A People's History of the United States
Howard Zinn's history of the United States is famous for reading the country from below: from the perspective of workers, enslaved people, Indigenous nations, women, and radicals rather than presidents and generals. The prose is direct, the argument is explicit, and the narrative moves from Columbus to the recent past with the momentum of a prosecutor's brief. It is not a balanced textbook, and it does not pretend to be; Zinn believed that the usual balance had already tilted too far in one direction. The book has survived decades of criticism because it asks questions that standard surveys avoid. Ideal reader: the reader who suspects that history class left most of the cast offstage, or the citizen who wants a counterweight to the triumphal version.
