A People's History of the United States (2015, first edition 1980) walks you through the United States' past from the perspective of the marginalized, the disenfranchised and the oppressed. These blinks describe a history of uprisings, protests and activism in the face of a government built for the rich.
The Zinn Education Project approach to history starts with the premise that the lives of ordinary people matter — that history ought to focus on those who too often receive only token attention (workers, women, people of color), and also on how people's actions, individually and collectively, shaped our society.
Zinn's point, however, is that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” can be forms of control. Put another way, he's arguing that the Founding Fathers pacified their people by giving them just enough freedom and power not to rebel, while still preserving an unjust status quo.
I studied History & Political Science in the early 70s at UCLA (double major). I had an excellent professor on dialecticism of Hegel, Marx and Freud (Wolfenstein, a protege of Angela Davis). Unlike today, I was treated with respect by the professor and deemed a bourgeois liberal Jew (I'm rather Conservative and religious).
My comment is that Zinn's attitude is antithetical to my view of history and the United States/consitution/bill of rights. Zinn's good points concern the ordinary people to compose society and their lifestyles/effect on it and history. However, he obliterates the positive characteristics which underline the society, which guide it, which nuture it or destroy it. Overall, United States has a progressive and overwhelmingly positive experience for Americans and the world. Just because of it's many faults and failings does not mean it should be condemned as he does the founding fathers.
While one can learn much concerning our history, his attitude is a negative one and should be discarded. The benefit of learning of the potential for governmental and elitist misconduct is to rectify it. All the negative conditions which suppressed and hurt American society of the centuries are learning points for today. While our current society is imperfect, the progressive/socialist/communist movements of today can only destroy and not elevate. Despite the potential and actual problems presented by free markets and capitalism, it is a superior system to that which Zinn professes to displace it.
One of my specialties was bureaucracy in government. This is the most difficult area to reform as it is entrenched and stubbornly persists in nearly all societies.