What if the American story is clearest from the picket line rather than the presidential podium? Howard Zinn tells US history from the ground up—Indigenous nations facing conquest, enslaved Africans, textile mill women, immigrant organisers, anti‑war GIs.

He re‑reads familiar chapters: through the Revolution, the Civil War, the New Deal, Vietnam - asking who paid, who profited, and who resisted. Plain‑spoken yet unabashedly argumentative, the book invites you to test the myths you were taught against the testimony of those left out.

If you want history that doubles as a toolkit, showing how ordinary people win rights and why they are never given, then this is a bracing and indispensable starting point. It changes how you read the past - and tomorrow’s - headlines.