I've been trying to read A People's History and the more I read it the more I'm infuriated by Zinn's need to be orthodox-marxist at the expense of making his point. The first couple chapters are brilliant; tracing out the origin of racism as a means of control of the labor force, making clear the capitalist interests of the founding fathers, identifying the economic and religious forces that created the American flavor of patriarchy, etc.
But once he gets to the era that should be his bread-and-butter, the 1870s-1920s, he just completely drops the ball. This is the era of American history where capitalism is at the worst it has ever been. Unions are being busted, workers are being shot by the state, the works. But Zinn will just casually bring something up like "[thing] was used as a means of control" and then do ZERO work proving that out or citing a source for further reading. Just like, a piss-poor showing as a historical work. (The bibliography for each chapter is also way too thin and the book has poor or nonexistent citations throughout.)
Not to mention that Zinn is at times an egregious class-reductionist when he really shouldn't be. To Zinn, Racism is only a fundamental force in US politics when the robber barons and planter aristocrats are doing it. As soon as the labor unions and proto-socialist farmer populists are doing systemic racism to cut out black workers, it's "complex politics". An unfortunate side-effect, but "hey Debs didn't like racism so clearly it was a complex thing and racism wasn't the REAL driving force of the working man". Where there could be a coherent point about how white workers saw the boxing-out of black workers as a rational way to increase their share of the pie there is instead just a void of analysis. The only analysis that Zinn is willing to engage with is the shallowest version of the marxist one, and it's really annoying and silly.
We need a version of or replacement for A People's History that, while still keeping the good parts of Zinn's narrative, is able to engage with more than one critical understanding of US history. One more fully versed in feminist theory and race theory and queer theory. Because what we have is kind of pathetic, tedious to read, poorly argued, and full of analytical gaps.