A People’s History of the United States

Introduction: History from the Bottom Up

The arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Bahamas in 1492 set a template for the next five centuries. It initiated a collision between a European civilization driven by a frenzy for money and indigenous societies rooted in communal sharing. The Arawaks greeted the Spaniards with hospitality, offering gifts and food to the new arrivals. Columbus, however, saw not neighbors but fine servants, and his primary objective was gold to satisfy the creditors of the Spanish Crown. When gold proved scarce, the mission shifted to the systematic extraction of human labor.

On the island of Hispaniola, the Spaniards instituted a reign of terror to compel the indigenous population to find gold dust that did not exist. Those who failed to meet their quotas had their hands severed, while those who fled were hunted with dogs. The result was a demographic catastrophe that wiped out entire communities. Through overwork in the mines, mass suicides, and the destruction of family life, a population that numbered in the millions was reduced to a few hundred within two generations. This pattern of progress through genocide was repeated by Cortés against the Aztecs and Pizarro against the Incas, fueled by the primitive accumulation of capital that built the modern Western world.

Traditional history often treats these atrocities as a regrettable but necessary footnote to a grand adventure. By focusing on the seamanship of Columbus or the heroism of the Founding Fathers, historians make an ideological choice to view the past from the perspective of the conquerors. This perspective creates a myth of national interest that pretends the master and the slave, or the landlord and the tenant, shared a common goal. In reality, the peace celebrated by statesmen was often a world of brutal exploitation for those at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

To understand the true cost of this development, history must be viewed through the eyes of the victims. These include the Arawaks, the Cherokee, the enslaved Africans, and the poor laborers who worked the land. These indigenous societies were not savage voids waiting for civilization; they were complex cultures with sophisticated agriculture, egalitarian social structures, and political systems where power was often shared between the sexes. Their destruction was not an inevitable step in human evolution but a deliberate choice made by those who valued private property over human life.