Review by ALAN MAASS

GEORGE WASHINGTON was the father of our country. Thomas Jefferson declared independence. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, and Franklin Roosevelt gave us Social Security.

The history of the United States as it’s taught to schoolchildren is filled with such claims. And it doesn’t get much better as we get older, either. Whether in the classroom or in the media, U.S. history is typically dominated by the lives of a small number of Great Men (and a very few women), and maybe some of their Great Ideas.

That leaves out a lot. Who, for example, served in Washington’s army? How many other people thought Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was a good thing? Answering these questions isn’t only a matter of giving credit where credit is due, but more importantly, understanding what really happened. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation would have been meaningless without the actions of masses of other people–from Black slaves who resisted bondage from the beginning, to the abolitionists who tirelessly built a movement against slavery even when it seemed like an unreachable goal, to the soldiers of the Union Army who fought and died to defeat the Confederacy.

Since it was first published more than twenty years ago, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has opened countless people’s eyes to the other side of American history. Now, with Anthony Arnove, who is on the editorial board of this magazine, Zinn has produced a new book called Voices of a People’s History of the United States. It collects excerpts from speeches, articles, essays, pamphlets, songs, poems, novels, and more–all reflecting the experiences, beliefs, and struggles of those on the other side of history.

Voices works as a companion volume to A People’s History, but it also stands on its own. Together or separately, both books turn history upside down–viewing the history of America, as Zinn and Arnove put it in their introduction to Voices, from the point of view of Native Americans, of slaves, of trade unionists, of the pioneers of the women’s movement, of the victims of Washington’s imperialist wars.

One result is that Voices presents a very different picture of events than the one we learn about from early on. The first chapter, for example, focuses on Christopher Columbus’s "discovery" of the "New World"–and exposes the horrific crimes of conquest by quoting Bartolomé de Las Casas, a contemporary of Columbus who tried to persuade the Spanish monarchy to stop the cruelties committed against the natives of the Americas:

Readers of the ISR may be familiar with some of this (not least from reading A People’s History). But there are selections in Voices that give a fuller picture of certain eras than many specialist books. For example, the chapter on the Civil War collects accounts of class conflict within the Confederacy. "Acts of resistance took place not only among soldiers, but also among women forced to deal with the growing costs of the war," Zinn and Arnove write in introducing the selections. These excerpts together show something about the slave South that is barely acknowledged in mainstream histories–that the interests of the super-wealthy Southern elite and the poor whites who made up the Confederate Army were in conflict, something that wasn’t always overcome by appeals to white supremacy, still less "Southern traditions."

One theme that comes across in this section of Voices as in many others is the question of class. As Zinn writes in his introduction to Voices:

The excerpts in Voices likewise reflect this continuity, from accounts of pre—Revolutionary War uprisings of indentured servants and poor farmers against the men of property, to speeches by workers fighting to defend union power against Corporate America’s offensive of the last three decades.

Voices collects some of the most important statements from the African American struggle for equality in the U.S., and it highlights the little-known history of the women’s movement. Another great strength is the book’s depiction of the causes and consequences of imperialist war. Samuel Clemens’ disgust at the U.S. government’s barbaric behavior in conquering the Philippines a century ago, and Kurt Vonnegut’s questioning of U.S. motives in the Second World War fifty years later, fit together with the statements of Tim Predmore, a U.S. soldier who spoke out against George Bush Jr.’s new Gulf war slaughter.

At every point, Zinn and Arnove search out the spirit of resistance–including the times in U.S. history where there seemed to be little. The accounts of struggle in this book cover the well-known demonstrations, when masses of people came together to make their voices heard. But just as often, the protests are local events–the kind of struggles that take place constantly in U.S. society, even if few people hear about them or learn the names of the participants. One inspiring selection in Voices is the story told by a Communist Party member, Rose Chernin (via a memoir by her daughter, Kim Chernin), about the spread of rent strikes in New York City during the Great Depression of the 1930s:

For Zinn and Arnove, such struggles make all the difference in what has happened in society. As Zinn writes in the introduction:

History, looked at under the surface, in the streets and on the farms, in GI barracks and trailer camps, in factories and offices, tells a different story. Whenever injustices have been remedied, wars halted, women and blacks and Native Americans given their due it has been because "unimportant" people spoke up, organized, protested, and brought democracy alive.

Or, as the abolitionist Reverend Theodore Parker put in a speech, excerpted in Voices, at a meeting in Boston after a former slave was kidnapped by slavecatchers to be returned to his owner under the federal government’s Fugitive Slave Act:

Jennifer Gonnerman
LIFE ON THE OUTSIDE: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett
Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2004
368 pages $24