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 appearing in Voices of a People’s History of the United States , edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove. Paralleling the 24 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 underrepresented or misrepresented in history books: women, Native Americans, workers, blacks and Latinos. Zinn has written short introductions to the texts, which themselves range in length from letters or poems of less than a page to entire speeches and essays that run several pages and longer. Voices of a People’s History is a symphony of our nation’s original voices, rich in ideas and actions, an embodiment of the power of civil disobedience and dissent, wherein lies our nation’s true spirit of defiance and resilience.
Beloved historian and activist Howard Zinn is the author of the best-selling A People’s History of the United States and many other books, including The Zinn Reader (Seven Stories Press 2000), Artists in the Time of War (Seven Stories Press, 2003) and Terrorism and War (Seven Stories Press 2002).
Anthony Arnove is the editor of Terrorism and War by Howard Zinn, and Iraq Under Siege . An activist and regular contributor to ZNet, his writing has appeared in The Nation , The Financial Times and Mother Jones . He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
