A People’s History of American Empire: A Graphic Adaptation – Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, Paul Buhle

I stayed at a hostel over my birthday this year, and I found this thing there. I read it over the long weekend at that hostel.

2026 is not going to go down in History as a great year for the United States. I am already willing to bet that it is going to be remembered as a pretty bad one. As the United States goes spiraling down the rabbit hole of authoritarianism, a little refresher on some of the lesser known perspectives on American history can be helpful. When it comes to this persepctive, I am not sure how familiar people are with Howard Zinn, who wrote wrote A People’s History of the United States, which is a seminal book in lefty circles. It was one of those books I half-hardheartedly read some 20 years ago, in some attempt to get some kind of bona fide amongst a certain type of left leaning university student groups.

It did affect my positively. Because the History of the United States isn’t just the history of an Empire, it is a History of an Empire and a lot of people who worked to fight against it, and that second part of the tradition, (which I guess finally fucking failed) is very fascinating. There are some strong socialist heros that ate worth knowing about. This book might inform you about some of them. This book will also really help a person understand to what extent the relationship between government and business/ industry always existed.

The Graphic Novel version of this is fun, and kinda cute. It has a style to it, the caricatures are pretty recognizable for the more famous figures, and it was nice that where the authors could they used actual historical pictures. That being said, it isn’t the best graphic novel every made, in terms of a certain amount of written expertise. Some pages were overloaded with text, in a way not very beholden to a comic.

But at the end of the day, the big fat history books can be hard to read regardless of how important the information in it might be, so I am glad they exist. It reminds me of how Stan Lee made a graphic novel version of the 9/11 Commision Report, in an effort to get people who sometimes hate stronger literary forms to engage with the information.