherwise, reinforced the elite's version of American history. A People's History is an attempt to correct the record.

Consider how Zinn treats Christopher Columbus. Traditional history presents Columbus as a heroic explorer, a man of vision and courage who opened the New World to European civilization. Zinn tells a different story.

In the fall of 1492, Columbus and his crew landed in what we now call the Bahamas. They found the Arawak people, who were humble, with no iron tools and no weapons. The native peoples met the Spaniards with gifts and offered to trade virtually anything they had. Columbus and his men, however, were after gold. The most prestigious Arawaks had small pieces of gold jewelry. Columbus demanded they take him to their supply and held several Arawaks as prisoners.

The trail of gold took the Spaniards to Cuba and then to Hispaniola, modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic. On each island, Columbus found peoples similar to the Arawaks: good-natured and trusting. Columbus concluded that with just a few hundred more soldiers, he could conquer so "weak" a people, put their land to good European-style use, and renew the quest for gold.

He returned to Spain, bringing trade goods, small treasures, and native slaves. Stories of the so-called "New World" fascinated the Spanish court. With his funding secured, Columbus returned to Hispaniola. But his forces could not find the gold he had promised to his European backers.

What happened next reveals the pattern Zinn sees throughout American history. Columbus published a decree: if locals did not bring sufficient gold every three months, they would have their hands cut off. When the locals fled, the Spaniards chased them into forests and swamps, attacking with swords and dogs. Those who were captured were typically executed. Many more chose suicide rather than be captured.

Zinn estimates that within two years of Columbus's return, 250,000 locals had died. Another estimate, by the priest Bartolome de las Casas, suggests that three million native people died between 1494 and 1508.

This is not the story of a heroic explorer. It is the story of the first in a long line of elites who placed personal gain above basic human dignity. Columbus was not an exception or a villain who betrayed noble ideals. He was the template. The pattern he established—elites exploiting the labor of the poor, using violence to maintain control, and justifying their actions through ideology—would repeat again and again throughout American history.

Zinn then turns to how historians have handled this story. He quotes specifically from Samuel Eliot Morison's 1954 biography of Columbus. Unlike other contemporary historians, Morison accepted that Columbus had implemented a "cruel policy" which led eventually to genocide. Yet at the end of his account, Morison claims that while Columbus had faults, those faults were what made him great and worthy of study.

Zinn calls this the "historian's distortion." Historians pick and choose facts to highlight or pass over in crafting their supposedly objective narratives. They are influenced by unconscious bias introduced by their ideologies. Morison did not lie about Columbus or conceal the effects of his administration. But he nevertheless excused Columbus's brutalization of the Arawaks in favor of advancing a narrative about Columbus's greatness.

Zinn declares that he has two goals in writing this book. First, he admits to his own bias: he is "skeptical of governments and their attempts, through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest." He hopes to replace the state-centric and Great Man-centric paradigm with one that focuses on popular movements and that helps readers imagine a possible future different from the past.

Second, Zinn hopes to place greater emphasis on the role of economics and class in US history. In this vein, Columbus is the first of many stories in which elites place personal gain above the basic dignity of the lower classes.

The book that follows is an attempt to recover the hidden history of American resistance. Zinn wants to show that ordinary people have never simply accepted their fate. They have fought back, sometimes winning real victories, and those struggles have shaped the nation as much as any president or general.

But here's the question Zinn leaves us with: If the traditional history we learned in school is actually propaganda for the ruling class, and if the real story of America is one of class struggle and elite control, then what does that mean for how we understand everything else we thought we knew about our country?