The great Howard Zinn is working on a documentary of his People's History of the United States. Here's a special sneak peak at the trailer... here

Also from Tomdispatch.com, the following essay and short video on A People's History of
American Empire

Empire or Humanity?

What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me About the
American Empire
By Howard Zinn

With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military
bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a
question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once
fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.

However, the very idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to
me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in
the Second World War, and came home. Even as I began to have second thoughts
about the purity of the "Good War," even after being horrified by Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own bombing of towns in Europe, I still did
not put all that together in the context of an American "Empire."

I was conscious, like everyone, of the British Empire and the other imperial
powers of Europe, but the United States was not seen in the same way. When,
after the war, I went to college under the G.I. Bill of Rights and took courses
in U.S. history, I usually found a chapter in the history texts called "The Age
of Imperialism." It invariably referred to the Spanish-American War of 1898 and
the conquest of the Philippines that followed. It seemed that American
imperialism lasted only a relatively few years. There was no overarching view of
U.S. expansion that might lead to the idea of a more far-ranging empire -- or
period of "imperialism."

I recall the classroom map (labeled "Western Expansion") which presented the
march across the continent as a natural, almost biological phenomenon. That huge
acquisition of land called "The Louisiana Purchase" hinted at nothing but vacant
land acquired. There was no sense that this territory had been occupied by
hundreds of Indian tribes which would have to be annihilated or forced from
their homes -- what we now call "ethnic cleansing" -- so that whites could
settle the land, and later railroads could crisscross it, presaging
"civilization" and its brutal discontents.

Neither the discussions of "Jacksonian democracy" in history courses, nor the
popular book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson, told me about
the "Trail of Tears," the deadly forced march of "the five civilized tribes"
westward from Georgia and Alabama across the Mississippi, leaving 4,000 dead in
their wake. No treatment of the Civil War mentioned the Sand Creek massacre of
hundreds of Indian villagers in Colorado just as "emancipation" was proclaimed
for black people by Lincoln's administration.

That classroom map also had a section to the
south and west labeled "Mexican Cession." This was a handy euphemism for the
aggressive war against Mexico in 1846 in which the United States seized half of
that country's land, giving us California and the great Southwest. The term
"Manifest Destiny," used at that time, soon of course became more universal. On
the eve of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Washington Post saw
beyond Cuba: "We are face to face with a strange destiny. The taste of Empire is
in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle."

The violent march across the continent, and even the invasion of Cuba,
appeared to be within a natural sphere of U.S. interest. After all, hadn't the
Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared the Western Hemisphere to be under our
protection? But with hardly a pause after Cuba came the invasion of the
Philippines, halfway around the world. The word "imperialism" now seemed a
fitting one for U.S. actions. Indeed, that long, cruel war -- treated quickly
and superficially in the history books -- gave rise to an Anti-Imperialist
League, in which William James and Mark Twain were leading figures. But this was
not something I learned in university either.

The "Sole Superpower" Comes into View

Reading outside the classroom, however, I began to fit the pieces of history
into a larger mosaic. What at first had seemed like a purely passive foreign
policy in the decade leading up to the First World War now appeared as a
succession of violent interventions: the seizure of the Panama Canal zone from
Colombia, a naval bombardment of the Mexican coast, the dispatch of the Marines
to almost every country in Central America, occupying armies sent to Haiti and
the Dominican Republic. As the much-decorated General Smedley Butler, who
participated in many of those interventions, wrote later: "I was an errand boy
for Wall Street."

At the very time I was learning this history -- the years after World War II
-- the United States was becoming not just another imperial power, but the
world's leading superpower. Determined to maintain and expand its monopoly on
nuclear weapons, it was taking over remote islands in the Pacific, forcing the
inhabitants to leave, and turning the islands into deadly playgrounds for more
atomic tests.

In his memoir, No Place to Hide, Dr. David Bradley, who monitored
radiation in those tests, described what was left behind as the testing teams
went home: "[R]adioactivity, contamination, the wrecked island of Bikini and its
sad-eyed patient exiles." The tests in the Pacific were followed, over the
years, by more tests in the deserts of Utah and Nevada, more than a thousand
tests in all.

When the war in Korea began in 1950, I was still studying history as a
graduate student at Columbia University. Nothing in my classes prepared me to
understand American policy in Asia. But I was reading I. F. Stone's
Weekly. Stone was among the very few journalists who questioned the official
justification for sending an army to Korea. It seemed clear to me then that it
was not the invasion of South Korea by the North that prompted U.S.
intervention, but the desire of the United States to have a firm foothold on the
continent of Asia, especially now that the Communists were in power in China.

Years later, as the covert intervention in Vietnam grew into a massive and
brutal military operation, the imperial designs of the United States became yet
clearer to me. In 1967, I wrote a little book called Vietnam: The Logic of
Withdrawal. By that time I was heavily involved in the movement against the
war.

When I read the hundreds of pages of the Pentagon Papers entrusted to me by
Daniel Ellsberg, what jumped out at me were the secret memos from the National
Security Council. Explaining the U.S. interest in Southeast Asia, they spoke
bluntly of the country's motives as a quest for "tin, rubber, oil."

Neither the desertions of soldiers in the Mexican War, nor the draft riots of
the Civil War, not the anti-imperialist groups at the turn of the century, nor
the strong opposition to World War I -- indeed no antiwar movement in the
history of the nation reached the scale of the opposition to the war in Vietnam.
At least part of that opposition rested on an understanding that more than
Vietnam was at stake, that the brutal war in that tiny country was part of a
grander imperial design.

Various interventions following the U.S. defeat in Vietnam seemed to reflect
the desperate need of the still-reigning superpower -- even after the fall of
its powerful rival, the Soviet Union -- to establish its dominance everywhere.
Hence the invasion of Grenada in 1982, the bombing assault on Panama in 1989,
the first Gulf war of 1991. Was George Bush Sr. heartsick over Saddam Hussein's
seizure of Kuwait, or was he using that event as an opportunity to move U.S.
power firmly into the coveted oil region of the Middle East? Given the history
of the United States, given its obsession with Middle Eastern oil dating from
Franklin Roosevelt's 1945 deal with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, and the
CIA's overthrow of the democratic Mossadeq government in Iran in 1953, it is not
hard to decide that question.

Justifying Empire

The ruthless attacks of September 11th (as the official 9/11 Commission
acknowledged) derived from fierce hatred of U.S. expansion in the Middle East
and elsewhere. Even before that event, the Defense Department acknowledged,
according to Chalmers Johnson's book The Sorrows of Empire, the existence
of more than 700 American military bases outside of the United States.

Since that date, with the initiation of a "war on terrorism," many more bases
have been established or expanded: in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, the desert of
Qatar, the Gulf of Oman, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else a compliant
nation could be bribed or coerced.

When I was bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and France in
the Second World War, the moral justification was so simple and clear as to be
beyond discussion: We were saving the world from the evil of fascism. I was
therefore startled to hear from a gunner on another crew -- what we had in
common was that we both read books -- that he considered this "an imperialist
war." Both sides, he said, were motivated by ambitions of control and conquest.
We argued without resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not long after
our discussion, this fellow was shot down and killed on a mission.

In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers and
the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My motive, like
that of so many, was innocent of imperial ambition. It was to help defeat
fascism and create a more decent world, free of aggression, militarism, and
racism.

The motive of the U.S. establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I knew,
was of a different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry Luce,
multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life, and Fortune
magazines, as the coming of "The American Century." The time had arrived, he
said, for the United States "to exert upon the world the full impact of our
influence, for such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see fit."

We can hardly ask for a more candid, blunter declaration of imperial design.
It has been echoed in recent years by the intellectual handmaidens of the Bush
administration, but with assurances that the motive of this "influence" is
benign, that the "purposes" -- whether in Luce's formulation or more recent ones
-- are noble, that this is an "imperialism lite." As George Bush said in his
second inaugural address: "Spreading liberty around the world… is the calling of
our time." The New York Times called that speech "striking for its
idealism."

The American Empire has always been a bipartisan project -- Democrats and
Republicans have taken turns extending it, extolling it, justifying it.
President Woodrow Wilson told graduates of the Naval Academy in 1914 (the year
he bombarded Mexico) that the U.S. used "her navy and her army... as the
instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression." And Bill
Clinton, in 1992, told West Point graduates: "The values you learned here… will
be able to spread throughout the country and throughout the world."

For the people of the United States, and indeed for people all over the
world, those claims sooner or later are revealed to be false. The rhetoric,
often persuasive on first hearing, soon becomes overwhelmed by horrors that can
no longer be concealed: the bloody corpses of Iraq, the torn limbs of American
GIs, the millions of families driven from their homes -- in the Middle East and
in the Mississippi Delta.

Have not the justifications for empire, embedded in our culture, assaulting
our good sense -- that war is necessary for security, that expansion is
fundamental to civilization -- begun to lose their hold on our minds? Have we
reached a point in history where we are ready to embrace a new way of living in
the world, expanding not our military power, but our humanity?

Howard Zinn is the author of A People's History of the United
States and Voices of a People's History of the United States, now
being filmed for a major television documentary. His newest book is A
People's History of American Empire, the story of America in the world, told
in comics form, with Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle in the American Empire
Project book series. An animated video adapted from this essay with visuals from
the comic book and voiceover by Viggo Mortensen, as well as a section of the
book on Zinn's early life, can be viewed by clicking here. Zinn's website is HowardZinn.org.