Rethinking America's Past: Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States in the Classroom and Beyond

By Robert Cohen and Sonia E. Murrow

No introductory work of American history has had more influence over the past forty years than Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which since its publication in 1980 has sold more than three million copies. Zinn’s iconoclastic critique of American militarism, racism, and capitalism has drawn bitter criticism from the Right, most recently from President Donald Trump, who at his White House Conference on American History in 2020 denounced Zinn as a Left propagandist and accused teachers aligned with Zinn of indoctrinating students to hate America and be ashamed of its history.

Rethinking America’s Past is the first work to use archival and classroom evidence to assess the impact that Zinn’s classic work has had on historical teaching and learning and on American culture. This evidence refutes Trump’s charges, showing that rather than indoctrinating students, Zinn’s book has been used by teachers to have students debate and rethink conventional versions of American history. Rethinking America’s Past also explores the ways Zinn’s work fostered deeper, more critical renderings of the American past in movies and on stage and television and traces the origins and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of A People’s History in light of more recent historical scholarship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780820360355

Robert Cohen

Robert Cohen is director of the Social Studies Program in the School of Education, associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, and an affiliated member of the History Department at New York University.

Book preview

Rethinking America’s Past

Rethinking America’s Past

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States in the Classroom and Beyond

ROBERT COHEN AND SONIA E. MURROW

The University of Georgia Press Athens

This publication received generous support from the Stephen M. Silberstein Foundation.

Howard Zinn letters and other material from his papers archived at

New York University’s Tamiment Library / Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives,

Copyright © The Howard Zinn Revocable Trust

© 2021 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cohen, Robert, 1955 May 21– author. | Murrow, Sonia E., 1964– author.

Title: Rethinking America’s past : Howard Zinn’s A people’s history of the United States in the classroom and beyond / Robert Cohen and Sonia E. Murrow.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021021083 | ISBN 9780820360331 (hardback) | ISBN 9780820360348 (paperback) | ISBN 9780820360355 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Zinn, Howard, 1922–2010. People’s history of the United States. | Zinn, Howard, 1922–2010—Study and teaching (Secondary) | United States— History—Study and teaching (Secondary) | United States—History— Textbooks. | United States—Historiography.

Classification: LCC E175.8 .C56 2021 | DDC 973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021083

For my children, Lev and Talia, and my mother, Hope

And in memory of Tom Hayden

HOWARD ZINN ON

RETHINKING THE AMERICAN PAST

It is a … profoundly important thing we are trying to accomplish, to look at the world from other points of view. We need to do that as we come into the twenty-first century, if we want this new century to be different, if we want it to be not an American century, or a Western century, or a white century, or a male century, or any nation’s … century but a century for the human race.

If the colonial period of our history constitutes our birth and infancy we were not born free. We were born amidst slavery, semi-slavery, land monopoly, class privilege, and class conflict.

It was easy to detect the control of the German scholars or the Russian scholars, but much harder to recognize that the high school texts of our own country have fostered jingoism, war heroes, the Sambo approach to the black man, the vision of the Indian as savage, and the notion that white Western Civilization is the cultural, humanistic summit of man’s time on earth.

The schools teach about the Declaration of Independence, … that we live in a democracy and that there is equality and justice for all. At the same time, the schools do not give … young people … the information that shows how these ideals are being violated every day.

Consider how much attention is given in historical writing to military affairs … and … how little attention is given to antiwar movements … to those who struggled against the idiocy of war.

As a result of omitting, or downplaying, the importance of social movements of the people in our history—the actions of abolitionists, labor leaders, radicals, feminists, and pacifists—a fundamental principle of democracy is undermined: … that … the citizenry, rather than the government … is the ultimate source of power … that pulls the … government in the direction of equality and justice.

CONTENTS

Introduction

CHAPTER 1. Origins and Appeal

CHAPTER 2. Before A People’s History

CHAPTER 3. In High School Classrooms

CHAPTER 4. Dear Mr. Zinn: Student Voices

CHAPTER 5. Not Just for Kids

CHAPTER 6. Teachers: A People’s Pedagogy

CHAPTER 7. Retrospectives and Reviews

CHAPTER 8. On Stage and Screen

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Rethinking America’s Past

INTRODUCTION

Most historians hope that their research and writing (as well as their teaching) will resonate with their students and colleagues but realize that in a culture as relentlessly ahistorical as America’s, the chances are slim that their books will get much attention from the general public. So Howard Zinn’s success in attracting millions of readers to A People’s History of the United States (1980), his revisionist introduction to the American past, is extraordinary.¹ Some of those readers, inspired by Zinn, would go on to become leading historians, among them Robin D. G. Kelley, who holds the Gary Nash Endowed Chair in American History at UCLA. Kelley, whose many publications include a labor history book, Three Strikes,² coauthored with Zinn, recalled the influence that A People’s History had on him as a young scholar-activist and Zinn’s enduring appeal:

In 1981, near the end of my second semester as a freshman at California State University, Long Beach, I decided to declare History as my major. I had gone through at least four majors during that first year, among them Philosophy and Political Science, because like so many Black kids of that generation, I saw myself as an activist—a revolutionary. I toyed with law school, political theory, a lifetime of re-reading Marx and Engels, but nothing compared to understanding the past. As far as U.S. historians go, Howard Zinn changed the game—for me and for most of my colleagues and comrades. He exposed the barbarism of the colonizer when the colonized were presumed to be the barbarian in need of civilization. He revealed the racist foundations of American liberty and yet always demonstrated that working people and other subjugated and oppressed people kept the ruling class on the run—either on the plantations or factories, the Northern plains or the Mexico border, or Cuba and the Philippines. Yes, he was the outstanding popular historian of social justice movements, the working class, oppressed peoples, but perhaps most crucially, Howard Zinn was a critic and chronicler of the inhumanity of war. He committed his life to ending war and writing books in which antiwar activists were the heroes, not tank commanders, the cavalry, or fighter pilots. Imagine a history book that sells over a million copies that doesn’t sell war? He was quite courageous in his complete condemnation of war. He once wrote: After my own experience [as a bombardier] in that war [World War II], I had moved away from my own rather orthodox view that there are just wars and unjust wars, to a universal rejection of war as a solution to any human problem.³

Kelley’s words capture why Zinn’s People’s History emerged as America’s best-selling and most iconoclastic introductory history book in the 1980s and why it has had steadfast appeal. Decades before the emergence of Black Lives Matter and the tearing down of Confederate statues, Zinn was tearing down myths promoted by nationalist politicians and school textbooks. In place of traditional textbook tales of heroic explorers opening up the New World, A People’s History begins with a chapter on Columbus as the emblem of genocidal conquest, war, and slavery. Rather than treat racial slavery as an exception to America’s forward progress, Zinn offered a far different version of American exceptionalism, arguing that there is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States. And the problem of ‘the color line,’ as W. E. B. Du Bois put it, is still with us.⁴

Similarly, the tragic consequences of U.S. militarism—such as the bloody conquest of Mexico and the Philippines, the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the carpet bombing and chemical warfare inflicted on Vietnam— comprised so central a theme in Zinn’s pacifist-inflected history that when the book came out in the Reagan era, most school system leaders would not consider adopting it. A People’s History was also too controversial for school officials because of its indictment of the inequities of American capitalism and Zinn’s celebration of working-class rebellions against it. But the radicalism that alienated education leaders made Zinn’s book an underground classic among those who, like Kelley, were influenced by the social movements of the Long 1960s, becoming critical of social inequality and America’s unending wars. Zinn’s book spoke to those who had marched against racism, war, sexism, and class exploitation, as well as to the coming generations influenced by or awakening to the critical sensibility that was a legacy of that turbulent time.

It was, however, not only the content but the form of A People’s History that made Zinn’s book so popular. The book was written with a clarity and verve that made it accessible both to such well-read historians-in-the-making as Robin D. G. Kelley and to high school students, who prior to reading Zinn had likely never read a history book from cover to cover. Although when A People’s History was published, President Ronald Reagan was the one known as the Great Communicator, far to his left Zinn demonstrated communicative skills that were equally impressive, and unlike Reagan, whose lines were fed to him by a tele-prompter, Zinn wrote the words that made him so popular. At a time when the Left had retreated to academia—as Todd Gitlin put it, marching on the English department while the Right took the White House⁵—Zinn was passionately committed to speaking to the broader public. Zinn knew that the groundbreaking scholarship generated by historians of the African American experience, women, U.S. imperialism, and labor in the Long 1960s had been cloistered in academe. He wanted it to reach high school teachers and their students, workers, people of color, prisoners, and millions of other Americans he hoped would learn from it that any progress toward social justice had resulted from people’s grassroots struggles.

Howard Zinn’s papers in NYU’s Tamiment Library offer extensive evidence— carton after carton of reader letters to Zinn—of how effective he was in leaving readers moved by A People’s History. Zinn exposed readers to the ugly, exploitative underside of America—some for the first time, generating shock and outrage. Zinn proved effective too in valorizing resistance movements: his engaging and lyrical introduction to those often forgotten movements of the eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century United States inspired readers to believe that protest by people like them could make a difference in the struggle for social change. The letters to Zinn were written by a diverse and multiracial array of people—leftist and liberal political organizers, artists, writers, filmmakers, actors, academics, prisoners, soldiers and sailors, disability activists—young, middle aged, and elderly. We were particularly struck by the large number of letters from teachers and students because they relate directly to our own work as historians based in schools of education who prepare undergraduates and graduate students to become high school and middle school history and social studies teachers.

What the Zinn archives make evident is that to understand the impact of A People’s History on history education one must analyze the book not only as an introductory work but also as a tool for teaching in history classrooms, a milestone and yardstick in the history of history education, a barometer of educational reform, and a presence in American popular culture. So our study offers a diversity of approaches to capture this multilayered history of the impact of A People’s History: (1) historiography (i.e., historical writing), as we look, in chapter 1, at the origins of A People’s History and, in chapter 7, at the way critics in 1980 and historians retrospectively view A People’s History as a historical work; (2) the history of education, as we show in chapter 2 how history education’s persistent failure paved the way for the success of A People’s History as an alternative to that tradition of failure; (3) a historical teaching and learning case study, as we explore in chapters 3 and 4 the way a teacher used A People’s History in high school history classes for more than a decade, documenting a thorough classroom record of student responses to Zinn and debate-oriented historical pedagogy; (4) the history of educational reform, as we probe in chapter 6 how an activist teacher reform movement helped to popularize A People’s History; and (5) cultural and political history, as we explore, in chapter 8, the way A People’s History influenced American popular culture and, in chapter 5, what adult letters to Zinn tell us about American culture’s relationship to historical knowledge, particularly with regard to the history of dissent.

Since the Zinn papers offer empirical evidence of the impact that A People’s History has had on teaching and learning history, we can do what late twentieth-century reviewers of the book (in the absence of such evidence) could not: explore the impact of A People’s History on readers of all ages and its usage and effect in history classrooms. We also assess how well Zinn’s book stands up as a work of history and as a teaching tool beyond the classroom: on stage and on film. We can learn from Zinn—no matter how one feels about his brand of history—what it means to be successful in engaging students with U.S. history and how it was possible for Zinn and the teachers who taught A People’s History (in tandem with and in conversation with conventional textbooks) to make historical classes sites of animated discussion, debate, and intellectual engagement.

In spotlighting the impact of A People’s History on teaching and learning in history classrooms we are referring to the teachers and students who have made use of the book, primarily in high schools. But it is important not to exaggerate how widely used A People’s History was by teachers in the three decades between its publication in 1980 and Zinn’s death in 2010, the period on which we focus in this book. Those teachers who assigned A People’s History were often inventive, dynamic, and, according to student letters to Zinn, highly effective, and one can admire them as grassroots curriculum reformers, but they nonetheless constituted a minority of the history teaching profession. In most school districts in the United States, Zinn’s book was—as he was well aware—considered far too radical to be adopted as an official school textbook (or anti-textbook). That is why education historian Larry Cuban, in his landmark study of history instruction in two urban school districts, never mentioned Zinn or A People’s History.⁶ This reflects a persistent challenge that dedicated reformers face in transforming school systems that are institutionally, pedagogically, and politically conservative, and therefore highly resistant to change.⁷ Thus, while there are in the Zinn archives many letters from teachers and students praising A People’s History for transforming their teaching and learning of American history, we found no such letters from public school principals, school board members, or anyone else in education leadership expressing admiration for A People’s History or committing to order it for the schools they oversaw. Initially, then, Zinn’s book came into schools piecemeal from individual teacher initiative—that is, from the bottom up. And we’d expect no less, that for such a paradigm-shifting work there had to be a people’s movement to champion a people’s history. Indeed, eventually teacher-led organizations would generate curriculum materials that incorporated Zinn’s People’s History into the classroom practice of reform-oriented teachers (which we detail in chapter 6).

While wary of exaggerating Zinn’s influence on history education in schools, we also want to be careful not to understate either the scope or endurance of that influence. Although ours is a study of the impact Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States had on history teaching and learning from its publication in 1980 to Zinn’s death in 2010 (grounded in the archival collection documenting that impact—Zinn’s papers—that spans those years), we want readers to bear in mind that Zinn’s classic work continues to have a significant impact on American education almost a decade after his passing. So examining how Zinn helped to change history education has contemporary as well as historical importance. One could argue, in fact, that—though not dominant nationally in history classrooms—Zinn’s bottom-up approach to American history has grown more popular among teachers over the past decade.

This recent surge in popularity has many sources, including the impressive success of two relatively new means of making people’s history more accessible to teachers (and students): the publication of A Young People’s History of the United States (2007)—which for the first time adapted Zinn’s book for middle school and upper elementary students—and the online history education resources provided by the Zinn Education Project.⁸ Dan Simon of Seven Stories Press estimates that sales of the Young People’s History connected to schools is twenty thousand to thirty thousand books annually. Deborah Menkart of the Zinn Education Project finds that close to one hundred thousand teachers use the project’s website.⁹ Other factors sustaining and expanding Zinn’s presence in the schools include the way the multicultural education and ethnic studies movements and the backlash against them (a key part of America’s culture wars),¹⁰ along with the Trump administration’s regression toward nativism, misogyny, and white supremacy, have fueled teacher interest in Zinn’s inclusive, egalitarian, and critical approaches to the American past.

To some university-based historians it may seem odd that almost half our book focuses on history education and Zinn’s impact on it at the high school rather than college level, especially since Zinn was himself employed as a professor rather than as a high school history teacher. But part of what made Zinn so distinctive among history professors was that he cared deeply about secondary education, its failure to engage students with history, and the tendency of school officials to shut out dissident views of the American past and present. That is why the major educational initiatives he helped to create, the Zinn Education Project and the Voices of a People’s History theater program, targeted high school teachers and students. It is also why Zinn, acting as a people’s historian rather than an academic, spoke so frequently at high schools (and corresponded with high school teachers and students), seeking to open them up to his critique of the American warfare state. For example, during the early days of the war in Afghanistan, Zinn spoke to a Massachusetts high school class about that war and provoked a parental backlash by equating this U.S. military intervention with terrorism. This made headlines, leading to invitations to speak at seven other high schools in the state—and Zinn accepted every one of those invitations.¹¹ With the high school student population far larger, more working class, and more racially diverse than its college counterpart, Zinn saw its students and teachers as a natural constituency for the inclusive people’s history that he championed.

Since Zinn understood that his People’s History would not become an official text in high schools, he wrote appreciatively to and about teachers who dared to bring his book into their classrooms¹²—in an almost underground fashion—by photocopying select chapters and having students use those chapters to challenge their conventional U.S. history textbooks. Some of these teachers had their students write Zinn letters making such comparisons. Many of their letters have been preserved in the Zinn papers, offering a unique window onto Zinn’s impact at the high school level. The letters provide a rare glimpse into the way young students viewed not only Zinn’s book but also the history education they received in school prior to encountering A People’s History. These classroom sets of high school student letters to Zinn are also the most balanced letters he received because they came from classes that included (mostly conservative) critics, distinguishing them from college students’ and other adults’ letters that came almost exclusively from those whose admiration of Zinn had led them to take the individual initiative to write him. Thus our high school focus evolved out of these uniquely illuminating sources and Zinn’s own concern that the historical profession had done little to address the inadequacy of high school history textbooks and history teaching and learning.

As in the past, A People’s History remains controversial, evidenced not only by the persistence of conservative attacks on it in the media but also in the realm of book orders, where a form of antiradical political correctness raised barriers to school access to Zinn’s book. Dan Simon has experienced this firsthand as the publisher of Zinn’s Young People’s History, observing that as of November 2019,

I do not think that either Howard’s voice, or his view of history are less radical now than in the past, or perceived as less dangerous or subversive. It seems to me that on a regular basis we hear from someone at a school wanting to see it adopt AYPHotUS [A Young People’s History of the United States], only to have it blocked at a higher level. And even more ominously, we hear from entire school districts interested in adopting AYPHotUS … [but then,] mysteriously, somewhere along the way the school district adoption ends up being blocked. This happened for example in Portland, where in fact some five or six years ago a larger order came through for thousands of copies. But it was not repeated.¹³

With the issue of whether A People’s History should be assigned in public school classrooms remaining contested, the historical evidence of its beneficial educational impact presented in our book should be of particular interest to the public, teachers, and those involved in leading schools and school systems.

Education at its best is not confined to classrooms, schoolhouses, or college campuses; it also encompasses popular culture. Theater, film, and television can, as Howard Zinn realized, serve as powerful vehicles for mass history education. Zinn used these venues as well as protest music to teach millions of Americans in the early twenty-first century about the history of dissent and mass protest. He worked with accomplished actors such as Danny Glover, Matt Damon, Marisa Tomei, Josh Brolin, Viggo Mortensen, and Kerry Washington; popular musicians like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and John Legend; and poets such as Martin Espada and many others to bring A People’s History and its critical and dissident sources to life on stage and screen.¹⁴ Anthony Arnove, Zinn’s collaborator in this work, generously shared with us his extensive files on these cultural and popular initiatives, enabling us to end our book with an in-depth account of Zinn’s projects in popular history education and entertainment—work that Zinn, then in his eighties, pursued with the energy of a teenager. Our hope is that the story of these initiatives will encourage other historians to collaborate with artists to bring critical history into popular culture venues—to push back against the national tendency toward historical amnesia, especially with regard to the successes and possibilities for democracy in action as embodied in non-violent protest movements.

Zinn, who has often been misrepresented by the right as un-American, portrayed social movements glowingly in his People’s History because they were part of an American tradition of dissent and resistance he admired, even loved—with its deep commitment to interracial democracy, economic equity, peace, and social justice. The capaciousness of this egalitarian vision, Zinn’s eloquence in evoking it (drawing on the even greater eloquence of dissenters from Frederick Douglass to Emma Goldman to Langston Hughes) resonates with democratic idealism even today—despite Donald Trump. So Zinn’s book continues to sell, continues to be attacked by conservatives, continues to help fill theaters with audiences moved by the readings of the dissenting historical voices that Zinn selected. As Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Eric Foner observed recently, "the main point is that we are still discussing Zinn’s People’s History forty years after it was published, which is quite a tribute to the book."¹⁵ Zinn’s book lives on as part of America’s dissident culture and the continuing struggle to keep the democratic ideal alive in a nation beset by extreme inequality and a money-driven, unrepresentative political system, presided over until recently by a billionaire president flirting with white nationalism and authoritarianism.¹⁶

Though Zinn did not live to see the Trump presidency, the emphasis of A People’s History on inclusive democratic politics, people’s movements, and progressive change from below is the polar opposite of Trumpian authoritarianism—as embodied in the Great Leader, I am your voice mantra of Trump’s chilling acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican Party convention.¹⁷ In this sense Zinn can be seen as the anti-Trump, whose historical work calls America back to its highest ideals of interracial and participatory democracy. Had more Americans absorbed the narrative A People’s History offered of the U.S. failure to live up to those democratic ideals—in the eras of Indian removal, slavery, anti-labor violence, Jim Crow, McCarthyism, and the collapse of the New Deal order—might they have been inoculated against the delusional nostalgia of Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign slogan?¹⁸ Has the choice of American educational leaders to avoid dissenting history texts and political controversy in their schools contributed to the larger failure to attain historical literacy in America’s public schools? We leave it to readers to answer these questions, but as you do so it is worth considering the connection between this record of school failure in history education and Trump’s professed love of the poorly educated.¹⁹

Zinn saw historical study as foundational to democratic struggle and hoped that the stories of protest and resistance in A People’s History would help inspire readers to become active working for a more democratic America. In one of his last interviews, Zinn acknowledged that the activist ethos he imparted in A People’s History distinguished him from conventional historians, that it might be considered an unprofessional thing for a historian to write a history that somebody else interprets as a call to action. But to me, the historian is a citizen before he [or she] is a historian. The historian is a human being before he is a historian… . I see the historian as somebody who intervenes, whose work should lead other people to think they are not simply passive instruments [of political and economic elites.] … Democracy requires an active citizenry. Therefore, you might say the writing of history should itself be a democratic act. It should promote democracy by giving people the idea that they too can participate in history.²⁰ Thus it is almost impossible to divorce the value of A People’s History as an instrument for challenging conventional textbooks in U.S. history, for stimulating debate and engaging pedagogy in classrooms, from Zinn’s politics and activist ethos and his search for a usable past.

A People’s History shows us too that despite one’s remoteness from political power, an activist-intellectual like Zinn could, through the power of his ideas and the eloquence of his prose, have far-reaching impact on American culture and education. It is the story of that impact that we hope to illuminate in these pages.

As important as Zinn is to our story, his impact on history teaching and learning was never a solo act. If our archival research has revealed anything it is that inventive teachers were as important as Zinn himself in bringing history to life in the classroom. Such teachers proved themselves daring and successful in using A People’s History in debate-oriented pedagogy in history classrooms, provoking students to engage in historical thinking. The evidence for this in the Zinn papers—in the form of extensive student and teacher letters to Zinn—is simply overwhelming. Such archival evidence explains what we had long observed but never quite understood before: the enthusiasm of high school teachers about A People’s History. And to this day, Zinn’s critics have failed to confront this evidence, failed to study the views of teachers and students on Zinn.

Of course, even the most thought-provoking historical works have flaws, and that includes Zinn’s. We hope that the more compelling and evenhanded criticisms of A People’s History in these pages will encourage Zinn’s admirers to consider the weaknesses and limitations of his work. Our view is that A People’s History works best not as a tool for some new orthodoxy but rather as a companion piece to more conventional textbook and introductory overviews of American history, where the assumptions, narratives, and conclusions of both are compared and debated. This is, in fact, the way Zinn has been most commonly used by innovative teachers aiming to teach their students to analyze conflicting historical interpretations, on the basis of evidence and reason, while asking critical questions about the United States and its past.

We see this approach to the teaching of American history—where students analyze competing historical interpretations, especially those of radical versus non-radical historians, along with conflicting primary sources—as a sure path to exploring the richness, complexity, joys, and tragedies of that history. Promoting a recognition that historical study worthy of its topic is neither a trivia game for teens nor a prep regime for standardized tests nor a nostalgia trip for sentimental adults. It is instead an exercise in critical thinking, which in the American case yields engagement with the startling reality that, as James Baldwin memorably put it, American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.²¹

Unlike Baldwin, who urged us to grapple with the complexities and contradictions of the nation’s past, President Donald Trump at his 2020 White House Conference on American History argued for a superpatriotic, cheerleading version of U.S. history. His speech at that conference promoted intolerance of dissenting views of American history by slandering teachers and historians who foregrounded the role of racial and class conflict in American history. Without offering evidence, he accused teachers of promoting a twisted web of lies in our schools, indoctrinating students in a version of history that has led them to hate America. This was, he claimed a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words.²² Referring to the mostly nonviolent nationwide Black Lives Matter protests against police violence as left-wing mobs fomenting violence and anarchy, Trump again without evidence charged that left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools. A key source of this alleged indoctrination named by Trump was Zinn, whom he depicted not as a historian but as a propagandist: Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.

It is no accident that Zinn was the only historian Trump denounced by name and that, along with the 1619 Project (whose controversial curriculum places slavery at the center of the American experience), Zinn’s work was made to sound like a serious threat to American patriotism. If one equates patriotism and Americanism as Trump does, with unreflective boasting about American greatness, Zinn would indeed seem threatening, for his People’s History demands of us (as does the 1619 Project) a critical reckoning, a rethinking of the American past. Zinn beckons us to confront rather than evade the gap between our nation’s inspiring democratic ideals and its failures to live up to them. Yet, contrary to Trump’s accusation, Zinn was not a propagandistic purveyor of shame. For Zinn also narrated the struggles of egalitarian idealists to push America’s government leaders toward policies consistent with the nation’s democratic ideals. So it was just as possible to come away from reading Zinn feeling pride in the courage of antiwar activists as it was to feel shame about the massacre at My Lai. Zinn’s goal, however, was not evoking pride or shame but rather promoting critical thinking about the past (and present) that could yield engaged democratic citizenship. History classrooms in a democratic society ought to be free and open enough to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of Zinn’s and the 1619 Project’s version of the American past as well as those of less critical versions of that past, so our historical dialogue is large and deep enough to encompass both the tragedy and the beauty of which James Baldwin wrote. This book is intended to convey Zinn’s contribution to that historical dialogue.

CHAPTER 1

Origins and Appeal

Howard Zinn ranks as one of America’s leading popularizers of its history. His People’s History of the United States has been the best-selling popular survey of American history in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, having sold more than 3,300,000 copies as of October 2019.¹ Remarkably, Zinn’s antiwar, antiracist, anticapitalist People’s History, published initially in 1980, became a best seller at a time when American politics was leaning rightward, during the Reagan era—a time of soaring military spending, retreat from civil rights enforcement, and enactment of the regressive economic agenda of big business. From 1980 through and beyond Zinn’s death in 2010, A People’s History sold an increasing number of copies with each passing year, the opposite of the normal trajectory of book sales.² Indeed, in 2003, on the occasion of the celebration of the one millionth copy sold, Hugh Van Dusen, Zinn’s editor at Harper and Row (now Harper Collins) attested that in all his years in publishing he had never seen a book continue to expand its readership in this way annually, which in the book business was akin to defying the laws of physics.³ The popularity of A People’s History impacted the publishing world, as other presses sought to emulate its success by adopting the People’s History tag for other books and the radical history approach that Zinn had used. One of these publishers was the New Press, whose People’s History volumes, on everything from the American Revolution to U.S. sports history, Zinn endorsed.⁴ The dissident speeches Zinn featured in A People’s History would be performed by famed actors, actresses, musicians, and writers at theatrical events across the United States, culminating in a film version, The People Speak, which reached an estimated nine million viewers when it aired on the History Channel in December 2009.⁵

A People’s History has also had a major impact on history teaching and learning, especially in high schools. Even though A People’s History was considered too radical to be adopted by public school districts, innovative teachers beginning in the 1980s discussed and circulated in class photocopied chapters from Zinn’s book and used them as a contrast to the corresponding and often boring chapters in their mandated textbooks.⁶ Even today, Zinn’s history, with its emphasis on the role of classism, racism, gender inequality, and imperialism in the American past, continues to attract tens of thousands of teachers who connect with it online through the Zinn Education Project’s curriculum resources—a project endowed by a former Zinn student and staffed by talented, grassroots teacher-organizers who worked closely with Zinn in launching the project.⁷

This book explores the impact A People’s History has had on history teaching and learning in schools, among the general public, and in popular culture. But before we delve into that impact we must start with Zinn himself, the key source of this educational and public rethinking of American history. So this chapter probes how Zinn understood the popularity and wide appeal of A People’s History in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century United States, and it examines the book’s origins and intentions and what the people’s history approach to the American past meant for him. We also look at the first glimmerings of that appeal, via the internal reviews (the publisher’s readers’ reports) of Zinn’s initial efforts to write a people’s history of the United States, since those reviews—even when offering criticism—predicted that the book would fill a significant gap in the realm of accessible American history writing.

That the growing popularity of A People’s History took its publisher by surprise is evidenced by the fact that Harper and Row gave Zinn only a small advance for the book and committed to a modest initial press run of five thousand copies.⁸ Van Dusen even had to lobby to convince the press to bring the book out quickly in paperback, since there had been no expectation of robust sales. This is quite understandable since introductory histories almost never become best sellers.

The book’s surprising popularity led Zinn and Van Dusen to ponder the reasons for it. Both came to link the success of A People’s History to the impact that the 1960s had in fostering dissident politics and cultural change and the persistence of the critical antiwar and social justice ethos disseminated in that tumultuous era. As Zinn recalled in 2008,

I remember sitting down [with Van Dusen], and asking How come? Why is this happening? And the answer, it was an encouraging one. The answer to it was: well people are hungry for a different and bolder, and yes even more radical view of our society, a more critical view. One that citizens should have of their society. In other words, the movements of the ’60s had created a new kind of spirit, and that spirit translated itself into a desire for things in the culture, whether it’s books or plays or movies … that would reflect their new experience. So we concluded that this still is the answer to … the question of why people are still buying A People’s History in large numbers is that the state of society is one that’s not pleasing to people. They are not pleased with the wars that are going on. They are not pleased by the economic inequality in a country which is the wealthiest … in the world. They are not pleased with the discrimination on race, on sex, or against immigrants, and so on. And in a situation like that they are looking for something that’s written that will corroborate their own instinctual desire to protest against what’s going on. So our surprise at the success of the book began to dissipate as we began to think about why this was happening.⁹

Van Dusen also cited the impact of the 1960s on teachers in explaining why sales of A People’s History increased each year. In 1991 he wrote Zinn a letter attributing the book’s impact in high schools to a generation of teachers who grew up in the 60s. Those teachers naturally wanted to assign the book—one of the very few which matches their view of history and which students love since it is wonderfully readable and gripping.¹⁰ Harper and Row incorporated into its marketing of the book this idea that teachers (as well as general readers) had become receptive to a more inclusive, critical reading of American history. Thus a fall 1991 Harper ad presented A People’s History as connecting with this democratic revolution in historical understanding (and scholarship), contrasting Zinn’s book with traditional textbooks’ out-of-date elitism:

Recently, as a passing glance at even the editorial pages would reveal, there has been a seismic shift in the way history is viewed and taught. To the surprise of many, and to the chagrin of some, certain historians have been putting forward the idea that history does not consist solely in the conduct and decisions of kings, generals, diplomats, religious leaders, and captains of industry of European descent. In fact (shock! horror!), women, people of non-European backgrounds, the poor and working classes have actually always existed. While this was probably an opinion held by some for many years at a purely instinctive level, it was not one easily verified by the history books most of us were forced to slog through in grammar school, high school, and beyond. All this is by way of preface to saying that we at Harper proudly publish Howard Zinn, whose pioneering classics A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES … and THE TWENTIETH CENTURY … stand as essential antidotes to establishment and exclusionary views, and deserve to be mentioned in the context of both Black History Month and Women in History Month—and for that matter the [500th] Anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World.¹¹

The ’60s generational explanation of his book’s popularity was attractive to Zinn in part because it accorded with his admiring view of social protest movements and of the most recent heyday of such movements, the 1960s.¹² Here Zinn was embodying the communalism of the 1960s social movements of which he had been a part (as a civil rights and antiwar movement veteran), crediting the book’s popularity not to his own skills as a writer but to the critical spirit and mindset that was a legacy of those movements.¹³

This view of the book’s popularity matched up well with Zinn’s memory of why he had written A People’s History of the United States in the first place, which was also deeply connected to the 1960s and its protest movements. As Zinn recalled in 2008,

I decided to write A People’s History … [after] teaching history for years, and we were going through and past the movements of the ’60s, the southern [civil rights] movement, the antiwar movement, the women’s movement … all sorts of movements of the ’60s, the prisoners’ movement, gay and lesbian movements. And people coming out of those movements were looking around for a history of the United States that would connect with the kind of spirit they felt, having been involved in those movements. They couldn’t find that spirit in traditional history books because they’d been in movements of ordinary people striving against the power of the Establishment. And they saw, as I did when I was studying history, … the regular, traditional, orthodox books as representing really the voice of the Establishment … the voice of the presidents and generals … the important people. [Post-sixties Americans were] looking for something that represented what they were feeling, having come out of those movements. And so they kept asking me as a teacher of history … if I knew of a book [introducing U.S. history] that was … a progressive, radical … critical view of American history. And there really wasn’t. And so I thought Well, I’ll write it. And then I started to write it.¹⁴

In Zinn’s telling, then, the genesis of A People’s History came from people—movement veterans and others influenced by the protests of the 1960s— who kept asking him to recommend a … one-volume history of the U.S. written from the point of view that would reflect the sensibilities of the ’60s … their movements … and I couldn’t find a book that would do it. I think that’s what happens very often. If you can’t find a book that does what you want, you write it.¹⁵

Zinn was so eager to credit people and movements of the 1960s with generating the demand for A People’s History that in explaining his book’s origins he spotlighted them rather than the ’60s generation of New Left historians, who had produced the new social history (raising the banner of writing history from the bottom up), and histories critiquing U.S. imperialism and militarism that he would draw on in writing A People’s History. According to Zinn, because of the movements of the ’60s, people began to rethink all sorts of issues: women’s history, labor movement [history], [and the history of] war and antiwar movements. And the traditional textbooks and traditional books on American history didn’t satisfy them. So … they were looking for this [more critical] point of view.¹⁶

Along these same lines, Zinn cited not the example of other radical historians or his own historical training but his involvement with the southern Black freedom struggle of the Long 1960s with shaping his bottom-up approach to writing history, focusing on people at the grass roots as opposed to government officials.

What I saw in the South … amazing scenes [of courageous organizing against racism]. I was going from Atlanta, Georgia, to Selma, Alabama, to towns in Mississippi, and I was seeing remarkable scenes going on, and talking to extraordinary people. And I thought, this is not being captured [by the media or by academic books]. And I