You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times Book

Here I go again, under-rating Zinn…

Dear Future self,

So, you have come back full of regret and are now proceeding to upgrade your original rating for yet another Zinn book. How predictable.

Here were your original reasons why you chose to under-rate Zinn yet again:

1) When I first came across Zinn, I had already gone through Noam Chomsky on US foreign policy/media propaganda and was in the midst of unpacking debates between Chris Hedges and Christopher Hitchens on US wars/religion, so while A People's History of the United States was impactful in its unique ways of engaging with history, the Zinn train seemed to have passed in a sense.
2) I was also moving on to seek works that came directly from more diverse sources (geographic and social positioning), rather than having it filtered through the lens of the US academic Left (even if their objective was to be critical).
3) Lastly, I was looking for analyses to detail and unpack real-world capitalism (i.e. political economy).

The Good:
--So, why return to Zinn?
1) Accessible: I support a diversity of outreach styles, but there's no question Zinn's "A People's History" style is a prominent one. No textbook remoteness/"objectivity" (which is still biased of course), resulting in the stereotypical boring history. All on-the-grounds, visceral substance, with the important idea that much of history is created not by singular events and singular great men, but by a groundswell of people power.

2) Examples of change: what better place to start than Zinn's personal story of starting as a gullible jock who became a US bombardier in WWII to "fight fascism" and then having this myth fall apart and ending up as an anti-empire history teacher?
…Zinn's first-hand accounts of the Civil Rights movement (esp. SNCC) is another major component. Interesting reflections change, like on how self-interest can bring openings, like the financial gain of integrating sports terms or the political gain from black votes after the Voting Rights Act. This of course needs to be combined with political economy.

The Missing:
--As suggested above, direct accounts from a diversity of social positions, and compilations filtered by those outside of Western/Global North/US academia. If we were to stay with the US, Gerald Horne is a historian I'd like to explore more:
--More theory on structures, esp. political economy (favorite intro: Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works - and How It Fails), as well as synthesizing this with "A People's History". 2 books jump out here, although I still have to unpack discussions on their historical methods: Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation and A People's History of the World.
--All the above have for me culminated in a group of Indian Marxists (the English language does play a role too), especially: Vijay Prashad, Utsa Patnaik, Prabhat Patnaik, Amiya Kumar Bagchi (Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital).