Voices of a People's History of the United States (ISBN 978-1583229163) is an anthology edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove. First released in 2004 by Seven Stories Press, Voices is the primary source companion to Zinn's A People's History of the United States. The book parallels A People's History in structure and is made up of various primary sources with short introductions to those sources.
Seven Stories Press released an updated edition with a new chapter in November 2009.
In the introduction, Zinn explains his motivation for the book:
"I want to point out that people who seem to have no power, whether working people, people of color, or women—once they organize and protest and create movements—have a voice no government can suppress."
Among the writings, speeches, poems, songs and other sources included in the book are selections by Chief Joseph, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, John Brown, Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, Upton Sinclair, Emma Goldman, Joe Hill, Eugene V. Debs, Langston Hughes, John Steinbeck, Malcolm X, Alice Walker, Martin Luther King, Jr., Allen Ginsberg, Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, Leonard Peltier, Noam Chomsky, César Chávez, Abbie Hoffman, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Julia Butterfly Hill and many others.
Read more about Voices Of A People's History Of The United States: The People Speak
Famous quotes containing the words voices of, united states, voices, people, history, united and/or states:
“When the voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And everything else is still.”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father!”
—Lydia M. Child (1802–1880)
“...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the “tough guy;” today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“In it he proves that all things are true and states how the truths of all contradictions may be reconciled physically, such as for example that white is black and black is white; that one can be and not be at the same time; that there can be hills without valleys; that nothingness is something and that everything, which is, is not. But take note that he proves all these unheard-of paradoxes without any fallacious or sophistical reasoning.”
—Savinien Cyrano De Bergerac (1619–1655)