A People’s History of the United States: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Every American schoolchild knows the story of how “Christopher Columbus” discovered America. Zinn tells this story from the perspective of the Arawak, noting how Columbus, from his first days in the Bahamas, aimed to subjugate the Arawak. The tone and structure of this opening passage suggests that this book will study familiar historical events from an unfamiliar perspective: the perspective of “the people,” not of heroes. Indeed, Zinn doesn’t see Columbus as a hero at all—Columbus was greedy, ruthless, and arguably navigationally incompetent.

There was nothing noble or enlightened about Columbus’s expeditions to the New World. His goal was simple: steal as much gold and wealth as possible in order to appease his employers in Spain. Some historians have argued that Columbus should be interpreted as a “product of his time” (in other words, that his genocidal acts were normal behavior at the time). However, Zinn brings up de las Casas, suggesting that, even in the 1490s, some Europeans regarded Columbus as a murderer and a thief. Columbus set a precedent for conquest and cruelty that continues, as we’ll see, throughout American history.

Zinn isn’t just writing a history book—he’s responding to the many history textbooks that have presented history from the perspective of conquerors, colonizers, and tyrants. He creates a clear imperative for his project, suggesting that he has a moral duty to tell a version of history that holds people like Columbus accountable for their genocidal crimes. Otherwise, he (and other historians) would be implicitly accepting murder and violence. The crux of Zinn’s argument is that historians aren’t just passive collectors of information about the past—they have the power to inspire people to overcome their “passivity” and change the world.

Another major problem that Zinn sees in average history textbooks is the premise that all Americans are alike and that they’re united in their common freedom and independence. Zinn argues, instead, that Americans have always been divided—specifically, that they’re always been divided between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless. (However, one major criticism of Zinn’s ideas is that Zinn himself is too general in his definition of “the powerless.”)

Zinn acknowledges upfront that his history of the United States isn’t free from his own personal biases. Zinn sees it as the duty of the historian not simply to relay what happened, but to remedy the marginalization that persecuted people have experienced, both in history and in history books. Many prominent historians—including those who share Zinn’s sense of moral responsibility—have questioned whether Zinn is too quick to idealize the persecuted and demonize the powerful. Even though he admits that the persecuted can be cruel to one another, Zinn will focus, by and large, on the commonalities and alliances between the persecuted, rather than their differences.

The growth of the Western industrialized world was intimately tied to the persecution of indigenous peoples in the New World—and, for that matter, to people in other undeveloped parts of the world, especially Africa, Asia, and South America. Columbus’s successors seem not to have expressed any guilt about murdering and torturing innocent people: their desire for wealth impelled them to continue conquering.

Instead of the usual, idealized vision of North American colonization offered in history textbooks, Zinn offers some harsh realities about brutality of the colonization. Significantly, he includes quotes from Native Americans, rather than from the familiar European heroes found in high school textbooks. The implicit answer to Chief Powhatan’s question is that the English colonizers’ greed and desire for property led them to use violence to take what wasn’t theirs.

In this passage, Zinn establishes the “war paradigm” that American society would use for the next four hundred years: provoke the enemy into a minor skirmish, treat the skirmish as an excuse to fight, and then defeat the enemy using superior technology. Thus, Winthrop’s Pilgrim colony—contrary to its reputation for peace and piety—brutally attacked the Pequot tribe, using terrorist methods.

Instead of treating “European settlers” as one, monolithic group, Zinn conveys the gap between the desires of the wealthy and the desires of the poor. In New England, the wealthiest citizens wanted a war on the Wampanoag, since they stood to gain significant property and land. Indeed, Zinn posits that the desire for more property motivated the early colonists in New England to resort to violence to conquer more territory. While Zinn doesn’t expound on his point, it’s interesting to note that the Pilgrims in New England (especially the wealthiest of them) believed that God had brought them to the New World, and they may also have believed that God gave them the further right to claim land for themselves.

European colonists—and the historians who’ve deified them in textbooks—have offered the same explanation for colonial brutality: the ends justified the means. But of course, this excuse ignores the basic greed and acquisitiveness of the European colonists: what was “good” for Europe was lethal for the Native Americans. Furthermore, most Europeans didn’t benefit in the slightest from the colonization of the New World—all the wealth flowed to the top of the social hierarchy.

This passage is a good example of Zinn’s approach to historical bias. Zinn idealizes Indian society, suggesting that it was an enlightened utopia, in which people were treated more or less equally. Zinn celebrates Native American science and technology, and suggests that women weren’t discriminated against in Native American tribes. In short, history textbooks are too quick to assume that European explorers conquered the Native Americans because they were inherently better (more technologically advanced, more “civilized,” etc.). Indeed, the clearest advantage that the Europeans seem to have had over the Native Americans was their propensity for violence and cruelty. Also, notice that throughout his book Zinn refers to Native Americans as Indians: while he does seem to recognize that “Indians” is an inaccurate and, in some ways, offensive term, he seems to have decided to use the term because, at the time when he was writing, it was the most common, accessible term for his readers. (For the purposes of this LitChart, in our analysis we’ll use the term “Native Americans,” because it is less potentially offensive, more geographically accurate, and more commonly used in the 2010s than it was in the 1980s.)

Zinn admits that he might be idealizing the Native Americans—i.e., assuming the best of them, in spite of the lack of a complete historical record about their societies. However, Zinn suggests that some idealization of the Native Americans is justified, not just because of the little we do know about pre-Columbian Native Americans, but because most history textbooks ignore Native American culture altogether. Zinn’s descriptions of the Native Americans aren’t just intended to convey information: they are meant to “balances out” the depictions found in other history books.