Voices of a People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Voices of a People's History of the United States Reviews

• 
  Emily

  
  
  A person must understand one thing going in: this is not "objective" history, if such a thing can be said to exist. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is written, and the companion volume Voices of a People's History is compiled, with a clear and openly acknowledged anarcho-socialist agenda, and if the titles (and the books' huge fame as touchstones of the radical left) weren't enough to clue you in, I definitely wouldn't recommend either volume to a person who wants their historical narrator to walk some kind of ideological "neutral" zone (nor, needless to say, to someone who expects a right-slanting bias). Zinn, as the title of his famous memoir You Can't Be Neutral On A Moving Train might suggest, makes no bones about his allegiances. In my opinion this can be a breath of fresh air, since every historian comes to the table with a set of biases, acknowledged or not, and getting them out in the open saves the reader time and energy. Not only that, but where should we locate this mythical neutral ground, anyway? Even the supposedly objective stance of one place or time comes to seem hopelessly biased when viewed from a different perspective. However I admit that, although I certainly don't agree with Zinn on everything, my political leanings are broadly in line with his, so take that for what it's worth.
  
  
  
  A People's History deals with over five hundred years of American history in just over six hundred pages, meaning that it covers a LOT of ground. Not only that, but its avowed focus on the stories of the resisters, the everyday people who fought against their conquerors/oppressors, means that by definition the narrative is more multi-form, more fragmented than the standard history event line (discovery, exploration, colonization, expansion, etc.) Zinn's work is cut out for him to an even greater extent than if he were simply attempting to tell five hundred years of victors' stories. For me, this was the most difficult thing about reading the book cover-to-cover: there is simply so much there. I usually prefer micro-histories: books that cover enough of the bigger picture so that I can contextualize the particulars of the smaller story being told, but specific enough that I feel I'm getting to know individuals, glimpsing what it was like to live in a different time and place. That's simply not going to happen when the author must move along at such a brisk clip, devoting four pages AT MOST to each individual struggle prior to 1960, and ten pages at most to more recent developments. Most of the fascinating individuals Zinn touches on are present for a paragraph or a page only, providing a tantalizing glimpse before the narrative speeds on by. Having read entire books on a few of the subjects Zinn mentions, it was very clear to me how much complexity and interest is lost in super large-scale histories like this one. To choose just one example, in Elliot Gorn's biography of the labor organizer Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, one of the most fascinating things to me was Jones's seemingly anti-progressive attitude toward female suffrage and union recognition for women; Zinn's only comment about this is "Mother Jones did not seem particularly interested in the feminist movement." It's not Zinn's fault, of course: just the function of this type of macro history.
  
  
  
  These challenges were one reason I decided to read Voices of a People's History in tandem with its parent volume: as a compilation of primary-source documents, it gives the reader a direct window into the experience of individual people taking part in the struggles Zinn describes, at a specific moment in time. I'm so glad I read both books together, as Voices reinforces the element I find most inspiring about A Peoples' History to begin with: that is, not so much the leftist (re)interpretation of events all Americans learned in high school anyway, but these books' function as a treasury of struggles and movements too regional, grass-roots, or politically radical to be included in traditional histories. These stories are often utterly fascinating: complex, personal/political struggles that illustrate the ways in which the landscape of American politics has shifted and buckled over the years, and a reminder that "America" does not equal whoever happens to be President/Governor/Secretary of Defense at a given time.
  
  
  
  I learned, for example, about the Anti-Rent movement in the Hudson Valley, a rebellion of tenant farmers against their Dutch-descended landlords, and against a system that amounted more or less to medieval-style feudalism, touched off by the financial crisis of 1837. I was reminded of the Irish-descended secret society of the Molly Maguires, immortalized antagonistically by Arthur Conan Doyle in The Valley of Fear and semi-sympathetically by Peter Carey in True History of the Kelly Gang. Zinn portrays a complex picture of Civil War-era hostilities, in which poor white Southerners resisted being drafted to die for the right of the wealthy to own slaves, and Northern anti-draft riots escalated into ugly race confrontations between Irish and black workers. The complexities of race surfaced again in Zinn's descriptions of the Populism of the 1890s, a Socialist grass-roots movement turned political party (Zinn argues that it was effectively made impotent by its move away from direct action and into politics) that was surprisingly radical in its demands for fair treatment for small farmers, while still displaying huge amounts of white racism. I learned about the General Strike in Seattle in 1919, in which workers across nearly all industries shut down the city in support of a wage increase for shipyard workers. So too, Zinn chronicles the International Workers of the World free-speech struggles in the early years of the 20th century, and tells of the 900 people jailed under the Espionage Act of 1917 for speaking against US involvement in World War I. From more recent years, I was glad to be reminded of the American Indian activism of the 1970s, when several tribes staged fish-ins to protest the federal withdrawal of ancestral fishing rights on the Nisqually and Columbia Rivers. Other native groups seized Alcatraz Island and the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in attempts to assert their rights to land and to basic visibility—a protest against the prevalent white American notion of Native Americans as a thing of the past, an extinct species, the "Disappearing Indian."
  
  
  
  In Voices, I loved best the accounts of ordinary people relating their experiences: first-hand accounts of Virginia slave rebellions; of the flour riots of 1837; of the massive Chicago railroad strikes of 1877; of organizing the unemployed in the Bronx tenements during the Great Depression; of the Stonewall riots of 1969. In addition to these first-hand recollections, there are letters, speeches, a surprising number of statements from defendants to their juries, popular songs and poems, excerpts from novels and memoirs, and a few passages from other third-party histories. Some of these documents seem overblown or poorly written by modern/literary standards (the nineteenth-century speeches are particularly overheated for my taste), but most are fascinating, and a few made me genuinely want to stand up and cheer. The speech to which this passage belongs, delivered by Emma Goldman in 1908, has long been a favorite of mine, and the place I point when trying to explain why I consider myself a humanist, not a patriot:
  
  
  
  

  
  Indeed, conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those how have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others.

  
  
  And the speech from which this comes, "Why We Fight," delivered in 1988 by Vito Russo and addressing the early apathy of those in power toward the AIDS epidemic: what can I say? It's amazing.
  
  
  

          So, if I'm dying from anything, I'm dying from homophobia. If I'm dying from anything, I'm dying from racism. If I'm dying from anything, it's from indifference and red tape, because these are the things that are preventing an end to this crisis. If I'm dying from anything, I'm dying from Jesse Helms. If I'm dying from anything, I'm dying from the President of the United States. And, especially, if I'm dying from anything, I'm dying from the sensationalism of newspapers and magazines and television shows, which are interested in me, as a human interest story—only as long as I'm willing to be a helpless victim, but not if I'm fighting for my life.
  
          If I'm dying from anything—I'm dying from the fact that not enough rich, white, heterosexual men have gotten AIDS for anybody to give a shit.

  
  
  "If I'm dying from anything, I'm dying from Jesse Helms": brilliant. (Incidentally, this speech also made me realize just how fast the messaging around AIDS evolved, because by the time I was old enough to be getting middle-school sex education, which must have been only three or four years after Russo delivered the speech, the educational system was aggressively trying to reverse the mistaken impression that HIV was solely a "gay" disease. Russo's point, that our society should do its best to intervene even if it WERE solely a gay disease, or a poor disease, or a disease affecting people of color, still stands, however.)
  
  As much as the United States has a despicable tradition of violent imperialism and oppression, both within our borders and abroad, it's good to learn or be reminded of concrete ways in which we also have a history of conscientious protest. To what extent the latter tradition can point to concrete results is another question, and I must admit that reading the Zinn duo does sometimes feel like being beat over the head with the atrocities committed by the US government and corporations through the years. Personally, there was nothing too surprising in this aspect of the book, although it's possible that someone who didn't grow up a lefty in Portland "
  Little Beirut" Oregon might be more surprised by the ongoing abuses Zinn chronicles. Despite whatever difficulties I may have had with this duo, however, I found them very much worthwhile. I plan to use them as starting points to more in-depth investigations of some of the most interesting stories, and I was glad to be reminded that no group, be it country or movement, speaks as a monolith.
• 
  John

  In most history books we read about famous people like Theodore Roosevelt or Harry Truman, but the truth is that these figures did not effect the daily lives of each of us nearly as much as the forgotten heroes this book brings out. People who fought for universal male suffrage, for women's suffrage, free speech, shorter workdays and workweeks, higher wages, equal treatment before the law, more accountability in government, etc. This book is able to bring those heroes back into our consciousness by simply bringing together a compilation of their own words and writings. By far one of the best books I have ever read.
• 
  Emily

  I downloaded this one from Audible and the readers were all amazing... Kurt Vonnegut, James Earl Jones, and Alice Walker to name a few. It was great!
• 
  Brahm

  Mixed opinion on this audiobook.
  
  First, I listened to the wrong book -
  A People's History of the United States was what was recommended to me, and Voices of... is not the same thing (Strike 1). It's supplementary source material (essays, speeches, songs, letters, etc) with some introductory commentary on each piece by Zinn.
  
  Much of the content was interesting and enlightening. People's History is the voice of the underrepresented, misrepresented, etc, and I took away many new perspectives.
  
  But it was a mixed bag. In the introduction, Zinn tells the reader (or listener) to brace themselves for a strong left-bias in the content and the commentary. The challenge for the reader is that as the book progresses through history (from discovery of the Americas to modern day) the content goes from very easy to accept (eg, "slavery is bad" or "unions liberated workers from systemic abuse by early companies!" or "women should have the right to vote") to more questionable ("nobody's done socialism/communism right yet") or flat-out inflammatory and designed to get you riled up (eg, a Michael Moore rant about George W. Bush). And that's fine I guess, but it doesn't line up with my goal of not exposing myself to content designed to get me outraged.
  
  As the main theme is people rising up and organizing, every subject is framed as a struggle and a battle. That's the book's perspective, but at one point I asked myself, "does this book really not have a single positive thing to say about the United States?"
  
  As a standalone work (and yes, my fault for reading the supplemental material instead of the main book), Voices suffers from the lack of a single cohesive narrative. The focus moves from one civil rights issue to another, so each chapter is something new.
  
  One thing I really liked about Voices (the audiobook) was the narrators (plural!). Every piece of source material was read by a voice actor who could bring it to life.
  
  I'll give it two stars: "It was OK". I read the wrong book and I probably don't fit perfectly in the target demographic. A couple chapters in I would have said it would be an easy four stars, but as the book marched through time it wore me down, until I was counting down the minutes until it was done.
• 
  Erin Crane

  I tried 😂
• 
  Hemubr

  This book is really fantastic.
• 
  Laura

  I love Howard Zinn. Just wish there was a unabridged version.
• 
  Jessica Biggs

  I have been a fan of Howard Zinn since I read A People's History in 11th grade. He writes to my liberal heart. This collection of speeches, journal entries, and essays I've been putting off reading for almost a decade. It seemed so daunting to sit down and read. I listened to the audiobook instead, and that is the way to experience this. The multiple narrators do a fantastic job of portraying the pain, anger, and indignation in each of the writings.
  This collection delves into aspects of history that aren't taught in school, not showed in the media, and many times not even widely known. From my own interest in african-american and feminist history, much of the writings from the 1800's I was familiar with, but my eyes were widely opened to the occurrences in my own lifetime--the '80s to present. The vast amount of war protests for the first gulf war to the current gulf war (which I knew some of). The labor union strikes, immigration, the protests of teachers to standardized testing, the protests to the banks. All of this is on the periphery, and it shouldn't be. One thing Howard Zinn was always able to do is make me feel passionate again about the struggles we are currently dealing with, and taht it's not okay to be complacent and sit while other people fight these battles. But I am grateful to the people in this book who did fight and then shared their stories through speeches and writings.
  This book should be mandatory reading for high school age kids. Let's stop the talk of Christopher Columbus discovering America, stop the thought that because people are different they're the problem--One thing he's always been able to point out is the that the problem isn't with the 99% of us, it's with the 1%.
• 
  RONWELL

  Garbage book from a garbage author, if you hate America and all she stands for then this is the book for you. If you have a shred of intellectual honesty then you’ll be better served lining this dumpster fire of a book in your parrot cage... Zinn deals in half-truths and innuendo and always takes a dim view of our great Country in all situations. A perfect example of an ivory tower leftist that is a darling of the blame America first crowd...
• 
  Airmid

  This is, in my opinion, the BEST book out of the Zinn People's History books. We read it while homeschooling in conjunction with the other books, and my son and I agree that this took the curriculum to a new level. It's one thing to read about something, it's something entirely different to read it in the words of the people who actually endured it. I recommend this to anyone I know who is teaching their kiddos about US History.
• 
  Drew Reilly

  Very good. A succinct anthology that Zinn used to help write his People's History.
  
  If I can offer a bit of advice, read this simultaneously with the People's History, alternating chapters. I read the People's History about 6 months ago, and feel that reading a chapter in History, then the corresponding chapter in Voices, would have made both books more enjoyable and helpful.
• 
  Jody Silver

  took almost a year...but i'm finished (yes, i read many books in between).
  so sad to read all of the evidence that we really haven't changed much in terms of gov't or politics. informative and i learned some new info.
• 
  Liz

  Saw this dramatized in a documentary with some famous actors and actresses reading from the letters and papers. Very moving..
• 
  Kaz D'Spaña

  This is my first read of the revised version. I am unable to get through this without despair of what we humans CONTINUE to do to to our fellow man. We don't stop the hate.
• 
  Jason von Meding

  An incredible collection featuring many authors that I will need to do some more reading about. A great companion book to A People's History.
• 
  Nat

  Listened to the audio book. Really made
  historic events im familiar with come alive. A must read for anyone that's interested in history.
• 
  Tie Webb

  Excellent audio book. Just wish it was longer.
• 
  Paul Gover

  Should be mandatory reading in every school. Shows America in a light not covered often enough
• 
  Jennifer Hirsch

  Important. Must be read.
• 
  Casey Wagner

  A powerful oral and written history of the United States told via the words of those who lived through it.
• 
  Pameemi

  The book is definitely terrific.
• 
  Rica

  This book is absolutely amazing