Analysis Of Howard Zinn´s A People's History Of The United States

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States offers great educational value, not only on history itself but on how history is typically taught, how it should be instead portrayed, and the arguments that arise as a result. Such a controversial book can bring up many different opinions and analyses. Zinn’s purpose in writing A People’s History of the United States was to share history from a perspective different from that which we typically read. “Too much history, he contends, is written ‘from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders.’ His People’s History, by way of contrast, sides with the losers, the downtrodden, the underdog” (Zinn XVI). I would consider that exact statement to be his thesis because the perspective he strives to show is so prevalent in all of writing; it is what all of his writing is based around. Zinn writes subjectively — there is no argument about that — but so do all other historians. As Zinn said in his interview by Barbara Miner, “[Objectivity]’s not possible because all history is subjective, all history represents a point of view” (“Why Students”). One’s point of view will largely affect how they write history as well as how they

In traditional history textbooks, or at least the ones that I have read, perspectives are one-sided, and the one side is that of the winner. The layout of these books (8.5 by 11 inch pages, justified small font for the length of the page) as well as simply the sentence structure and flow makes history textbooks less intuitive. Zinn’s perspective was largely that of the minority or that of the losers. Understanding his somewhat unbalanced perspective evened out with the traditional unbalanced perspective. However, if this book were to be perfect, it probably would be a bit more balanced. Daniel Flynn pointed out things that Zinn did not mention, such as Indians’ actions that were not completely