A People’s History of the United States

Most U.S. history books center on the powerful: presidents, war generals, wealthy industrialists, and other decision-makers. Howard Zinn rewrites that narrative from the bottom looking up. Rather than treating the masses as background characters to elite ambition, he tells American history through ordinary people—Indigenous nations, enslaved Africans, laborers, immigrants, women, soldiers, activists, and all those whose lives reveal how progress often came from struggle rather than benevolence. His approach questions not only what happened, but who paid the price for those events, and who resisted them. His narrative shows that most turning points in the United States were shaped by conflict between those who had power and those who were denied it.

Zinn’s story is therefore less about heroic founding fathers and more about exploited workers building railroads, enslaved people fueling plantation economies, women agitating for rights, soldiers sent to fight wars they did not choose, and social movements trying to claim dignity. In this telling, America is not a smooth tale of gradual freedom, but a constant negotiation between control and resistance, privilege and rebellion, growth and injustice.

The Colonial Foundation – Conquest, Class Hierarchy, and the Birth of Inequality

The United States begins not with democracy but with conquest. European explorers arrived driven by desire for wealth and expansion. Indigenous societies—organized, communal, linked to land spiritually and economically—were forced into a violent collision with an economic system that valued property and resource extraction above all. Columbus’s arrival marked a period in which European powers enslaved, killed, or displaced Indigenous people on a massive scale, establishing an economy built on their suffering.

Colonial society quickly hardened into hierarchy. A small elite owned land and capital; merchants and plantation owners profited from crops and trade; small farmers and artisans made up a modest middle; and below them were indentured Europeans, enslaved Africans, and Indigenous people with almost no rights. Slavery became the defining labor institution, not only economically but ideologically: racism was cultivated deliberately to justify enslavement and to stop poor whites from joining enslaved Africans in rebellion. After early uprisings threatened elite control, lawmakers strengthened racial divisions to divide the lower classes.

Women lived under patriarchal laws that denied political participation and property ownership. Their labor—raising children, producing household goods, and working informally—was essential yet unseen. Despite silencing, women challenged their condition through writing, protest, and labor actions.

The American Revolution – Freedom for Whom?

Schools often present the American Revolution as a unified colonial struggle for liberty. Zinn paints a more complicated picture. Many wealthy colonists rebelled not out of universal principle but because British taxation and trade restrictions threatened their profits. Poor whites, who faced debt, hunger, and rising inequality, were persuaded to fight through promises of freedom, wages, or patriotism. For elites, war diverted unrest away from inequality at home by focusing anger on Britain.

Enslaved Africans largely sided with the British after being offered emancipation. Indigenous groups often opposed colonial forces because the British restricted westward settlement and colonists constantly invaded their lands. After independence, the new United States did not radically transform ...