A People's History of the United States : 1492-Present

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Summary: To the man from Key West
Review: You scare me. Please put all of our minds at rest and tell me you are not a school teacher.You are the problem, not the solution. I don't for a moment feel superior because I know how cruel people can be to one another. The reason I feel superior is because I recognize it as an injustice and you recognize it as a necessity.

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Summary: One of the top 10 books of all time.
Review: An excellent book, should be manditory reading by 6th grade

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Summary: I Like Humans
Review: This is more a review for someone who has read the book already. The reason I gave the book five stars is because it is very empowering. It gives hope to all people, not just rich, white americans. It is admittedly Marxist in its approach to history, but then again he is a Marxist, so.... To all of those that claim this book is just an iconoclastic, unamerican account you are mistaken. It is very American (if you read American to mean "the American People" and not the US gov't. Silly reviewer, if you weren't so enamored with your Big Brother maybe you could take the side of your fellow humans. I love you anyway.

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Summary: Eye-opening!
Review: This book was given to me by my brother, and I really liked it. Everything was well-written, and it is a great antidote to school-book history. If you like this book, you should also read "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong" by James Lowen.

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Summary: A history of the people who actually make history.
Review: People tend to forget, in studying history, that kings and emperors do not an entire nation make. Howard Zinn has made it his life's work to write down the stories of those who made history, without the tired half-true Washington's Cherry Tree type of nonsens. He does not make martyrs of those who have shaped history. A People's History is more like a newspaper covering the last few-hundred years. It tells about the losers in history too, something that is all too often forgotten in most history books. And it is well-written and a pleasure to read.

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Summary: A Great Book for All!!!!!
Review: I just finished an Advance Placement US History Class and during the first weeks of the summer decided to read Howard Zimm's book. I bought it in San Francisco and the first day read one hundred pages.... It is an excellent book and is very different than what was narrowly taught in my AP US class. This book teaches the real atrocitites that our ancestors have gone through to obtain some of the rights we have today. Unlike my AP US class which just taught the facts and minor details this book goes into how each party was effected... not just the dominant one. The chapter on Eugene V. Debs and Socialism was an extremely intresting one along with many other great chapters. Buy this book... sit out on the back deck with some lemonade and ENJOY :-)

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Summary: Flawed but still worth a read
Review: I'm going to partially disagree with the reader from Australia and agree (in part) with the reader from Key West, and probably offend both in the process. Oh well. Nothing personal, of course. What this book adds to the discussion of social history is a needed examination of long neglected issues of class in America, and how those pressing factors are often submerged in hyper-patriotism or blind faith in capitalism. That's very important, and that still doesn't get into the history textbooks. And the fact that Zinn is talking from the Left is, I think, not as important as the fact that his leftist perspective illuminates shadowed areas of history -- Cherokee culture in the 1830s, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 (the best section in the book), or peace movements during World War II. That's important. The problem is that everything else he said could be found in the history textbooks I studied in elementary school, high school and college in the 1980s and 90s. Reading the book last month, I was more surprised by how much of Zinn's work is put into American History textbooks (in an admittedly abbreviated form) than is left out. Class struggles are, by and large, omitted, but everything else -- Indian genocide, the horrors of the Middle Passage, cold-hearted union crackdowns -- I studied in sixth grade. Zinn is not the corrective to traditional textbooks now; he writes them. There wasn't anything particularly radical in this book for me -- nothing I hadn't read before, anyway. Its cutting edge feels dulled by the passing of decades. And it should be noted that Zinn's biggest flaw is that he reduces complex personalities into archetypes of what he thinks they should be -- so we hear awful things about Andrew Carnegie, but nothing about his philanthropy; we read a wonderful reflection on W.E.B. DuBois, but nothing about his anti-semitism (as seen in "The Souls of Black Folk"). But you could dig up these flaws in any book as ambitious as Zinn's. I like the suggestion that this be read in counterpoint to Johnson; I've been meaning to do that. Zinn's class corrective is very important; and if he overstates the case at times, he at least makes a noise few others have bothered to sound.

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Summary: ....A must read in order to maintain personal sanity
Review: Although driven to anger and helplessness after reading many sections of this historical account of America's not so liberating history, this book is a must for anyone. Even the reader from Key West, who claims that the people of America already know the negative aspects of America's history. Not so my friend. The constant media bombardment and educational bias that exists in American society has produced a culture and population that is totally ignorant of America's bloody and polemic history. This is not a book that merely supplements the mainstream version of American history - IT IS AMERICA'S HISTORY! Americans need to honestly face this truth in order to reconcile and move on with even the smallest amount of dignity and credibility.

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Summary: Absolutely Essential Reading for any self-respecting citizen
Review: I don't think I could add anything fundamentally different to all the reviews below, suffice to say that in addition to its presenting history from the perspective of human beings instead of the on-high perspective of savages, it is also a beautifully written, if emotionally exhausting, book as any for anyone who has even the smallest amount of empathy or dignity.

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Summary: great if you like fiction
Review: No one should feel this is a bad book. It's not. It's very well written. No one, indeed, should feel this book is in anyway one-sided. It's not that either. It's simply a very fragmented, juvenile, graffiti scrawled writing of history typical of what we've come to expect from 60s refugees like Professor Zinn. My favorite section chronicles the Gulf War, where Zinn devotes more than 10 pages to a conflict which lasted less than six months, claiming the mainstream media did little to cover the anti-war protest movement. A careful reading of the footnotes will point out that most of his information came from newspaper clippings. (Stand by to see how much outrage he musters in future when chronicling the Mad Bomber Clinton in his Lewinsky-related airstrikes.) But such things are to expected from this book. This is nothing more or less than an exercise in airing the dirty laundry of a nation that everyone is aware of, then casting it in the worst possible light so that people can feel superior for knowing how shabby human beings can be to each other. Every nation's beginning is bloody, horrible and disgraceful. The only difference is we have fully documented ours. Ask Professor Zinn which other utopia he'd like to immigrate to. To get the whole picture, read this and Paul Johnson's History of the American People. For intelligent leftist reading, consult Christopher Hitchens.