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

Book - Nonfiction. By Howard Zinn. 2005. 702 pages.
Howard Zinn’s groundbreaking work on U.S. history. This book details the lives and facts that are rarely included in textbooks — an indispensable teacher resource.

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Since its original landmark publication in 1980, A People’s History of the United States has been chronicling American history from the bottom up.

Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People’s History is the only volume to tell America’s story from the point of view of — and in the words of — America’s women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country’s greatest battles — the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women’s rights, racial equality — were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance. Covering Christopher Columbus’s arrival through President Clinton’s first term, A People’s History of the United States features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history.  (Publisher’s comments.)

Nominated for the American Book Award in 1981. Over two million copies sold.

“Professor Zinn writes with an enthusiasm rarely encountered in the leaden prose of academic history, and his text is studded with telling quotations.” - Eric Foner, The New York Times

Table of Contents:

Chapter 1. Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress

Chapter 2. Drawing the Color Line

Chapter 3. Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

Chapter 4. Tyranny Is Tyranny

Chapter 5. A Kind of Revolution

Chapter 6. The Intimately Oppressed

Chapter 7. As Long as Grass Grows or Water Runs

Chapter 8. We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God

Chapter 9. Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom

Chapter 10. The Other Civil War

Chapter 11. Robber Barons and Rebels

Chapter 12. The Empire and the People

Chapter 13. The Socialist Challenge

Chapter 14. War Is the Health of the State

Chapter 15. Self-help in Hard Times

Chapter 16. A Peoples War?

Chapter 17. Or Does It Explode?

Chapter 18. The Impossible Victory: Vietnam

Chapter 19. Surprises

Chapter 20. The Seventies: Under Control?

Chapter 21. The Coming Revolt of the Guards

Published by HarperCollins.

ISBN: 9780060838652