History is subjective. It is written and recorded by both regular people and historians, all of whom have their own personal biases, interpretations of events, and beliefs, regardless of how conscious they are of trying to be objective. No account of history escapes this phenomenon.

This brings an important question to light: Whose account of history have we been taught? For many of us, especially those of us taught in public schools, it is the version approved by people in positions of power. In A People’s History of the United States, our author Howard Zinn does the opposite, telling history from the point of view of the powerless.

It starts with Columbus meeting the Native Americans in the late 1400’s. Many textbooks teach that he discovered new lands and new people and became economic partners with them. Through a European lens, this is true. If we consider this initial meeting through the eyes of the native people, however, we might interpret events differently. Columbus could not have discover America, the continent was already inhabited by millions of indigenous people. Did they trade peacefully? Perhaps at times, but Columbus’ men also enslaved many of the natives and treated them with extreme hostility. This same trend played out repeatedly as more Europeans sailed west and encountered the Native Americans. The Spanish and Portuguese subjugated the people of South and Central America, whilst the English subjugated those in the North.

Perhaps we know a bit of this history, and recognize that European-Native American relations were more antagonistic than harmonious. This, again, is only a partial truth, as “more than half the colonists who came to the North American shores in the colonial period came as servants.” Subjugation was not only reserved for the Native Americans, even many white men and women were oppressed by their own European elites. It was a society in favor of the few at the expense of the many. This, more than anything, is the theme of this book.

Zinn proposes that the history of The United States is a history of dominance by the elite classes over Native Americans, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, women, those living in poverty, and pretty much anyone without the ability to resist. Not only was this dominance financial, with the elite class keeping the wealth created by the labor class for themselves, but it was often physical and emotional as well. When movements of poor and working class people coalesced and petitioned for more rights and better working conditions, they were often met with imprisonment, violence, and death. The following are statistics from this book that illuminate these trends:

In 1770, in Boston, the top 1 percent of property owners owned 44 percent of the wealth.

In 1820, 120,000 Indians lived east of the Mississippi. By 1844, fewer than 30,000 were left.

Between 1790 and 1860, the number of slaves grew from 500,000 to 4,000,000.

In 1877, 100,000 workers went on strike against the railroad companies.

In 1886 there were over 1,400 strikes, involving 500,000 workers.

In 1914, the income of 44 families making $1 million or more equaled the total income of 100,000 families earning $500 a year.

During World War Two, there were 14,000 strikes involving 6,770,000 workers.

In 1950, the military had a budget of about $12 billion out of a total US budget of about $40 billion. In 1960, the military budget was $45.8 billion—49.7 percent of the total budget.

In 1961, about 200 giant corporations out of 200,000 corporations—one-tenth of 1 percent of all corporations—controlled about 60 percent of the manufacturing wealth of the nation.

In 1977, the top 10 percent of the American population had an income thirty times that of the bottom tenth; the top 1 percent of the nation owned 33 percent of the wealth.

On June 12, 1982, 1,000,000 people gathered in Central Park, New York City, to express their determination to bring an end to the arms race.

In 1990, the average pay of the chief executive officers of the 500 largest corporations was 64 times that of the average worker. By 1999, it was 475 times the average worker’s pay.

In 1998, one of every three working people in the United States had jobs paying at or below the federal poverty level (from the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Census Bureau).

Zinn asserts that the history of The United States is a history of control by the elite class. Consider the founding fathers: They were nearly all lawyers by profession and were “men of wealth, in land, slaves, manufacturing, or shipping.” Forty of the fifty-five men held government bonds, according to the records of the Treasury Department. These men were obviously from the elite class, which begs the question: If they were truly determined to compose a Constitution that ensured equally for all, why were no slaves, women, servants, or men without property allowed to be a part of the writing process?

Consider a recent presidential election: In 1980, Ronald Reagan received 51.6 percent of the popular vote while Jimmy Carter received 41.7 percent. These numbers look good until you factor in the reality that “only 54 percent of the voting-age population voted, so that—of the total eligible to vote—27 percent voted for Reagan.” A democracy is supposed to be a system of government in which the people govern themselves by electing representatives from amongst their ranks. However, if half of eligible voters don’t bother to participate and don’t believe in the system, is it really a democracy? The country was thus presided over by a man who was selected by just over one-quarter of the citizenry. In his first term in office, Reagan cut $140 billion dollars in social programs while simultaneously increasing the ‘defense’ budget by $181 billion. He clearly cared more about allocating money for the military industrial complex than for the poor.

A People’s History of the United States is a long and methodical book—it covers events from colonial times up to the 2000 presidential election and the “war on terror.” It is a necessary alternative to the versions of history proposed to many of us in school and should be taught in conjunction with them. The question that came to my mind when I finished reading it was this: Is the story of The United States a story about liberal democracy or a story about elite power?