By the time I read A People’s History of the United States I was in the senior year of an undergraduate American Studies major, which made me the exact opposite of the intended audience. It was all “hey, I bet you didn’t know this stuff was part of American history”, but yes, yes I did. More than that, I knew the stuff Zinn didn’t see fit to mention, the context and linkages and contradictions.

So when he tried to build these anecdotes into an indictment of America, in that register of white American post-New Left Zack de la Rocha cod-radicalism that tries to reinvent the wheel of Marxism without the baggage of dusty old discredited notions such as the circle, I noticed that while this conceit rested on a continuity and coherency between the respective “winners” and “losers” of each vignette, in actuality some of the “winners” had actually been the “losers” of other situations, or their (literal or figurative) heirs.

(If your interpretive categories are winners and losers, you can read any and all of history as a conspiracy to valorize the former at the expense of the latter, which as a reading is not so much wrong as so thoroughly, question-beggingly correct as to be worthless.)

I mean hell, the 2nd (okay, 3rd) American nation, that is to say black slaves and their descendants - those guys definitely get the short end of the stick, over and over. But even they occasionally win one. Briefly. In the early ‘70ses, mostly.