A People’s History of the United States was published by Harper & Row in 1980 and has sold over two million copies, making it the most commercially successful work of left-wing American historiography ever published. Zinn’s thesis is stated in his opening chapter on Columbus: the conventional narrative of American history is told from the perspective of conquerors, slaveholders, industrialists, and presidents. By telling it instead from the perspective of those who were conquered, enslaved, exploited, and governed, a radically different picture emerges — one of continuous resistance, struggle, and the hard-won achievement of rights never voluntarily granted.
The book covers American history from 1492 to the present (updated in successive editions through 2003) in twenty-five chapters. Each chapter reframes a familiar period — the Revolution, the Civil War, industrialization, the New Deal, the Cold War — by foregrounding the experiences of ordinary people and marginalized groups. The American Revolution appears not as a popular uprising but as an elite project designed to redirect colonial anger away from domestic exploitation; the New Deal appears not as progressive reform but as the minimum concession necessary to prevent revolution.
Zinn’s critics — and they are numerous, spanning from conservative historians to centrist academics — charge that the book is propagandistic, that it replaces one simplistic narrative with another, that it denies agency to historical actors who were genuinely progressive within their context, and that it treats all American institutions as uniformly oppressive. These criticisms have merit — the book is openly polemical, not balanced — but miss the point of what Zinn was doing: providing a corrective to the patriotic consensus history taught in American schools, not a neutral replacement for it.
Collecting A People’s History
First edition (Harper & Row, New York, 1980): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $300–$800
- Very good: $100–$300
- Signed copies: $500–$1,500
- Later printings/paperbacks: $5–$20