Voices of a People's History of the United States Author: Howard Zinn | Language: English | ISBN:
B00541YDWQ | Format: EPUB
Voices of a People's History of the United States Description
Here in their own words are Frederick Douglass, George Jackson, Chief Joseph, Martin Luther King Jr., Plough Jogger, Sacco and Vanzetti, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Mark Twain, and Malcolm X, to name just a few of the hundreds of voices that appear in Voices of a People's History of the United States, edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove.
Paralleling the twenty-four chapters of Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Voices of a People’s History is the long-awaited companion volume to the national bestseller. For Voices, Zinn and Arnove have selected testimonies to living history—speeches, letters, poems, songs—left by the people who make history happen but who usually are left out of history books—women, workers, nonwhites. Zinn has written short introductions to the texts, which range in length from letters or poems of less than a page to entire speeches and essays that run several pages. Voices of a People’s History is a symphony of our nation’s original voices, rich in ideas and actions, the embodiment of the power of civil disobedience and dissent wherein lies our nation’s true spirit of defiance and resilience.
- File Size: 1518 KB
- Print Length: 675 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1583229167
- Publisher: Seven Stories Press; 2 edition (January 4, 2011)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00541YDWQ
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #258,911 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove have edited a first class reader to go with Zinn's earlier narrative, A People's History of the United States, which was first published in 1980 and has gone through several revised and updated editions. This reader is an excellent collection of primary source documents drawn from: diaries, poems, songs, speeches, letters to the editor, testimony before congressional committees, official investigations of disasters, etc. that for the most part have not gotten into the official versions of what has happened in the American past.
Zinn, the principal author, does not hide his perspective. In fact, he openly announces it in a stirring introduction.
He tells us, "When I began work, five years ago, on what would become the present volume, Voices of a People's History of the United States, I wanted the voices of struggle, mostly absent from our history books, to be given the place they deserve. I wanted labor history, which has been the battleground, decade after decade, century after century, of an ongoing fight for human dignity, to come to the fore. And I wanted my readers to experience how at key moments in our history some of the bravest and most effective political acts were the sounds of the human voice itself.
"To omit or to minimize these voices of resistance is to create the idea that power only rests with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth, who own the newspapers and the television stations. I want to point out that people who seem to have no power, whether working people, people of color, or women-once they organize and protest and create movements-have a voice no government can suppress.
History is sometimes written with the goal of documenting the attitudes or opinions of a particular class of people, such as the intellectuals, the politicians, the scientists, or the warriors. Each of these groups has made important contributions to human accomplishment, which should not be forgotten or discarded under the guise of some egalitarian or multicultural reading of history. But when the stories of these groups are documented in history, too often other voices are deafened, and these voices represent the vast majority of historical participants. It is not enough to view history through the eyes of intellectuals, politicians, or warriors. For an historical account to be meaningful, it must offer insight into the collaborations, opinions, belief structures, and longings of those who chose not to become famous, but instead chose to indulge themselves in the unique fascinations that each historical epoch possesses.
But because most humans throughout history did not record their experiences, the historian is left wanting for accurate appraisals of these experiences. Diaries, journals, and other personal writings can assist the historian in this regard, and there have been many uses of these throughout the historical literature. It is important to remember though that because of the paucity of these personal documents, one should not be too hasty in imputing the opinions of their authors to the entire population at the time. One cannot view them as representing the "voices of the people" without establishing this with (difficult) statistical analysis.
Sometimes however these documents were written more as a catharsis, as a way of expressing, in a strong and determined way, an idea, grievance, or opposition to the status quo.
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