This video from the USA is called Howard Zinn: “On Human Nature and Aggression.”
From Socialist Worker in the USA:
Review: BooksSee also here.Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle, A People’s History of American Empire. Metropolitan Books, 2008, 273 pages, $17.
Picturing resistance to empire
Zach Zill reviews a book that sets Howard Zinn’s history from below in a new form–the graphic novel.
May 29, 2008
OVER THE past 25 years, anyone coming to radical conclusions about the U.S. and its history has likely traveled through the pages of at least one Howard Zinn book. A People’s History of the United States is undoubtedly the most popular, widely read radical analysis of U.S. history.
First published in 1980, it has sold more than 1.7 million copies, become required reading in many high school and college classrooms and spawned several offshoot projects–most notably, the primary source reader Voices of a People’s History of the United States.
Now, Zinn, along with cartoonist Mike Konopacki and historian and activist Paul Buhle, has delivered a new book that is sure to delight and enlighten activists, radicals and those newly come to left-wing ideas.
A People’s History of American Empire is the first attempt to recreate Zinn’s history in a new form–that of the graphic novel. Like the theatrical performances of Voices and the forthcoming documentary The People Speak, A People’s History of American Empire uses a new medium to spread Zinn’s basic message to a wider audience.
The book provides an animated, bottom-up telling of U.S. history, with a focus on U.S. military interventions and their repercussions at home.
Here, the reader discovers one of the most consciously disguised historical facts: the U.S. was not born “the world’s greatest democracy,” destined to spread its message of freedom around the globe. Rather, from early in its history, it has striven to become a new form of empire, time and again playing an anti-democratic role in the world.
Zinn’s version of history draws out the social forces whose interests have driven the American empire–major corporations, the U.S. military, the ultra-wealthy American elite and politicians of both major parties.
From the 1890 massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee, to the funding and training of contras in Nicaragua and the predecessors of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the book depicts the major battles and military machinations of a U.S. ruling class bent on increasing its power and wealth, no matter what the human cost.
Zinn, Konopacki and Buhle show how the promise of American democracy has been realized only as a result of struggle against these interests, locating the source of progressive historical change where it rightly belongs–with the millions of people around the world who resisted the encroachment of U.S. empire.
