(From the book jacket) In A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, Howard Zinn unlocks America's current political/ethical crisis using lessons learned from our nation's history. He brings a profoundly human, yet uniquely American perspective to each subject he writes about, whether it's the abolition of war, terrorism, the Founding Fathers, the Holocaust, or immigrants' rights. "America's future is linked to how we understand our past," writes Zinn, "For this reason, writing about history, for me, is never a neutral act."
Zinn frames the book with an opening essay on the role and responsibility of the historian: "To think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat.... If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, and occasionally win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare."
Zinn draws upon these untold histories to comment on the most controversial issues facing us today: government dishonesty, terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the loss of our liberties, immigration, and the responsibility of the citizen to confront power for the common good.