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Howard Zinn

 
Who2 Biography:

Howard Zinn, Historian

Howard Zinn
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  • Born: 1922
  • Birthplace: New York, New York
  • Died: 27 January 2010 (heart attack)
  • Best Known As: Boat-rocking U.S. historian

Howard Zinn is most famous for his 1980 book A People's History of the United States, a "radical" approach that has earned him the reputation of revising history with an anti-American bias. Called "history from the bottom up" by some, Zinn's book sought to tell the story of the United States from the perspective of the disenfranchised minorities rather than the more traditional perspective of the powerful elite. A decorated veteran of World War II, Zinn was educated at Columbia University in New York, then taught in Georgia during the 1950s. In the late 1960s he began teaching at Boston University in the political science department, and he and Noam Chomsky (of MIT) were two of the nation's most prominent academics in opposition to the war in Vietnam; in the '70s and '80s he was a critic of U.S. policy in Central America; and in the '90s he was a critic of the Gulf War. His social activism and written works earned him scorn over the years, but his history book is now a standard text in many U.S. high schools and he had a strong influence on the public's perception of Columbus, the Founding Fathers and American foreign policy.

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Biography:

Howard Zinn

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American political scientist and historian Howard Zinn (born 1922) was a leading exponent of the New Left perspective in scholarship and a political radical known for his activity in the civil rights and peace movements.

Howard Zinn was born on August 24, 1922, in New York City. During World War II, he served from 1943 to 1945 as a second lieutenant in the United States Army Air Force and participated in bombing missions in Europe. He was awarded an Air Medal and several battle stars. After his discharge from the service he attended New York University and received his bachelor's degree in 1951. He did graduate work in political science at Columbia University, completing his masters degree in 1952 and his Ph.D. in 1958. During this time he was an instructor at Upsala College in East Orange, NJ, from 1953 to 1956.

Zinn's doctoral dissertation on New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's congressional career was published in 1959 as LaGuardia in Congress. Zinn portrayed LaGuardia as a feisty liberal Republican who fought for pro-labor legislation and criticized the upper-class bias of his party's economic policies. Although LaGuardia would remain one of his heroes, Zinn's own political views grew much more radical. In Zinn's introduction to his anthology New Deal Thought (1965), he argued that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his leading advisers thwarted a possible American social revolution by pursuing the modest goal of restoring the American middle class to prosperity and rejecting more radical social reform.

Civil Rights Activist

Events in the late 1950s and early 1960s reinforced Zinn's disillusionment with American liberalism. In 1956 he moved to Atlanta, GA, to accept a post as chairman of the department of history and social science at Spelman College, an African-American women's school. During the seven years he taught there, Zinn saw and participated in some of the key events of the civil rights movement. He was shocked by the violence directed at African-Americans and dismayed by the federal government's failure to defend their rights more vigorously. Zinn was critical of President John Kennedy's administration. Though it was regarded as liberal by many Americans, it seemed to Zinn to be weak in response to demands for equality.

Zinn's study of one of the major civil rights organizations, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was published as SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964). The book was both an impassioned first-hand description of the civil rights struggle and a cogent historical analysis of the modern movement's links with pre-Civil War abolitionism.

Anti-War Activist

Zinn joined Boston University's Government Department in 1964 and remained a professor of political science there the rest of his career. He became well known in New Left circles for his opposition to United States military involvement in Vietnam. In his book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal (1967), he made a powerful case for reversing the Lyndon Johnson administration's policy of escalation. Zinn's role in the peace movement was not limited to his scholarly writings. Throughout the mid-1960s he was active in the American Mobilization Committee's national drive to bring an end to the United States intervention. In February 1968, he travelled to North Vietnam with the radical priest, Father Daniel Berrigan, to secure the release of three American bomber pilots shot down on air raids. As he had done earlier with his experiences in the civil rights movement, Zinn wrote articles that offered a first-hand account of his trip to Hanoi.

Traditional academics scolded Zinn for being partisan about his subject matter. In a collection of his essays, The Politics of History (1970), Zinn rejected the view that historical scholarship was objective. He argued that all historical writing was political and that historians should align themselves with humane values. To fail to speak out against evil, he warned, was to be irrelevant and irresponsible. Zinn sought to illustrate the usefulness of a politically engaged approach to history in his essays on World War II, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. They provided examples of how his historical approach worked in practice.

People's Historian

When critics charged that the New Left historians' work was deficient because radical scholars had not produced a full-scale synthesis of American history, Zinn set to work to prove them wrong. Zinn's A People's History of the United States (1980), surveyed all of American history from the point of view of the working classes and minority groups. He documented the history of race, sex, and class; the history of civil disobedience; how hopes for a more egalitarian society had been frustrated, and how a small, upper-class elite had retained its hold on power and wealth. "Zinn admits his bias candidly," noted reviewer Luther Spoehr in Saturday Review "insisting that 'we need some counter force to avoid being crushed into submission."' Eric Foner, in the New York Times Book Review, said the book could be considered "a step toward a coherent new version of American history." In 1984, the book was abridged and updated and republished as The Twentieth Century: A People's History.

Zinn remained active in leftist politics and contributed to scholarly journals and popular publications, including Harper's, Saturday Review and The Nation. With his wife Roslyn, he had two children. He became a professor emeritus at Boston University in 1988. In 1985, he published a play, Daughter of Venus, which was first performed at New York's Theatre for New City. In 1990, his book Declarations of Independence continued his populist approach to American history.

Further Reading

A brief sketch of Zinn's career appears in Nelson Lichtenstein, editor, Political Profiles: The Johnson Years (1976). See also the references cited in the text for Zinn's "personal" approach to current history. Reviews of his major books are in the New York Times Book Review (June 4, 1967; February 16, 1969; September 20, 1970; March 2, 1980; July 22, 1984).

Quotes By:

Howard Zinn

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Quotes:

"We will not know unless we begin."

Artist:

Howard Zinn

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Similar Artists:

Jello Biafra, Robert Fisk, Noam Chomsky

Followers:

  • Born: August 24, 1922, Brooklyn, NY
  • Active: '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, 2000s
  • Genres: Spoken Word
  • Instrument: Vocals
  • Representative Albums: "Artists in a Time of War", "Heroes And Martyrs: Emma Goldman, Sacco & Venzetti, And The Revolutionary Struggle", "The People's History Project: Vol. 1"

Biography

One of America's most respected political activists and thinkers, Howard Zinn was born on December 7, 1922, in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Zinn's political consciousness was awakened when he served as a fighter pilot during World War II; after the war, Zinn attended college under the G.I Bill and received a master's degree in history from Columbia University. Zinn took a position as a professor at Spelman College, a school for African-American women in Georgia, in 1956. Zinn became an active participant in the burgeoning civil rights movement that was emerging in Atlanta, and became an advisor to the influential activist group the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

In 1963, Zinn's activism on behalf of civil rights and against the Vietnam War resulted in his being fired from Spelman; Boston University added Zinn to their faculty, where he would remain until he retired from education. Zinn would later became a visiting professor at the University of Paris and the University of Bologna. A prolific author, in 1980 Zinn published A People's History of the United States, a look at American history from the point of view of the disenfranchised, which would go on to sell over a million copies; he's also been a frequent contributor to a number of magazines, and has written a number of plays on radical political figures in history. Zinn is also a frequent speaker at colleges and on radio, and several recordings of his talks have been released through the leftist publishing house AK Press. ~ Mark Deming, All Music Guide
Wikipedia:

Howard Zinn

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Howard Zinn
Born August 24, 1922(1922-08-24)
Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
Died January 27, 2010 (aged 87)[1]
Santa Monica, California, U.S.
Occupation Professor, historian, playwright
Spouse(s) Roslyn Zinn (died 2008)[1]

Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010)[1] was an American historian, author, activist, playwright, intellectual and Professor of Political Science at Boston University from 1964 to 1988.[2] He wrote more than 20 books, which included his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States.[3] Zinn also wrote extensively about the civil rights, civil liberties and anti-war movements. His memoir, "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train," became the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn's life and work.[4]

Contents

Life and career

Early life

Zinn was born to a Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn. His father, Eddie Zinn, born in Austria-Hungary, emigrated to the U.S. with his brother Phil before the outbreak of World War I. Howard's mother Jenny Zinn emigrated from the Eastern Siberian city of Irkutsk.

Both parents were factory workers with limited education when they met and married, and there were no books or magazines in the series of apartments where they raised their children. Zinn's parents introduced him to literature by sending 25 cents plus a coupon to the New York Post for each of the 20 volumes of Charles Dickens' collected works.[5] He also studied creative writing at Thomas Jefferson High School in a special program established by poet Elias Lieberman.[6]

World War II

Eager to fight fascism, Zinn joined the Army Air Force during World War II where he was assigned as a bombardier in the 490th Bombardment Group.[7] bombing targets in Berlin, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.[8] The anti-war stance Zinn developed later was informed, in part, by his experiences. In April, 1945, he participated in the first military use of napalm, which took place in Royan.[9]

2nd Lieut. Howard Zinn, bombardier, Army Air Force in England, 1945.

On a post-doctoral research mission nine years after those bombing missions, Zinn visited the seaside resort near Bordeaux in southwest France where he interviewed residents, reviewed municipal documents and read wartime newspaper clippings at the local library. In 1966, Zinn returned to Royan after which he gave his fullest account of that research in his book, The Politics of History. On the ground, Zinn learned that the aerial bombing attacks—in which he participated—had killed more than 1000 French civilians as well as some German soldiers hiding near Royan to await the war's end, events that are described "in all accounts" he found as "une tragique erreur" that leveled a small but ancient city and "its population that was, at least officially, friend, not foe." In two books, The Politics of History and The Zinn Reader, Zinn described how the bombing was ordered—three weeks before the war in Europe ended—by military officials who were, in part, motivated more by the desire for career advancement than legitimate military objectives. He quotes the official history of the U.S. Army Air Forces' brief reference to the Eighth Air Force attack on Royan and also, in the same chapter, to the bombing of Pilsen in what was then Czechoslovakia. The official history stated, that the famous Skoda works in Pilsen "received 500 well-placed tons, and that "Because of a warning sent out ahead of time the workers were able to escape, except for five persons."

Zinn wrote, "I recalled flying on that mission, too, as deputy lead bombardier, and that we did not aim specifically at the "skoda works" (which I would have noted, because it was the one target in Czechoslovakia I had read about) but dropped our bombs, without much precision, on the city of Pilsen. Two Czech citizens who lived in Pilsen at the time told me, recently, that several hundred people were killed in that raid (that is, Czechs)--not five."[10]

Zinn said his experience as a wartime bombardier, combined with his research into the reasons for, and effects of the bombing of Royan and Pilsen, sensitized him to the ethical dilemmas faced by G.I.s during wartime.[11] Zinn questioned the justifications for military operations that inflicted massive civilian casualties during the Allied bombing of cities such as Dresden, Royan, Tokyo, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, Hanoi during the U.S. War in Vietnam, and Baghdad during the U.S. war in Iraq and the civilian casualties during bombings in Afghanistan during the U.S.'s current and nearly decade old war there. In his pamphlet, Hiroshima: Breaking the Silence[12] written in 1995, he laid out the case against targeting civilians with aerial bombing.

Six years later, he wrote: "Recall that in the midst of the Gulf War, the U.S. military bombed an air raid shelter, killing 400 to 500 men, women, and children who were huddled to escape bombs. The claim was that it was a military target, housing a communications center, but reporters going through the ruins immediately afterward said there was no sign of anything like that. I suggest that the history of bombing—and no one has bombed more than this nation—is a history of endless atrocities, all calmly explained by deceptive and deadly language like "accident," "military target," and "collateral damage."[13]

Education

After World War II, Zinn attended New York University on the GI Bill, graduating with a B.A. in 1951 and Columbia University, where he earned an M.A. (1952) and a Ph.D. in history with a minor in political science (1958). His masters' thesis examined the Colorado coal strikes of 1914.[14] His doctoral dissertation LaGuardia in Congress was a study of Fiorello LaGuardia's congressional career, and it depicted LaGuardia representing "the conscience of the twenties" as LaGuardia fought for public power, the right to strike, and the redistribution of wealth by taxation.[14] "His specific legislative program," Zinn wrote, "was an astonishingly accurate preview of the New Deal." It was published by the Cornell University Press for the American Historical Association. La Guardia in Congress won the American Historical Association's Beveridge Prize as the best English-language book on American history.[15]

While at Columbia, his professors included Harry Carman, Henry Steele Commager, and David Donald.[14] But it was Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition that made the most lasting impression. Zinn regularly included it in his lists of recommended readings, and after Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, Zinn wrote, "If Richard Hofstadter were adding to his book The American Political Tradition, in which he found both "conservative" and "liberal" presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, maintaining for dear life the two critical characteristics of the American system, nationalism and capitalism, Obama would fit the pattern." [16]

In 1960-61, Zinn was a post-doctoral Fellow in East Asian Studies at Harvard University.

Academic career

We were not born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed in our consciousness-embedded there by years of family prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television. This would seem to lead to a simple conclusion: that we all have an enormous responsibility to bring to the attention of others information they do not have, which has the potential of causing them to rethink long-held ideas.
— Howard Zinn, 2005[17]

Zinn was Professor of History at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia from 1956 to 1963, and Visiting Professor at both the University of Paris and University of Bologna.

Fresh from writing two books about his research, observations, and participation in the Civil Rights movement in the South, Zinn accepted a position at Boston University in 1964. His classes in civil liberties were among the most popular at the university with as many as 400 students subscribing each semester to the non-required class. A Professor of Political Science, he taught at BU for 24 years and retired in 1988.

"He had a deep sense of fairness and justice for the underdog. But he always kept his sense of humor. He was a happy warrior," said Caryl Rivers, journalism professor at Boston University. Rivers and Zinn were among a group of faculty members who in 1979 defended the right of the school's clerical workers to strike and were threatened with dismissal after refusing to cross a picket line.[18]

Zinn came to believe that the point of view expressed in traditional history books was often limited. He wrote a history textbook, A People's History of the United States, to provide other perspectives on American history. The textbook depicts the struggles of Native Americans against European and U.S. conquest and expansion, slaves against slavery, unionists and other workers against capitalists, women against patriarchy, and African-Americans for civil rights. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1981.[19]

In the years since the first edition of A People's History was published in 1980, it has been used as an alternative to standard textbooks in many high school and college history courses, and it is one of the most widely known examples of critical pedagogy. According to the New York Times Book Review it "routinely sells more than 100,000 copies a year".[20]

In 2004, Zinn published Voices of A People's History of the United States with Anthony Arnove. Voices is a sourcebook of speeches, articles, essays, poetry and song lyrics by the people themselves whose stories are told in A People's History.

The People Speak, scheduled for release on DVD in February 2010, is a documentary movie inspired by the lives of ordinary people who fought back against oppressive conditions over the course of the history of the United States. The film includes performances by Zinn, Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Viggo Mortensen, Josh Brolin, Danny Glover, Marisa Tomei, Don Cheadle, and Sandra Oh.[21][22][23]

Civil Rights movement

From 1956 through 1963, Zinn chaired the department of history and social sciences at Spelman College. He participated in the Civil Rights movement and lobbied with historian August Meier[24] "to end the practice of the Southern Historical Association of holding meetings at segregated hotels."[25]

While at Spelman, Zinn served as an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and in 1964, Beacon Press published his book SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Zinn collaborated with historian Staughton Lynd mentoring student activists, among them Alice Walker[26], who would later write The Color Purple, and Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund. Edelman identified Zinn as a major influence in her life and, in that same journal article, tells of his accompanying students to a sit-in at the segregated white section of the Georgia state legislature.[27]

Although Zinn was a tenured professor, he was dismissed in June 1963, after siding with students in the struggle against segregation. As Zinn described[28] in The Nation, though Spelman administrators prided themselves for turning out refined "young ladies, its students were likely to be found on the picket line, or in jail for participating in the greater effort to break down segregation in public places in Atlanta. Zinn's years at Spelman are recounted in his autobiography You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times. His seven years at Spelman College, Zinn said, "are probably the most interesting, exciting, most educational years for me. I learned more from my students than my students learned from me."[29]

While living in Georgia, Zinn wrote that he observed 30 violations of the First and Fourteenth amendments to the United States Constitution in Albany, Georgia, including the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and equal protection under the law. In an article on the civil rights movement in Albany, Zinn described the people who participated in the Freedom Rides to end segregation, and the reluctance of President John F. Kennedy to enforce the law.[30] Zinn has also pointed out that the Justice Department under Robert F. Kennedy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, headed by J. Edgar Hoover, did little or nothing to stop the segregationists from brutalizing civil rights workers.[31]

Zinn wrote about the struggle for civil rights, both as participant and historian[32] His second book, The Southern Mystique[33] was published in 1964, the same year as his SNCC: The New Abolitionists in which he describes how the sit-ins against segregation were initiated by students and, in that sense, were independent of the efforts of the older, more established civil rights organizations.

In 2005, forty-one years after his firing, Zinn returned to Spelman where he was given an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters and gave the commencement address[34][35] where he said in part, during his speech titled, "Against Discouragement," that "The lesson of that history is that you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist, things will change. The government may try to deceive the people, and the newspapers and television may do the same, but the truth has a way of coming out. The truth has a power greater than a hundred lies." [36].

Anti-war efforts

Zinn wrote one of the earliest books calling for the U.S. withdrawal from its war in Vietnam. Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal was published by Beacon Press in 1967 based on his articles in Commonwealth, The Nation, and Ramparts.

In Noam Chomsky's view, The Logic of Withdrawal, was Zinn's most important book. "He was the first person to say—loudly, publicly, very persuasively—that this simply has to stop; we should get out, period, no conditions; we have no right to be there; it's an act of aggression; pull out. That was so surprising at the time—it became more commonplace later—that he couldn't even—there wasn't even a review of the book. In fact, he asked me if I would review it in Ramparts just so that people would know about the book."[37]

In December 1969, radical historians tried unsuccessfully to persuade the American Historical Association to pass an anti-Vietnam War resolution. "A debacle unfolded as Harvard historian (and AHA president in 1968) John Fairbank literally wrestled the microphone from Zinn's hands." [38] Correspondence by Fairbank, Zinn and other historians, published by the AHA in 1970, is online in what Fairbank called "our briefly-famous Struggle for the Mike".[39]

In later years, Zinn was an adviser to the Disarm Education Fund.[40]

Vietnam

Zinn's diplomatic visit to Hanoi with Rev. Daniel Berrigan, during the Tet Offensive in January 1968, resulted in the return of three American airmen, the first American POWs released by the North Vietnamese since the U.S. bombing of that nation had begun. The event was widely reported in the news media and discussed in a variety of books including Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975 by Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan.[41] Zinn and the Berrigan brothers, Dan and Philip, remained friends and allies over the years.

Daniel Ellsberg, a former RAND consultant who had secretly copied The Pentagon Papers, which described the internal planning and policy decisions of the United States government during the Vietnam War, gave a copy of them to Howard and Roslyn Zinn.[42] Along with Noam Chomsky, Zinn edited and annotated the copy of The Pentagon Papers that Ellsberg entrusted to him. Zinn's longtime publisher, Beacon Press, published what has come to be known as the Senator Mike Gravel edition of The Pentagon Papers, four volumes plus a fifth volume with analysis by Chomsky and Zinn.

At Ellsberg's criminal trial for theft, conspiracy, and espionage in connection with the publication of the Pentagon Papers by The New York Times, defense attorneys called Zinn as an expert witness to explain to the jury the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from World War II to 1963. Zinn discussed that history for several hours, later reflecting on his time before the jury. "I explained there was nothing in the papers of military significance that could be used to harm the defense of the United States, that the information in them was simply embarrassing to our government because what was revealed, in the government's own interoffice memos, was how it had lied to the American public. The secrets disclosed in the Pentagon Papers might embarrass politicians, might hurt the profits of corporations wanting tin, rubber, oil, in far-off places. But this was not the same as hurting the nation, the people," Zinn wrote in his autobiography. Most of the jurors later said that they voted for acquittal. [p. 161] However, the federal judge dismissed the case on the ground that it had been tainted by the Nixon administration's burglary of the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist.

Zinn's testimony as to the motivation for government secrecy was confirmed in 1989 by Erwin Griswold, who as U.S. solicitor general during the Nixon administration, prosecuted The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971.[43] Griswold persuaded three Supreme Court justices to vote to stop The New York Times from continuing to publish the Pentagon Papers, an order known as "prior restraint" that has been held to be illegal under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The papers were simultaneously published in The Washington Post, effectively nulling the effect of the prior restraint order. In 1989, Griswold admitted that there was no national security damage resulting from the publication of the papers.[43] In a column in the Washington Post, Griswold wrote: "It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considerable experience with classified material that there is massive over classification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another."

Zinn supported the G.I. antiwar movement during the U.S. war in Vietnam. In the 2001 film Unfinished Symphony, Zinn provides a historical context for the 1971 antiwar march by Vietnam Veterans against the War. The marchers traveled from Lexington, Massachusetts, to Bunker Hill, "which retraced Paul Revere's ride of 1775 and ended in the massive arrest of 410 veterans and civilians by the Lexington police." The film depicts "scenes from the 1971 Winter Soldier hearings,[44] during which former G.I.s testified about atrocities" they either participated in or witnessed in Vietnam.[45]

Iraq

Howard Zinn speaking at Marlboro College February 2004.

Zinn opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and wrote several books about it. He asserted that the U.S. would end its war with, and occupation of, Iraq when resistance within the military increased, in the same way resistance within the military contributed to ending the U.S. war in Vietnam. He compared the demand by a growing number of contemporary U.S. military families to end the war in Iraq to the parallel "in the Confederacy in the Civil War, when the wives of soldiers rioted because their husbands were dying and the plantation owners were profiting from the sale of cotton, refusing to grow grains for civilians to eat."[46] Zinn argued that "There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable."[47]

Jean-Christophe Agnew, Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, told the Yale Daily News in May 2007 that Zinn’s historical work is "highly influential and widely used".[48] He observed that it is not unusual for prominent professors such as Zinn to weigh in on current events, citing a resolution opposing the war in Iraq that was recently ratified by the American Historical Association.[49] Agnew added, “In these moments of crisis, when the country is split — so historians are split.”[50]

Death

Zinn was swimming in a hotel pool when he died of an apparent heart attack.[51] in Santa Monica, California on January 27, 2010. He had been scheduled to speak at the Santa Monica Museum of Art for an event titled "A Collection of Ideas... the People Speak." [52]

In one of his last interviews[53] he said he'd like to be remembered "for introducing a different way of thinking about the world, about war, about human rights, about equality," and "for getting more people to realize that the power which rests so far in the hands of people with wealth and guns, that the power ultimately rests in people themselves and that they can use it. At certain points in history, they have used it. Black people in the South used it. People in the women's movement used it. People in the anti-war movement used it. People in other countries who have overthrown tyrannies have used it."

He said he wanted to be known as "somebody who gave people a feeling of hope and power that they didn't have before."[54]

Zinn is survived by his daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn, son Jeff Zinn and five grandchildren.[55]"

Awards

I can't think of anyone who had such a powerful and benign influence. His historical work changed the way millions of people saw the past. The happy thing about Howard was that in the last years he could gain satisfaction that his contributions were so impressive and recognized.

For his leadership in the Peace Movement, Zinn received the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award in 1996. He received the Thomas Merton Award and, in 1998, the Eugene V. Debs Award[2]. In 1998, he won the Lannan Literary Award[56] for nonfiction and the following year won the Upton Sinclair Award, which honors social activism. In 2003, Zinn was awarded the Prix des Amis du Monde diplomatique[57] for the French version of his seminal work, Une histoire populaire des Etats-Unis.

On October 5, 2006, Zinn received the Haven's Center Award for Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship in Madison, Wisconsin.[58]

References in popular culture

  • An interview with Zinn is featured in the documentary film Sacco and Vanzetti (2007).
  • The Pearl Jam song "Down" from the album Lost Dogs (album) was inspired by the band's friendship with Zinn.
  • Actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck who grew up near Zinn and were family friends, gave "A People's History" a plug in their Academy Award-winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting.[4]
  • Marge Simpson is seen reading "A People's History" in The Simpsons episode 1911 That 90's Show, which flashes back to when Marge was in college.
  • Musician Bruce Springsteen's, bleak album "Nebraska" was inspired in part by "A People's History."[4]
  • "A People's History" was the basis for the 2007 documentary, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind."[4]
  • The NOFX song Franco Un-American references Howard Zinn.
  • In the System Of A Down song "Deer Dance", about Police Brutality against peaceful protest, Zinn is paraphrased in the line "We can't afford to be neutral on a moving train".

Bibliography

Author

Contributor

Recordings

  • A People's History of the United States (1999)
  • Artists in the Time of War (2002)
  • Heroes & Martyrs: Emma Goldman, Sacco & Vanzetti, and the Revolutionary Struggle (2000)
  • Stories Hollywood Never Tells (2000)
  • You Can't Blow Up A Social Relationship, CD including Zinn lectures and performances by rock band Resident genius (Thick Records, 2005)[61]

Theatre

Biographies

  • Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller, Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (film 2004)[62]
  • Davis D. Joyce, Howard Zinn: A Radical American Vision (Prometheus Books, 2003), ISBN 1-59102-131-6

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c Feeney, Mark (27 January 2010). "Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87". USA: Boston.com. http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/01/howard_zinn_his.html. Retrieved 2010-01-27. 
  2. ^ July 05, 2008 (2008-07-05). "Howard Zinn'a political philosophy connected to democratic socialism, although he was sympathetic to anarchism". Youtube.com. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF7GoDYEbfQ. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  3. ^ Howard Zinn, Historian, Is Dead at 87, January 28, 2010.
  4. ^ a b c d e Howard Zinn Dead, Author Of 'People's History Of The United States' Died At 87 by Hillel Italie, The Huffington Post, January 27, 2010.
  5. ^ HOWARD ZINN- One Step Ahead of the Landlord.
  6. ^ Appel, Jacob M. Chronicing Lives From Spelman College to B.U. Education Update, April 2004.
  7. ^ The Politics of History 2nd ed. by Howard Zinn (University of Illinois Press, 1990) pp. 258-274) ISBN 0252016734.
  8. ^ "film clip of Zinn". http://www.youtube.com/v/Ehc3V1g5pm0&rel=1&border=0. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  9. ^ Zinn, Howard (1990). Declarations of Independence. New York, NY: HarperPerennial. ISBN 0060921080. 
  10. ^ The Politics of History p. 260.
  11. ^ "Interview with Zinn". Progressive.org. http://progressive.org/mag_zinn0106. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  12. ^ Zinn Hiroshima: Breaking the Silence by Howard Zinn.
  13. ^ "A Just Cause, Not a Just War" The Progressive December, 2001.
  14. ^ a b c Appel, JM. Howard Zinn: Chronicling Lives from Spelman College to Boston U., April 2004.
  15. ^ January 29, 2010 "Howard Zinn, Historian, Is Dead at 87".
  16. ^ "What next for struggle in the Obama era?" The Socialist Worker November 5, 2008, Issue 684
  17. ^ Changing Minds, One at a Time by Howard Zinn, Published in the March 2005 issue of The Progressive.
  18. ^ http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60R5D020100128 "Activist, historian Howard Zinn dies at 87" by Ros Krasny at Reuters January 28, 2010
  19. ^ http://www.nationalbook.org/nba_winners_finalist_50_07.pdf
  20. ^ "Backlist to the Future" by Rachel Donadio, July 30, 2006.
  21. ^ "people-s-history-moves-small-screen bu.edu 2009/11/03". Bu.edu. 2009-11-04. http://www.bu.edu/today/2009/11/03/people-s-history-moves-small-screen. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  22. ^ "howardzinn.org". howardzinn.org. http://howardzinn.org/default/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=103&Itemid=55. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  23. ^ "History channel". History.com. http://www.history.com/content/people-speak. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  24. ^ "Biography of August Meier". Oah.org. http://www.oah.org/pubs/nl/2003may/meier.html. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  25. ^ Organization of American Historians. Obituary of August Meier, May 2003 by John Bracey University of Massachusetts, Amherst [1].
  26. ^ Alice Walker remembers Howard Zinn. January 31, 2010 in the Boston Globe
  27. ^ Edelman, Marian Wright. "Spelman College: A Safe Haven for A Young Black Woman." The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 27 (2000): 118-123.
  28. ^ "Finishing School for Pickets" By Howard Zinn in The Nation August 6, 1960
  29. ^ "Interview with Zinn". Globetrotter.berkeley.edu. http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Zinn/zinn-con2.html. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  30. ^ http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/oldzinn.htm
  31. ^ "Media Filter article on Zinn". Mediafilter.org. http://mediafilter.org/mff/fbi.html. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  32. ^ "Reporting Civil Rights, Part one: American Journalism 1941-1963". The Library of America. http://www.reportingcivilrights.org/authors/biblio.jsp?authorId=85. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  33. ^ "Intervew with Zinn". Identitytheory.com. http://www.identitytheory.com/people/birnbaum10.html. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  34. ^ "Exodus News article on Zinn". Atlanta Inquirer (Georgia) via Exodusnews.com. 2005-05-11. http://www.exodusnews.com/education/education051.htm. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  35. ^ Brittain, Victoria (28 January 2010). "Howard Zinn's Lesson To Us All". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/28/howard-zinn-america. 
  36. ^ "Tomgram: Graduation Day with Howard Zinn". Tomdispatch.com. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/2728/graduation_day_with_howard_zinn. Retrieved 2010-01-28.  full text of "Against Discouragement."
  37. ^ Howard Zinn (1922-2010): A Tribute to the Legendary Historian with Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein and Anthony Arnove
  38. ^ "Forty Years On: Looking Back at the 1969 Annual Meeting" by Carl Mirra[http://www.adelphi.edu/faculty/profiles/profile.php?PID=0430 February 2010 issue of Perspectives on History published by the American Historical Association
  39. ^ From the June 1970 AHA Newsletter "Professional Comment and Controversy: An Open Letter to Howard Zinn"
  40. ^ Disarm National Advisory Board, accessed January 28, 2010.
  41. ^ Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975. Horizon Book Promotions. 1989. ISBN 0-385-17547-7. 
  42. ^ [Ellsberg autobiography, Zinn autobiography].
  43. ^ a b Blanton, Tom (2006-05-21). "The lie behind the secrets". Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-blanton21may21,0,1992884.story. Retrieved 2008-01-21. 
  44. ^ Winter Soldier Investigation. 1971. 
  45. ^ http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/unfinished.pdf
  46. ^ Interview with Zinn.
  47. ^ ""Terrorism Over Tripoli" from Zinn Reader, Seven Stories Press (1993) excerpted online". Thirdworldtraveler.com. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/Tripoli_ZR.html. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  48. ^ "Zinn calls for activism". Yale Daily News. 2007-05-03. http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/21049. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  49. ^ "American Historical Association Blog: Iraq War Resolution is Ratified by AHA Members". Blog.historians.org. 2007-03-12. http://blog.historians.org/news/166/iraq-war-resolution-is-ratified-by-aha-members. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  50. ^ Yu, Lea. "Historian Howard Zinn Calls for Activism – CommonDreams.org". CommonDreams.org. http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/04/963/. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  51. ^ "Howard Zinn, Historian, Is Dead at 87" The New York Times January 29, 2010.
  52. ^ [[latimes.com/news/local/la-me-howard-zinn28-2010jan28,0,5610858.story Howard Zinn dies at 87; author of best-selling People's History of the United States: Activist collapsed in Santa Monica, where he was scheduled to deliver a lecture.]]
  53. ^ Howard Zinn video in nine parts.
  54. ^ Howard Zinn: How I Want to Be Remembered.
  55. ^ Feeney M, Marquard B (2010-01-27). "Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87.". The Boston Globe. http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/01/howard_zinn_his.html. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  56. ^ "Lannan Foundation – Howard Zinn". Lannan.org. http://www.lannan.org/lf/bios/detail/howard-zinn/. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  57. ^ "Prix des Amis du Monde diplomatique 2003 – Les Amis du Monde diplomatique". Amis.monde-diplomatique.fr. http://www.amis.monde-diplomatique.fr/article.php3?id_article=252. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  58. ^ "Zinn to receive Havens Center award (October 4, 2006)". News.wisc.edu. 2006-10-04. http://www.news.wisc.edu/12985.html. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  59. ^ "Politics of Knowledge: Richard Ohmann". UPNE. 2010-01-21. http://www.upne.com/0-8195-6589-X.html. Retrieved 2010-01-28. 
  60. ^ Declarations of independence: cross-examining American ideology By Howard Zinn.
  61. ^ "You Can't Blow Up A Social Relationship".
  62. ^ FRF's Judith Mizrachy interviews Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller, directors of the film HOWARD ZINN: YOU CAN’T BE NEUTRAL ON A MOVING TRAIN, retrieved January 28, 2010.

External links

Videos


 
 
Learn More
Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2004 Culture & Society Film)
Third Party: Political Alternatives in the Age of Duopoly (2003 Culture & Society Film)
Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove: Readings From Voices of a People's History of the United States (2005 Culture & Society Film)

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