Dennis Silber

This book is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand how the United States came to be in its current situation both politically and economically. What makes this the “peoples’s history” is that the bulk of the story is told from the point of view of the people who, being capable of writing, were able to describe what they saw, heard, and experienced at every time and era in American history. Not only are there accounts of events by first hand witnesses but also trenchant reports of their emotional reactions to how they were affected. Many criticize the book as being biased. History can be cast as a series of chronological occurrences with no context or explanation and I suspect that is what this book’s critics prefer. Or the history of the United States can be presented as a screed that purports to explain why it is so great and so exceptional which many critics of The People’s history, no doubt, would also prefer. What makes the Peoples History of the United States so on point is it’s documentation not only of the words of the people alive at the time of the events described but also of the words of politicians and then contemporary prominent social critics and observers. Their words serve to vindicate or condemn each and every one of them, as the case may be, by the subsequent course of our nation’s history after their times had past, and by the contemporary standards of not only the United States as it is today but by the whole world as well.