Howard Zinn at 100: Remembering “The People’s Historian”

JVL Introduction

Lest we forget, it is a hundred years since the birth of Howard Zinn, a remarkable anti-war activist and historian from below, whose A People’s History of the United States has now sold a staggering more-than-four million copies.

Zinn responded to a critic Walter Kirn in a letter to the New York Times in 2007, saying:

“there is no such thing as a single ‘objective’ truth… veneration of the “great men” of the past: the political leaders, the enterprising industrialists — add up to exactly the simplistic history fed to young people over the generations, which my book tries to replace.”

And he continued

My history, therefore, describes the inspiring struggle of those who have fought slavery and racism (Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses), of the labor organizers who have led strikes for the rights of working people (Big Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, César Chávez), of the socialists and others who have protested war and militarism (Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, Cindy Sheehan). My hero is not Theodore Roosevelt, who loved war and congratulated a general after a massacre of Filipino villagers at the turn of the century, but Mark Twain, who denounced the massacre and satirized imperialism.…

I want young people to understand that ours is a beautiful country, but it has been taken over by men who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties. Our people are basically decent and caring, and our highest ideals are expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which says that all of us have an equal right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The history of our country, I point out in my book, is a striving, against corporate robber barons and war makers, to make those ideals a reality — and all of us, of whatever age, can find immense satisfaction in becoming part of that.

This article was originally published by the Nation on Wed 24 Aug 2022. Read the original here.