It is a compelling antidote to those who regard the future with pessimism." Readable and provocative and written with Paul Johnson's customary vigorous, direct and colourful style, A History of the American People charts the sweep and drama of America's history through its politics and economics, its art and literature and science, its society and manners and, not least, its complex religious beliefs. Reading the average American history textbook, it’s easy to “forget half the population of the country.” Women were largely invisible in public life, and they’re still largely invisible in histories of the early United States. Grades . Too many historians treat American history as a list of heroic, larger-than-life people: Columbus, the Founding Fathers, the presidents, etc. An Overview of Native American History. A brief historical background of the people who first discovered and lived in the Americas, called American Indians or Native Americans. The latest radio-dating analysis of the remnants of lives in the Bluefish Caves indicates that people were there 24,000 years ago. Andrew Jackson remains one of the most celebrated figures in American history (although, partly because of the scholarship of Howard Zinn, and other revisionist historians, Jackson has become much less popular than he was—his likeness was recently taken off the twenty-dollar bill). In this chapter he explains how American representative democracy allows people to select who will make decisions for them; the people themselves don't make the decisions. Not so much a history of the Indigenous Peoples of North America as much as a re-telling of American history that actually includes their unfortunate role within it, which is way more prominent in ways you haven't imagined. A New History of the First Peoples in the Americas. Second, we are sure that once you new people begin reading it, you'll go out and get a physical copy. The title may be considered misleading though: there is no information about the people who inhabited the territory … From. It is a very exhaustive account of how several small, dispersed British colonies became the American nation. Even though a huge portion of the American people chose to support military intervention in the Spanish American War and the war in the Philippines, Zinn chooses to end the chapter by focusing on the minority of Americans who opposed the war on moral grounds. It is a compelling antidote to those who regard the future with pessimism." . Literature has existed in the Americas for as long as the people who lived there have been telling stories. The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples.
The implication of such an interpretation of history is that “great men” are responsible for changing the world. If democracy is defined as majority rule or a government by the people, Zinn questions whether the United States is … These founding peoples spread … --" New York Times Book Review""Paul Johnson's" The History of the American People" is as majestic in its scope as the country it celebrates. Library Journal calls Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those.