According to this classic of revisionist American history,
narratives of national unity and progress are a smoke screen disguising
the ceaseless conflict between elites and the masses whom they oppress
and exploit. Historian Zinn sides with the latter group in chronicling
Indians' struggle against Europeans, blacks' struggle against racism,
women's struggle against patriarchy, and workers' struggle against
capitalists. First published in 1980, the volume sums up decades of
post-war scholarship into a definitive statement of leftist,
multicultural, anti-imperialist historiography. This edition updates
that project with new chapters on the Clinton and Bush presidencies,
which deplore Clinton's pro-business agenda, celebrate the 1999 Seattle
anti-globalization protests and apologize for previous editions'
slighting of the struggles of Latinos and gays. Zinn's work is an vital
corrective to triumphalist accounts, but his uncompromising radicalism
shades, at times, into cynicism. Zinn views the Bill of Rights, universal
suffrage, affirmative action and collective bargaining not as fundamental
(albeit imperfect) extensions of freedom, but as tactical concessions by
monied elites to defuse and contain more revolutionary impulses; voting,
in fact, is but the most insidious of the "controls." It's too bad that
Zinn dismisses two centuries of talk about "patriotism, democracy,
national interest" as mere "slogans" and "pretense," because the history
he recounts is in large part the effort of downtrodden people to claim
these ideals for their own.

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