Beginning with a look at Christopher Columbus's arrival through the eyes of the Arawak Indians, then leading the reader through the struggles for workers' rights, women's rights, and civil rights during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ending with the current protests against continued American imperialism, Zinn presents a radical new way of understanding America's history. In so doing, he reminds readers that America's true greatness is shaped by our dissident voices, not our military generals.
A Young People's History of the United States is also a companion volume to The People Speak, the film adapted from A People's History of the United States and Voices of a People's History of the United States.
REBECCA STEFOFF is the author of more than 100 nonfiction books for children and young adults, and she has adapted several best-selling history books for younger readers.
Zinn Education Project: Teaching a People’s History offers free resources for teaching outside the textbook. Coordinated by @RethinkSchools & @TeachingChange
@JanineATurner1 "A Young People’s History of the United States: Revised and Updated" might be a good resource for your daughter. https://t.co/p5ltPST4Pt
"A Young People's History of the United States offers students a valuable tool to learn outside the textbook." --Deborah Menkart, executive director, Teaching for Change
"Zinn's work exemplifies an approach to history that is radical, regardless of its subject or geographical location. He tells us the untold story, the story of the world's poor, the world's workers, the world's homeless, the world's oppressed, the people who don't really qualify as real people in official histories. Howard Zinn painstakingly unearths the details that the powerful seek to airbrush away. He brings official secrets and forgotten histories out into the light, and in doing so, changes the official narrative that the powerful have constructed for us. He strips the grinning mask off the myth of the benign American Empire. To not read Howard Zinn is to do a disservice to yourself." --Arundhati Roy
"[Zinn] gives a real insight into history that is often left out of textbooks. Highly recommended." --Socialist Review