This book proved to be an enlightening read. Teach and inspire. Howard Zinn has given us a perspective of real American history heretofore unavailable to us – history from the point of view of real people – immigrant workers, American women, the working poor, factory workers, Africans, and Native Americans. United States, originally published in 1980, as a non-fiction work by American political scientist and historian Howard Zinn. Zinn seeks to show us American history through the eyes of ordinary people, rather than the opinions of biased historians. A People's History is included in high school and college curricula in the United States and is a favorite of American homeschoolers everywhere. It has dramatically changed the way history is now presented. In a 2004 interview, Zinn said, “You could say it took me twenty years, twenty years of teaching American history and gathering material and so on, but not knowing that I was going to write this book. When I sat down to write, it took me less than a year to write. I wrote it because after the movements of the 1960s people had become radicalized and people had become dissatisfied with traditional history and wanted stories that showed workers, blacks, Native Americans and women. And I was aware that there was no such book, that there was no such story. So I decided I would try to fill that gap.” (1) The history of a people begins with the story of the first encounters of the natives with Christopher Columbus. Zinn's views on the reality of these early encounters are fundamentally different from the stories we hear as children. We find Columbus traditionally depicted as a peaceful and...... middle of paper ......vision and tells us about a powerful social evolution based on the ever-widening gap between the majority of the American population ("the 99%") and the wealthy minority (“the 1%”) (Zinn, p. 619-621, 1995) has been attacked. over and over again by conservatives and others. Considering the events of recent years, the banking crisis and the rise of the Occupy Movement in 2011, Zinn's theories about the 99% are surprisingly insightful, even predictive of the times of the 21st century. . Zinn is always careful to avoid painting his predictions with too broad a brush. Zinn's scrutiny of the issues between the wealthy and the growing poor continues today – A Magazine or Art & Politics, October 27, 2004