Howard Zinn Critique

The late Howard Zinn is a much respected historian. His views are known to be bold and nonetheless controversial. In his book, “A People’s History of the United States,” Zinn touches on topics such as indentured servants, angry civilians, and the United States Constitution. Indentured servants were people of a lower economic class who worked for people of a higher economic background. These servants worked for a given amount of time, usually between five and seven years and either worked for money, food, shelter, or freedom. Indentured servants were originally made up of mostly young white males who were trading their time in prison or their poverty for time working as a servant. The number of indentured servants began to decrease and soon after English colonists looked for other potential people to enslave. The Virginia colony needed labor. They needed to grow corn for subsistence, and needed to grow tobacco for export because they had just learned to grow tobacco. Virginia couldn’t make the Indians work for them like Christopher Columbus had done in the past. The colonists would be outnumbered if they decided to try to take over the Indians even though they were equipped with firearms. The Indians were resourceful,
Beard studied the economic backgrounds and political ideas of the fifty-five men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draw up the constitution. In his findings a majority of them were lawyers by profession, most of them were wealthy due to land, slaves, manufacturing, or shipping. Half of them had money loaned out at interest, and that forty out of fifty held government bonds according to the records of the treasury department. Beard also found that most of the makers of the constitution had some direct economic interest in establishing a strong federal government. Beard did not think the constitution as written to benefit the Founding Fathers