A TribalCrit Analysis of Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States and Paul Johnson's History of the American People

Abstract

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (1980) and Paul Johnson's A History of the American People (1997) have occupied prominent positions in both academic discourse and popular readership. Yet, little scholarly attention has directly compared their constructions of Indigenous history and settler-colonial power using Tribal Critical Theory (TribalCrit). This research addressed this gap by asking: How do Zinn's and Johnson's historical narratives align with or diverge from the core principles or tenets of TribalCrit? The study employed Comparative Historical Analysis (CHA) as its methodological approach to systematically examine how each text constructs the themes of material dispossession, sovereignty/self-determination, and Indigenous agency. TribalCrit worked as the theoretical framework operationalized through deductive coding which focused on colonization, policy, sovereignty, and story as theory. The AI-assisted texts analysis observed that Zinn foregrounded Indigenous resistance and critiqued state violence but at times embedded Indigenous sovereignty within broader anti-capitalist narratives. In contrast, Johnson reinforces settler sovereignty by means of erasure, civilizational and assimilationist rhetoric. The findings also revealed that even revisionist narratives seeking to challenge dominant paradigms can unintentionally replicate historical silences by not fully articulating ongoing-colonialism and Indigenous self-determination as a present-day political reality.