Maybe you’ve read People’s History of the United States, but you’ve almost certainly had someone trying to you impress you Timothy Chalamet-style with a public showing that they can reference the Howard Zinn book. I’ve read it once, and I resonated with about half of the book. In one sense, I was refreshed by accounts of unity and bravery when slaves would flee to Native American tribes or settlers would do the same only to be welcomed and supported and have their minds literally change to attitudes that recognized and resisted the inhumanity of a colonial project. These are stories that are kept out of historical narrative because it doesn’t comport with our masculine understanding of history as a chain of “noble but unfortunate” conflict. Additionally, those stories are kept from us because some of us may get ideas….

In another sense, I found Zinn’s edge to be severely dulled once the book began to investigate more recent history. The final chapters limits focus to president’s administrations rather than wider national practices, and Zinn ultimately drops the ball at the very end when he suggests that America could use its defense budget to become a “humanitarian superpower.” While this was not the original ending of the book, I felt betrayed by the ending in these update chapters. While the book largely criticizes America’s inhumane policies, it accepts America’s potential “humane” actions it could take in the future. After reading the book one would likely be convinced America will likely, no, definitively never commit to that kind of project, and in a lot of ways, that is a good thing. Zinn writes earlier in the book on the role of conversion schools and adoption that were meant to “help” Native American people, which should lead Zinn to raise more suspicion of what America defines as humanitarian today. Humanitarian aid is a misnomer, and more accurately serves as a budget category for our defense department’s continued oppression-by-ledger, as we know from recent “humanitarian efforts” in places like Haiti, Afghanistan, and Gaza.

Thankfully, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz wrote a book that not only serves as a corrective, but ultimately uncovers an entirely different and more accurate aspect of the colonial project in the Americas: corporate continuity. Across early chapters, Dunbar-Ortiz details the lives of Native Americans before Europeans set foot, the complexities of their governments/societies, and the importance of nature in those tribes. While many of us may understand general points in American history of settlement and destruction, we often do not pause to consider the scale, the specific techniques. Crucially, Dunbar-Ortiz connects these oppressive tactics used by the English, Spanish, Dutch, and French powers to modern understandings of total war. Growing up in 2000s public schooling, my understanding was that WWII brought unprecedented horrors onto the world, broke everyone’s mind, all doom and gloom and abstract art. Indigenous People’s History shows that scorched earth, total war, and psychological warfare are hardly modern advents. More accurately, these tactics were perfected by Europe before they were even aware of America.

One of the more painful realizations of the traditional aspect of modern warfare comes in the chapter “Bloody Footprints”, part of which explains the history of the practice of scalping. Settler authority had committed a mass “deputization” of sorts by encouraging individuals or small groups to go scalping for reward money. As reprehensible as the practice of targeting noncombatants is, it is a technique that was created, refined, and upscaled by the 1670s. Before reading this book, I understood the destructive racism of the tactics like scalping, but I did not previously associate this kind of grim corporatism with the first century of colonialism.

Those kinds of piercing investigations and modern connections are precisely why you should read this book. Dunbar-Ortiz implores the reader that to not only point out how technique and industry are much older forces of evil than we normally assume, but we can begin to see how our government, and even how us as individuals, attempt to cover up these histories. Allow this book to untangle the historical-narrative webs in your mind and allow you to see America in its truest light yet.