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      A PEOPLE’S HISTORY

      OF THE UNITED STATES

      Teaching Edition

      Revised and Updated

      HOWARD ZINN

      Teaching materials by

      Kathy Emery and Ellen Reeves

      Copyright © 1980, 1995, 1997, 2003 by Howard Zinn. Teaching materials © 1997 by Katherine Emery, and 2003 by Ellen Reeves.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

      To Noah and his generation

      Rise like lions after slumber

      In unvanquishable number!

      Shake your chains to earth, like dew

      Which in sleep had fallen on you—

      Ye are many, they are few!

      —Percy Bysshe Shelley

      Why do you stand

       they were asked, and

       Why do you walk?

      Because of the children, they said, and

       because of the heart, and

       because of the bread.

      —Daniel Berrigan

       Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress

2. Drawing the Color Line

3. Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

4. Tyranny Is Tyranny

5. A Kind of Revolution

6. The Intimately Oppressed

7. As Long as Grass Grows or Water Runs

8. We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God

      9. Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom

      10. The Other Civil War

      11. Robber Barons and Rebels

      12. The Empire and the People

      13. The Socialist Challenge

      14. War Is the Health of the State

      15. Self-help in Hard Times

      16. A People’s War?

      17. “Or Does It Explode?”

      18. The Impossible Victory: Vietnam

      19. Surprises

      20. The Seventies: Under Control?

      21. Carter-Reagan-Bush: The Bipartisan Consensus

      22. The Unreported Resistance

      23. The Coming Revolt of the Guards

      24. The Clinton Presidency

      25. The 2000 Election and the “War on Terrorism”

      Afterword

      Appendices

      Bibliography

      Index

       Acknowledgments

      To André Schiffrin and Ellen Reeves of the New Press, for imagining and undertaking this special edition.

      To Kathy Emery, for her heroic work in enriching the book for high school students.

      To my two original editors, for their incalculable help: Cynthia Merman of Harper & Row, and Roslyn Zinn.

      To Rick Balkin, my literary agent, for provoking me to do the original “People’s History.”

      To Hugh Van Dusen of HarperCollins, for wonderful help and support throughout the history of this book.

      To Akwesasne Notes, Mohawk Nation, for the passage from Ila Abernathy’s poem.

      To Dodd, Mead, & Company, for the passage from “We Wear the Mask,” from The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

      To Harper & Row, for “Incident,” from On These I Stand by Countee Cullen. Copyright 1925 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.; renewed 1953 by Ida M. Cullen.

      To Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for the passage from “I, Too,” from Selected Poems of Langston Hughes.

      To The New Trail, 1953 yearbook of the Phoenix Indian School, Phoenix, Arizona, for the poem “It Is Not!”

      To Random House, Inc., for the passage from Langston Hughes’s “Lenox Avenue Mural,” from The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Time.

      To Esta Seaton, for her poem “Her Life,” which first appeared in The Ethnic American Woman by Edith Blicksilver, Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1978.

      To Warner Bros., for the excerpt from “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” Lyrics by Jay Gorney, music by E. Y. Harburg. © 1932 Warner Bros. Inc. Copyright Renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

       Introduction

      Kathy Emery

In every year of my twenty years of teaching, I have been responsible for teaching an American history survey course. This meant having to deal with the issue of boring textbooks. When I chose to become a teacher, I promised myself that, if nothing else, I would not bore my students. So I needed to discover a way in which my students could enjoy learning. To accomplish this task, I began to expose my students to several points of view and then teach them the skills to pick and choose among the different views. I wanted them to develop opinions about history that they cared about. For me, this involved teaching a process of moral evaluation as well as rational analysis and explication of data. At first, I used Blum’s The National Experience for its detail.¹ But it was still only one point of view and did not allow for the range of debate I was looking for. So I began assigning a different textbook to each student. This was an improvement over using only one interpretation of the past, since the standard textbooks of American history differ somewhat in their interpretations of events and selection of data.²

But after several years of experimentation with different textbooks, I still was not satisfied with the results. The range of difference was still too small to provoke the desired degree of controversy and thus interest in the material. I tried to expand the interpretive continuum with Grob and Billias’s Interpretations of American History?³ But I had to spend too much time in the classroom dissecting each article so the students could understand the arguments and data. I was never able to make it to the twentieth century by the end of the school year. Though I kept experimenting with a variety of secondary sources as supplements to the textbook, always looking for the perfect fit, it was only when I discovered Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States that I found the solution to the problem I had posed to myself so many years earlier.

      Zinn provides what no other textbook does: the human impact, the human cost of decisions made by politicians and businessmen. With other texts, I had been asking my students

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