THROUGHOUT THE years, readers of A People's History have said that they were most inspired by reading the words of the fugitive slaves, suffragists, abolitionists, workers, antiwar organizers and other voices quoted throughout the book. There is a power in these voices of resistance in U.S. history that no secondhand account can capture--and which all too often has been ignored or excluded in the history we learn in schools, and which we see the newspapers or on television.

How many students in schools actually read the words of Eugene Debs, Frederick Douglass, Helen Keller, Joe Hill, Tecumseh, Las Casas? And how many ever have the chance to read the speech John Lewis planned to give at the historic 1963 March on Washington, but which he was pressured to water down by the organizers of that demonstration? How many ever read Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech in the Riverside Church against the Vietnam War, or his remarkable address to the Southern Christian Leadership Council, questioning the economic system of capitalism?

These words--the documents we've gathered together in Voices--have a liveliness and a relevance that enlightens not only the past, but the present.

WHAT DO you hope people take from this book?

WE HOPE people take a number of ideas from this book. One is an appreciation that history matters--that it is not just a boring recitation of defeats or battles or the achievements of "great men," but that it is vital to understanding the world we are in today.

Another central idea we hope people will take away from Voices is the importance of class, which is so often overlooked or denied. Voices follows A People's History in presenting our history as one marked throughout by class conflict. The opening line of The Communist Manifesto could just as easily have served as the opening line of A People's History or of Voices.

The real opening line of Voices is actually a quote from Frederick Douglass that illustrates another central theme of the book: "If there is no struggle, there is no progress...This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both."

THE VOICES here are not the well-known figures you usually hear about in history books. What does this say about the way you view history?

HISTORY IS made by ordinary people, many of them unknown, despised, ignored, downtrodden, abused--but who had the courage to speak out, to act on their convictions. That's why we wanted to include not only the figures who are now widely recognized for their eloquence or their role in shaping U.S. history, but the records of anonymous resistance or the statements of people like Martin Delany, whose names should be better known.

We try in Voices to look at history from below. How did the 1930s look to a Communist in New York organizing unemployed workers and defending people who were being evicted from their homes? How did the conquest of the Philippines look from the standpoint of Black soldiers being sent to kill brown people abroad, while they face lynching at home?

These are the kinds of questions we asked, with the goal of correcting the record and challenging the triumphalist history we so often learn--as when George Bush recently cited the bloody invasion and occupation of the Philippines as a positive model for the occupation of Iraq. If you read Mark Twain's account of the massacre of Moros in the Philippines, which we have included in Voices, you come away with a far different appreciation for what Bush means.

WHAT KIND of response have you gotten so far?

WE HAVE been thrilled with the response so far to the book. First of all, a number of people have expressed enthusiasm for the idea of the book, commenting on how much they wished there had been an easy way to read the voices included in A People's History in fuller detail.

We have also been especially pleased with the response we have seen to the public performances we have organized based on Voices. In New York recently, more than 700 people came out to hear Lili Taylor, Paul Robeson Jr., Sarah Jones, Brian Jones, John Sayles, Leslie Silva and Wallace Shawn read selections from the book.

We hope others will perform their own readings from Voices--in schools, in theaters, in unions, in churches. And we also hope we can get the book into the hands of teachers who can integrate Voices into the classroom.

YOU INCLUDED several selections from musicians, like Bob Dylan and Public Enemy, as well as poems or selections from prose. Why?

WE WOULD have actually liked to have included more literary and artistic voices, more songs and poems, but the book is now more than 700 pages, and we had to cut some excellent texts to keep the book affordable (and portable).

Music has always been a part of people's history--a way people have popularized political ideas, and especially a way people have told their own histories. Both of us first learned about the Ludlow massacre not from a history book, but from a Woody Guthrie song ("Ludlow Massacre," which we include in Voices). Most history books leave out Ludlow, like so many other defining moments in U.S. labor history.

Music has often been a remarkable source of resistance. Today, for example, you have songs by Eminem, Public Enemy, Moby, Steve Earle and others challenging the war in Iraq. And on tour, Dylan is playing "Masters of War" again, with as much spirit and venom--and as much relevance--as when he first wrote it.

DO YOU have any favorites among the selections? Or anything that stands out as voices you're especially proud to have brought to the light of day with the book?

WE EACH have some favorites and some texts we are really happy to bring to a wider audience.

Tecumseh's speech to the Osages, Susan B. Anthony's remarkable protest against her arrest for illegal voting, the documents showing class anger in the Confederacy, Vito Russo's speech at an ACT-UP rally, Bob Dylan's memorial to George Jackson, and Frederick Douglass's speech addressing the war on Mexico and slave uprisings in the South are some favorites. But we hope readers will find their own surprises and favorites throughout the book.

Excerpts from the book

BARTOLOMÉ DE LAS CASAS was a contemporary of the explorer Christopher Columbus, whose writings reveal the barbarism of the European conquest of the "New World."

Whom will they spare? What blood will they not shed? What cruelty will they not commit, these brutal men who are hardened to seeing fields bathed in human blood, who make no distinction of sex or age, who do not spare infants at their mothers' breasts, pregnant women, the great, the lowly or even men of feeble and gray old age for whom the weight of years usually awakens reverence or mercy?

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