Her recent book, These Truths (2018), is more than a revision of the American story we have heard before. That deeper reality, for Zinn, is the historical dynamism of class conflict understood in Marxist terms: particularly, “a rising class of important people” who once ”needed to enlist on their side enough Americans to defeat England without disturbing too much the relations of wealth and power that had developed over 150 years of colonial history.” Zinn’s People’s History is essentially a political and economic chronicle of capitalism in the Americas versus the heroic efforts of a bold and inspired few who have dared to revolt, imagining for themselves and their children “a different and marvelous world” (641).Įnter Jill Lepore.

On the contrary, the key to his whole historical project–once praised as “a step toward a coherent new version of American history”–is the assumption that “the reality behind the words of the Declaration of Independence” has been the definitive, shaping force in American history rather than the lofty ideals these words represent.

Is this merely an interesting historical coincidence? The author thinks not. In A People’s History of the United States (1980), the (in)famous American historian, Howard Zinn, shrewdly observed that “the words of the Declaration of Independence” were “issued in the same year as Adam Smith’s capitalist manifesto, The Wealth of Nations” (74). Howard Zinn’s People’s History (1980)–once praised as “a step toward a coherent new version of American history.”

Lepore these truths