what is howard zinn's thesis

In Memoriam

Howard Zinn (1922-2010)

Pillarisetti Sudhir | Sep 1, 2010

Paradigmatic people’s historian

Howard Zinn, the historian who translated his pioneering vision of the past—seen from the perspective of ordinary people—into progressive and radical political action, died of a heart attack on Wednesday, January 27, 2010, at the age of 87.

In his most famous book, A People’s History of the United States , Zinn sought to answer Bertolt Brecht’s “Questions from a Worker Who Reads” for the United States, taking the view that the past needed to be understood from the viewpoint of ordinary people. Living up to its title not just in its inspiring retelling of what had been until then the master’s narrative, but even in its lucid and accessible style, the book sold more than a million copies. It compelled readers to look at American history in an entirely different way, and became a paradigm for historians in many lands.

In one sense, Howard Zinn was the archetypal “worker who reads,” born to working-class parents (his immigrant father, Edward, was a waiter, and his mother, Jennie, was a homemaker). He himself worked in various menial jobs after he had served as a bombardier in the U.S. Air Force during the Second World War. But he took advantage of the GI Bill to get a degree from New York University and then went on to get his MA and PhD degrees from Columbia University. His dissertation, which received an honorable mention in the 1958 competition for the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association, was published for the AHA as LaGuardia in Congress by Cornell University Press. That first book already showed Zinn’s intellectual concern for the people without a presence in the traditional history books and presaged his lifelong commitment to constructing a new narrative about the past from a progressive perspective. As Zinn put it, it was the “obscure and ordinary people, farmers and small businessmen, white-collar workers and manual laborers, who beheld the glittering spectacle [of the Gilded Age] but were never quite part of it,” that people like LaGuardia were concerned about, and Zinn himself came to focus upon.

Zinn began his teaching career at Upsala College and Brooklyn College before moving to Spelman College in Atlanta, where he inspired generations of students including such distinguished alumni as Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman.

As Eric Foner, the Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and a former president of the AHA, said of Zinn, “Over the years I have been struck by how many excellent students of history had their interest in studying the past sparked by reading Howard Zinn.  That’s the highest compliment one can offer to a historian.”

Perhaps because of his new reading of American history, his own humane worldview, and his belief that a historian cannot ignore his or her civic responsibilities as a citizen, Zinn became an activist, first in the civil rights campaign (during which he served on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and then in the protests against the Vietnam War.

Zinn eloquently expressed his views about the historian as a citizen in an exchange with AHA President John K. Fairbank in the pages of the AHA’s newsletter ( www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/1970/7006/7006tim1.cfm ) following a dramatic business meeting in which Zinn had introduced a resolution against the war in Vietnam (as described by Carl Mirra in the February 2010 issue of Perspectives on History ): “If all Americans, in all the thousands of assemblies that take place through the year, insist on keeping out of politics because neither war nor racial persecution nor poisonous vapors coming in through the library window, affect them as historians, chiropodists, clerks, or carpenters—then ‘pluralist’ democracy is a facade for oligarchical rule.”

From Spelman College, Zinn moved to the political science department at Boston University, where he continued to inspire and mentor countless numbers of students (his classes sometimes had hundreds enrolled) with his teaching and his activism. Even after he took early retirement from the university in 1988, Zinn kept speaking and writing about the issues that were at the heart of his political self, which, for him, was never separate from his intellectual being. He produced a series of books, including the autobiographical You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times; Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law and Order ; Declarations of Independence ; three plays, Emma (about Emma Goldman), Marx in Soho , and Daughter of Venus ; and different editions of People’s History , of which the most recent was a graphic book version. He was also a prolific writer of essays, some of which have been collected into anthologies.

Zinn was expected to be at the AHA’s 121st annual meeting held in January 2007 in Atlanta, to chair a session that was titled —most appropriately for him—“The Historian in a Time of Crisis: Staughton Lynd, Yale University, and the Vietnam War.” Unfortunately he could not come to the meeting because of the illness of his wife, Roslyn. (She died in 2008). Zinn had agreed to take part in a panel organized by Carl Mirra and Staughton Lynd for the AHA’s 2011 annual meeting in Boston, but which must now be bereft of Zinn’s iconic presence (Session 266: “The Global War on Terror: Historical Perspectives and Future Prospects”).

Just a few months before his death, Zinn appeared in a History Channel production, The People Speak , in which film, stage, and TV personalities read and performed extracts from his work or other related pieces and thus paid tribute to a historian who crossed the traditional boundaries of his discipline and perhaps even of his profession, to set an example that will always remain impossible to emulate. He was truly a historian of the people and for the people.

—Pillarisetti Sudhir Editor, Perspectives on History

Tags: In Memoriam

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Howard Zinn Papers

Call number, language of materials.

Howard Zinn (1922-2010) was an award-winning historian, activist, playwright, teacher, public speaker and author of articles, essays and books including his best-selling A People's History of the United States . Praised for his moral courage and passion for social justice, Zinn influenced thousands of students during a teaching career of more than thirty years. Reaching the wider public through his books, plays, articles, lectures and in theatrical and television presentations of his Voices of A People's History and The People Speak , Zinn celebrated the lives of ordinary individuals engaged in the struggle for peace and justice, highlighting their often overlooked victories, and encouraging his audiences to engage as well. This collection provides a broad view of Howard Zinn's many activities and interests. Among his personal papers are school and military records, datebooks, biographical articles and interviews. Correspondence with a wide variety of individuals forms a large part of the collection. There are also published and unpublished writings; drafts, fragments and corrected typescripts; datebooks and notebooks; research materials and lecture notes; posters, photographs and transparencies; annotated books, publications of many kinds, and audio and video materials documenting lectures, interviews, discussions, readings and other public events in which Zinn took part. The collection also contains Zinn's archived website, first captured in March 2009.

Biographical Note

Howard Zinn (1922-2010) was an award-winning historian, activist, playwright, teacher, public speaker and author of articles, essays and books including the best-selling A People's History of the United States . Praised for his moral courage and passion for social justice, Zinn influenced thousands of students during a teaching career of more than thirty years. Reaching the wider public through his books, plays, articles, lectures and in theatrical and television presentations of his Voices of A People's History and The People Speak , Zinn celebrated the lives of ordinary individuals engaged in the struggle for peace and justice, highlighting their often overlooked victories, and encouraging his audiences to engage as well.

Born on August 24, 1922, Howard Zinn was one of four sons of working-class Jewish immigrants Edward and Jennie (Rabinowitz) Zinn. Growing up in Brooklyn, he held after school and summer jobs from the age of fourteen, graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School, and worked as an apprentice ship fitter at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In early 1943, he joined the Army Air Corps, attaining the rank of Second Lieutenant. He trained as a bombardier and flew both combat and humanitarian missions in Europe. In 1944 he married Roslyn Shechter and, after the war, they lived in public housing and began raising a family while he attended New York University on the GI Bill and worked at a variety of menial jobs. Earning an undergraduate degree from NYU in 1951, Zinn continued his education at Columbia University, completing his MA in 1952 and PhD in 1958. In 1960-1961, he was a post-doctoral fellow in East Asian Studies at Harvard University.

After part-time lecturing in history and political science (1953-1956) at Upsala College in New Jersey, Zinn accepted a position at Spelman College in Atlanta as Chairman of the Department of History and Social Sciences (1956). During his seven years at Spelman, an all-black women's college, he became deeply involved in the civil rights movement – mentoring student activists, participating in sit-ins and other actions, advising the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and producing articles for publications such as The Nation and Harper's . His activism made him unpopular with the school's administration and, in 1963, he was dismissed. Forty-one years later, in 2005, Zinn was invited to give Spelman's commencement address and the school awarded him an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.

In 1964 Zinn published two books focusing on the civil rights movement – SNCC: The New Abolitionists and The Southern Mystique —and also accepted a teaching position at Boston University.

His 24 years at BU were marked by overbooked classes and clashes with the administration, as well as teach-ins, strikes, debates, rallies and the writing of many articles, essays and books including two of particular note – Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal (1967), one of the first to strongly condemn US actions in Vietnam, and A People's History of the Unites States (1980), his most popular work. Noam Chomsky describes this as "his enduring masterpiece", a book that communicates Zinn's "fundamental message about the crucial role of the people who remain unknown in carrying forward the endless struggle for peace and justice…"

Howard Zinn retired from Boston University in 1988. His relatively early retirement allowed him to concentrate on speaking and writing and to continue participating in demonstrations, protests, strikes and acts of civil disobedience which, on some occasions, resulted in his arrest. He spoke out against capital punishment and for improved prison conditions, expressed strong concerns about the environment and nuclear issues, consistently criticized US foreign policy in Central America and elsewhere, and was strongly opposed to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In 2002, Harper Collins celebrated the sale of one million copies of A People's History of the United States with a New York City performance of readings based on the book. This was followed in 2004 by publication of Voices of a People's History of the United States in which Zinn and Anthony Arnove collected speeches, articles, essays, poetry and song lyrics by the individuals described in A People's History . Public performances of selections from Voices culminated in the production of a feature film, The People Speak , in 2009. The film features Zinn, along with well-known entertainers such as Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Viggo Mortensen, Marisa Tomei, Josh Brolin and Danny Glover. These performances, as well as references to Zinn in popular culture, including a mention in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting , significantly increased the number of his readers and viewers. In 2008, the nonprofit Zinn Education Project was established to provide teaching materials based on Zinn's work to educators at the secondary school level insuring that his views on history, politics and social justice would continue to be introduced to young audiences.

Howard Zinn died on January 27, 2010. He and his wife Roslyn, who died in 2008, had two children, Myla Kabat-Zinn and Jeff Zinn, and five grandchildren. Zinn's life and work are described in his 1995 autobiography You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train which was released in 2004 as a documentary film of the same name.

Arrangement

The Howard Zinn Papers are arranged into ten series, three of which are further arranged into subseries. Folders within each series and subseries are arranged alphabetically with several exceptions: appearances/speaking engagements are in chronological order as are audio-visual materials within each format and correspondence within specific sections.

The series arrangement of the collection is as follows:

Series I: Personal and Biographical Material, 1944-2010 Series II: Correspondence, 1962-2010 Series III: Writings, 1901-2009 Series IV: Appearances / Speaking Engagements. 1964-2008 Series V: Boston University, 1960-2003 Subseries VA: Teaching and Student Material Subseries VB: Boston University Controversy Series VI: Race and Civil Rights, 1932-2008 Series VII: Vietnam War, 1944-2001 Subseries VIIA: Vietnam War Material Subseries VIIB: The Pentagon Papers Series VIII: Subject Files, 1933-2010 Series IX: Books with Zinn Annotations, 1929-1997 Series X: Audio-Visual Material, 1957-2009 Subseries XA: Audio Cassettes Subseries XB: Audio Compact Disks Subseries XC: Audio Reel-to-Reel Subseries XD: Video DVDs Subseries XE: Video VHS Subseries XF: Video, Other Formats

Scope and Content Note

This collection provides a broad view of Howard Zinn's many activities and interests. Among his personal papers are school and military records, datebooks, biographical articles and interviews. Correspondence with a wide variety of individuals forms a large part of the collection. There are also published and unpublished writings; drafts, fragments and corrected typescripts; datebooks and notebooks; research materials and lecture notes; posters, photographs and transparencies; annotated books, publications of many kinds, and audio and video materials documenting lectures, interviews, discussions, readings and other public events in which Zinn took part.

Correspondence is found in almost every series. The correspondence included in "Series II: Correspondence" is the most varied, containing letters, emails, postcards and related materials that Zinn had consolidated and arranged by year. Letters in "Series I: Personal and Biographical Material" involve family and close friends, and are personal in nature, while within "Series III: Writings", much of the correspondence reflects communication with publishers, editors, actors and others involved in his various projects. Zinn associated the remaining correspondence with specific topics, individuals, events or issues being addressed and that arrangement has been maintained.

Howard Zinn's extensive travels outside the United States are reflected in many parts of the collection. In addition to material in "Series VII: Vietnam War" describing his visits to Vietnam, Paris and Japan, there are a number of folders in "Series VIII: Subject Files" containing publications, clippings and notes from his 1982 visit to South Africa as well as a copy of the speech he gave in Cape Town in "Series III: Writings." He made a number of trips to Paris (1974, 1978, 1984) where he was a visiting professor at the University of Paris (Vincennes and Institut Charles Civiq) and to Italy as a Fulbright Distinguished Professor at the University of Bologna (1995). Personal correspondence and memorabilia from these and other European travels, as well as from his South African visit and several trips to Cuba, may be found in "Series I: Personal and Biographical Material."

There are many articles and newspaper clippings throughout the collection. It should be noted that he often clipped only the portions of articles that interested him, sometimes saving an initial section and not the continuation. The name of the publication and date of the article were not always saved.

The collection also contains Zinn's archived website, first captured in March 2009. In addition to a biography and bibliography, the site contains print interviews, essays and commentary, audio and video, and information about The People Speak, the documentary based on the live performances of Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove's Voices of a People's History of the United States.

Organizations

Conditions governing access.

Materials are open without restrictions. Archived websites are open to researchers without restrictions.

Conditions Governing Use

This collection is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use materials in the collection in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Preferred Citation

Published citations for paper and audiovisual materials should take the following form: Identification of item, date; Howard Zinn Papers; TAM 542; box number; folder number; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Purchased from Myla Kabat-Zinn, Jeff Zinn, and The Howard Zinn Revocable Trust in 2010; additional materials were donated in 2011 and 2019. The accession numbers associated with this collection are 2010.050, 2011.035, and 2019.064.

Custodial History

Websites are selected by curators and captured through the use of Archive-It. Archive-It uses web crawling technology to capture websites at a scheduled time and displays only an archived copy, from the resulting WARC file, of the website.

The archived website was migrated from the California Digital Library's Web Archiving Service to the Internet Archive's Archive-It Service in November 2015. The link to California Digital Library was removed in October 2017.

Audiovisual Access Policies and Procedures

Access to audiovisual materials in this collection is available through digitized access copies. Researchers may view an item's original container, but the media themselves are not available for playback because of preservation concerns. Materials that have already been digitized are noted in the collection's finding aid and can be requested in our reading room. To request an access copy, or if you are unsure if an item has been digitized, please contact [email protected] with the collection name, collection number, and a description of the item(s) requested. A staff member will respond to you with further information.

Physical Characteristics and Technical Requirements

Due to technical or privacy issues, archived websites may not be exact copies of the original website at the time of the web crawl. Certain file types will not be captured dependent on how they are embedded in the site. Other parts of websites that the crawler has difficulty capturing includes JavaScript, streaming content, database-driven content, and highly interactive content. Full-Text searches of archived websites are available at https://archive-it.org/organizations/567.

Take Down Policy

Archived websites are made accessible for purposes of education and research. NYU Libraries have given attribution to rights holders when possible; however, due to the nature of archival collections, we are not always able to identify this information.

If you hold the rights to materials in our archived websites that are unattributed, please let us know so that we may maintain accurate information about these materials.

If you are a rights holder and are concerned that you have found material on this website for which you have not granted permission (or is not covered by a copyright exception under US copyright laws), you may request the removal of the material from our site by submitting a notice, with the elements described below, to repository email.

Please include the following in your notice: Identification of the material that you believe to be infringing and information sufficient to permit us to locate the material; your contact information, such as an address, telephone number, and email address; a statement that you are the owner, or authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed and that you have a good-faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; a statement that the information in the notification is accurate and made under penalty of perjury; and your physical or electronic signature. Upon receiving a notice that includes the details listed above, we will remove the allegedly infringing material from public view while we assess the issues identified in your notice.

Separated Materials

A number of books from Howard Zinn's personal library were acquired with his papers and many of them were transferred to the Tamiment Library. (The more heavily annotated books were retained with the papers - see Series IX.)

Related Archival Material

Howard Zinn Papers, 1956-1970

The Wisconsin Historical Society holds a small manuscript collection acquired from Howard Zinn (1966, 1980) focusing primarily on Zinn's research on the civil rights movement and his personal involvement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the 1960s. The Wisconsin Historical Society finding aid may be accessed at http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/wiarchives.uw-whs-mss00588

Bibliography

Collection processed by, about this guide, processing information note.

No original order was apparent in the collection upon receipt. Ten linear feet of manuscript material had been in the possession of Boston University (BU) and items had been placed in new folders, many titled "Professional Material: Research Files" with, in some cases, what appear to have been the original folder titles appended. Four linear feet of audio/visual material had also been held by BU and was inventoried but not arranged in any order. One additional box contained editor's proofs of several of Zinn's books. The rest of the material came from the family in three deliveries. Within a few of the boxes, there appears to have been a somewhat alphabetic arrangement but folders with the same or similar titles were found across the entire collection. Not all of the material was contained within folders.

A series arrangement was imposed by the archivist based on aggregation of materials with similar titles and content while keeping in mind the activities and interests of Howard Zinn (e.g. teaching, writing, speaking engagements) and the various types of material (e.g. books, audio/visual items) within the collection. Description was based on original folder titles to the extent possible. Because Zinn made many notes and annotations, his original folders were often photocopied and included within the new ones.

In 2014, the archived website was added as Series XI. New York University Libraries follows professional standards and best practices when imaging, ingesting, and processing born-digital material in order to maintain the integrity of the content.

In 2021, creator-supplied titles containing harmfully euphemistic language regarding the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II were identified, but have been retained to convey important contextual information regarding time and place in which the documents and titles were created.

Revisions to this Guide

The New York Times

The learning network | we the people: considering howard zinn’s approach to history.

We the People: Considering Howard Zinn’s Approach to History

U.S. History

Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.

• See all in U.S. History »
• See all lesson plans »

Overview | What was Howard Zinn’s approach to history, and what values are inherent in it? What issues does his work raise about the purpose and significance of studying history? What are the benefits and drawbacks of his method? In this lesson, students examine Mr. Zinn’s work by comparing his writing with a typical American history textbook. They then write a reflection or select a document from American history to perform.

Materials | Student journals, projection equipment or handouts, copies of relevant portions of “A People’s History of the United States” and a history textbook

Warm-Up | Provide the following two questions for students to respond to in their journals: In writing history, what do you think should be a historian’s goal(s)? Why do you think people should study history?

When students are finished writing, invite them to share their ideas and record them on the board.

Next, hand out, project and/or read aloud the following quotation from Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”:

I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements. But 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, occasionally to 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. That, being as blunt as I can, is my approach to the history of the United States. The reader may as well know the before going on.

Ask: How would you paraphrase this historian’s approach to United States history? What does he seem to value and why? What does he seem to think the purpose and function of history is? How does this approach seem similar to and different from how you have studied history in school? What are the connections between what you wrote earlier in your journals and these ideas?

Tell students the source of the quotation and that they will take a closer look at the work and philosophy of this historian, Howard Zinn, and the controversy over his approach.

Related | In the obituary “Howard Zinn, Historian, Is Dead at 87,” Michael Powell notes that Mr. Zinn’s book “A People’s History of the United States was a “best-seller that inspired a generation of high school and college students to rethink American history”:

Almost an oddity at first, with a printing of just 4,000 in 1980, “A People’s History of the United States” has sold nearly two million copies. To describe it as a revisionist account is to risk understatement. A conventional historical account held no allure; he concentrated on what he saw as the genocidal depredations of Christopher Columbus, the blood lust of Theodore Roosevelt and the racial failings of Abraham Lincoln. He also shined an insistent light on the revolutionary struggles of impoverished farmers, feminists, laborers and resisters of slavery and war. Such stories are more often recounted in textbooks today; they were not at the time.

Questions | For discussion and reading comprehension:

• What does it mean that Howard Zinn “delighted … in lancing what he considered platitudes, not the least that American history was a heroic march toward democracy”?
• Why did the book meet with some skepticism and opposition? How did Mr. Zinn respond to critics?
• How has Mr. Zinn and his work penetrated popular culture? Why do you think that is?
• How do you think Mr. Zinn’s life might have contributed to his worldview and historical approach and vice versa? Why?
• What “personal philosophy” do you think is expressed in the title of Mr. Zinn’s memoir, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train”?
• How do you think the way you study history is different from how it was taught to your parents and grandparents?

RELATED RESOURCES

From the learning network.

• Lesson: I Cannot Tell a Lie
• Lesson: ‘Whitewashing’ History
• Lesson: From Concrete to Memory: Scrapbooking the Berlin Wall

From NYTimes.com

• Times Topics: Howard Zinn
• Times Topics: History
• Op-Ed Column: “A Radical Treasure”

Around the Web

• History Matters
• America’s Social History Project
• Howard Zinn.org

Activity | Explain that students will now examine Howard Zinn’s approach to history writing by comparing a subject in a typical American history textbook with Mr. Zinn’s portrayal of the same event in his book “A People’s History of the United States.”

You could use any topic for this lesson, depending on your current curriculum, by simply looking through the index of “A People’s History of the United States.” The example here is about Shays’ Rebellion.

To begin, hand out the following textbook account of Shays’ Rebellion, from the middle school-level United States history textbook “The American Nation,” by James West Davidson and John E. Batchelor, Prentice Hall, 1986, and read it out loud with the class:

While Congress dealt successfully with the Northwest Territory, it failed to solve other problems. Among the most serious were the problems of farmers. During the Revolution, the demand for farm products was high. Farmers borrowed money for land, seed, animals and tools. But after the war, the nation suffered an economic depression. An economic depression is a period when business activity slows, prices and wages fall, and unemployment rises. When prices for farm goods fell, farmers could not repay their loans. Farmers in western Massachusetts were hard hit by falling farm prices. To make matters worse, Massachusetts raised taxes. The courts threatened to seize the farms of people who did not pay their loans and taxes. Captain Daniel Shays was a Massachusetts farmer who had fought in the Revolution. In 1786, Shays gathered a force of about 1,000 angry farmers. They attacked courthouses and tried to take a warehouse full of rifles and gunpowder. Massachusetts quickly raised an army and ended the rebellion. Shays’ Rebellion worried many Americans. It was a sign that the Articles of Confederation were not working. Leaders of several states called for a convention to discuss ways of reforming the Articles. They decided to meet in Philadelphia in May 1787. When they met, however, they took more drastic action.

After they read this account, ask students to read the same subject from a history Web site, like this one or this one .

After reading these two sources, students work individually or in pairs to write a short summary of what happened during Shays’ Rebellion. Invite a few students or pairs to share their summary with the class.

Next, hand out Mr. Zinn’s account of Shays’ Rebellion, from “A People’s History of the United States,” and read it out loud with the class. (It is available online here , but this version may contain some typos, as the site’s disclaimer notes; you may wish to use a print copy of the book with your class.)

After the class finishes reading both accounts, ask pairs to compare and contrast Mr. Zinn’s account with the textbook versions. Questions for consideration include these:

• What are similarities and differences between the passages? What do you make of these differences?
• What characters does Mr. Zinn introduce that the textbook and summaries do not mention?
• What significant perspectives or information may have been left out of each passage? Do you feel that either of the passages offered a more adequate retelling of this event? If so, which one?
• Explain how reading historical accounts influences your understanding. What did you take away from the textbook passage? What did you take away from Mr. Zinn’s account? When would a simple textbook passage be most helpful? When would it be more useful to read an account like those in “A People’s History”?
• In what ways does Mr. Zinn’s account of Shays’ Rebellion relate to the quotation about his approach to writing history that we read at the beginning of class?
• Why do you think an account like Mr. Zinn’s could make some historians and readers dismiss him?
• Why do you think that the way Mr. Zinn approaches history led to some historians to dismiss him and brand him a “radical”?

To take this further, you might share one or both of the following:

• A transcript of an interview with Howard Zinn from WBUR in which he connects the story of Shays’ Rebellion to present-day America: “We could learn from that history, because people are being foreclosed, they’re losing their homes. Instead of waiting for the president and Congress to act, who are very slow to act and who are not going to really represent the interests of these poor people or even middle class people who are evicted from homes. People should be organizing, doing what citizens have done, doing what democracy requires to prevent these evictions from taking place.” Invite students to consider that comparison further for similarities and differences in circumstance, context and so on.
• Bob Herbert’s Op-Ed column “A Radical Treasure,” in which he questions why Mr. Zinn was often characterized as a radical, and why he considered himself one. Discuss with students what the term “radical” means and how and why it might, and might not, apply to Mr. Zinn. They might also read some more of Mr. Herbert’s columns to compare and contrast Mr. Herbert’s and Mr. Zinn’s work and approach to documenting the people and events of the United States. Can you find any evidence in Mr. Herbert’s columns of Mr. Zinn’s philosophy? Would you call Mr. Herbert a radical? Why or why not?

Going Further | Students revisit their warm-up writing and discussion by re-exploring the question of how history should be “told” in a written piece that explores some of the following questions: What power and responsibility does a historian have in telling a story? Is there a way to write history completely objectively? Or, do historians always add some form of personal bias? How does a concentration on “the people” make Mr. Zinn’s version of history different than an emphasis on, say, politics, economics or foreign relations? Do you think a voice like Mr. Zinn’s is an essential part of the historical record? Is it important, in your opinion, that historians use primary sources in their exploration of history? Why or why not? How do you most like to learn about history? Why?

Alternatively or additionally, students watch some of “The People Speak” and read the corresponding texts. They then create their own video or performance piece on the document of their choice from American history. Hold a classroom “People Speak” contest, in which students enter video, animated projects, raps, theater pieces, etc. Perform and share the pieces at a community event or for other classrooms in the school. They then reflect on how this experience brought the texts “to life” for them in a new way.

Standards | From McRel , for Grades 6-12:

Language Arts 5. Uses the general skills and strategies of the reading process 7. Uses reading skills and strategies to understand and interpret a variety of informational texts

Historical Understanding 1. Understands and knows how to analyze chronological relationships and patterns 2. Understands the historical perspective

Grades K-4 History 4. Understands how democratic values came to be, and how they have been exemplified by people, events, and symbols

Comments are no longer being accepted.

Ugh. the first activity suggests comparing a 200 word passage in a dry textbook to 10,000 words of polemic analysis. Many of Zinn’s angles and facts are indeed good to know about, but there are other well-written, longer treatments of the material that would not conflate reader-friendly analysis with anachronistic tub-thumping that feeds a contemporary political agenda.

One major flaw of Zinn’s history is the lack of foot or end notes. This failing should disqualify the work for any serious student of history.

Another caveat is Zinn’s history covers minorities and movements but sometimes to the exclusion of broader developments such as the increasing democracy in the country from 1790 to 1840. It is a good adjunct to a history of the U.S. but should not be the main text.

Dinah and Holly – Thank you for creating this valuable and thoughtful lesson.

As a social studies teacher, another resource I’ve found invaluable is the Zinn Education Project website ( //zinnedproject.org ). ZEP has dozens of teaching activities and similar resources – organized by time period and theme – to teach a people’s history.

In addition, Dr. Zinn recently responded to questions from teachers, and it is available at //www.zinnedproject.org/posts/5046 . It, too, provides additional insight into his life and work, as well as great advice for social studies teachers.

Thanks for taking the time after Howard’s passing for including this thoughtful lesson and especially for including Howard’s last work, the film THE PEOPLE SPEAK ( //www.thepeoplespeak.com ).

Michael R’s is right: The Zinn Education Project has terrific materials for many different age groups.

And students around the country are also putting on readings from Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History of the United States, the primary source companion to A People’s History.

Performance and reading out loud is a great way to bring history to life for students. There are online organizing tools and scripts at //www.peopleshistory.us

As a teacher/tutor, I object to the constant thread of polemics in Zinn and his lack of references. We are to take his assertions about history as gospel because he says so. Frankly, I think he is the genesis of the movement that condemns anything American.

The Zinn piece is just too long. My students could not get through all of it. My classes are only 57 minutes and I don’t teach at Stuyvesant. Can’t the Times create something for, for lack of a better term, average students?

To all the critics of Zinn, Re: endnotes, polemics: I see Zinn as more of a jumping off point. His perspective is one that is more of a wider vision of American History that has generally been left out of other treatments, For example, Zinn’s historical work is inclusive of indigenous people, the impact of indigenous people in a larger framework and goes beyond “official” or “Big Man” history. That is, delves into subtexts left out of the history of big events (like wars, etc.) and “Big Men,” theories of history (so-called “Top Down” history) that use a central big event and the central leaders (presidents, kings, industrial leaders, social movement leaders, etc.) and describes surrounding or contemporary events in the context of, or through the “lense” of, the major players, events and officials. Zinn was a vanguard of “social history,” more or less positing that change occurs from the bottom up, from the grass roots. By viewing from such a perspective a deeper, richer more comprehensive understanding of history, a truer and more realistic and more inclusive history, “a people’s history,” is attained. Is he a polemicist? From certain pespectives, of course, but that does not serve as meaningful enough criticism to dismiss his work. As for the endnotes the primary and secondary material that is grounds for his writings widely exists. It’s not as if these events have not been written about by others. Don’t take Zinn’s word for it do your own research.

William Murphy alleges a lack of references in Zinn’s “A People’s History”. I suspect Mr. Murphy neglected to read the 19 pages of bibliography that precisely identifies sources, chapter by chapter.

In the 662-page text in the 1999 edition, Dr. Zinn identified the authors and book titles directly in the text and includes the full information for each in the bibliography. He placed asterisks next to those he found indispensable and said the quotes in the text were found in those marked with asterisks. He identified the scholarly journals and “less orthodox but important” periodicals he reviewed before writing.

Mr. Murphy also complains that what Zinn chose to write about sometimes excludes “broader developments such as the increasing democracy in the country from 1790 to 1840.”

We know that “increasing democracy” excluded fully half the adult population (women) until several centuries later along with many other broad sections of the population– including Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans and others — also until several centuries later.

When three quarters of the population–or more– is denied voting rights, whatever amount of democracy increased between 1790 and1840 did not include the majority of people living within the United States.

The Zinn Education Project has no place in any school and here’s why.

1. It’s full of half truths, innacuracies and flat out lies. “People’s History” is not only boring Marxist propagandizing, it’s not even well researched. He gets so much basic stuff wrong because he’s so busy trying to convince you he’s right, he just overlooks things or flat out puts things in there that aren’t correct. It seems the writers he reccomends do the same….Shay’s rebellion raided an arsenal full of “rifles”??? Is that so? Any military historian would scoff at that and tell you the clear difference between a rifle and a musket! 2. Zinn’s education project is flat out illegal according to most education codes. He tells the teachers to disregard this and fight a “guerilla war” against administrators. To all the teachers who think that little game is fun; guess what, Zinn and his ilk don’t care if you get fired or suspended, they just want to make a point at your expense….useful tools.

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What You Should Know About America’s Most Popular Historian

I remember well my first encounter with the work of Howard Zinn.

It wasn’t his most famous and influential book, A People’s History of the United States , that I read first, but his Declarations of Independence . Yet most of the same themes were present in this lesser-known “cross-examination of American ideology,” in which Zinn indicted the United States for its hypocrisy, militarism, exploitative capitalism, and racial injustices, among many other sins.

As a high school graduate preparing for my first year at the University of Virginia, where I planned to study history, Zinn’s writing (I went on to read his People’s History that same summer) was unsettling, revolutionary, and inspiring.

What eighteen-year-old doesn’t like considering the possibility that most everything his parents and teachers had told him was wrong?

Like most intellectual renegades, there was in Zinn more bluster than substance, more polemics than principles. But it would take a few years for me to figure this out—thankfully before I began teaching history to impressionable Virginia high schoolers as I had once been!

The Man Who Shaped Americans’ View of Their History

It’s difficult to overstate the influence of the late Howard Zinn (d. 2010) in contemporary conceptions of American history.

A People’s History of the United States has sold more than 2.5 million copies and is assigned in high school and undergraduate classes across the nation—I read excerpts from it in both my history and education courses at the University of Virginia. A version of the text has been adapted for middle school audiences, while the College Board includes Zinn’s books in their AP teacher-training seminars. It is, in the words of Gilbert Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council, the nation’s “best-known work of American history.”

Politicians, celebrities, and academics commend Zinn to millions of Americans, with far-reaching effects. The central claims of the New York Times’s 1619 Project—that America’s true founding began when black African slaves were sold to white Virginia colonists in 1619, and that American history is best understood primarily through the lens of oppression—is pure Zinn.

Moreover, it’s not hard to believe that the late Boston University professor would have delighted in the destruction of public art honoring Christopher Columbus, Junípero Serra, and other emblems of the “oppressive white patriarchy”—Zinn was himself an unabashed critic of Columbus.

Given the pervasive influence of Zinn’s ideas on American public discourse and our national self-understanding, it is essential to understand the problems with both Zinn as a historian and his most important work.

Thankfully, former Emory adjunct professor Mary Grabar has offered an extensive, thoroughly researched critical treatment of Zinn in her 2019 book Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America . For those assigned A People’s History, Grabar’s book—which deftly catalogues the severity of Zinn’s sins—will prove an invaluable resource.

Poor Credit

One of the first things to know about Howard Zinn is that his credibility as a historian is greatly exaggerated. Zinn wrote only one true, original historical work, his PhD thesis on the congressional career of Fiorello LaGuardia, published in 1959. The remainder of his literary corpus—including A People’s History —is simply the repackaging of other historians or, more commonly, leftist polemicists.

Unlike actual historians, Zinn did not write articles for academic journals, though he did write many politically themed essays for various journals like Harper’s , The Progressive , New South Students , Liberation , Ramparts , and Z Magazine .

Zinn’s historical professionalism is also highly circumspect; his work is defined by the selective, misleading, and downright deceptive use of sources.

Take, for example, one of the most famous excerpts from A People’s History , found in the book’s first pages, the recounting of Christopher Columbus’s interactions with the indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean. Zinn cites Columbus’s description of Taíno natives (also called Arawaks), and, with a heavy use of ellipses in the quotations taken from the Genoese explorer’s journal, argues that Columbus intended to subjugate the native peoples for financial gain.

Yet these ellipses separate entire days in Columbus’s journal and ignore passages that prove Columbus was respectful of the indigenous tribes. Indeed, in one such Zinn-ignored passage, Columbus tells his men to take nothing from the natives without offering something in exchange. In another, he sympathetically notes that the Taínos had wounds on their bodies from battles with other tribes who had sought to enslave them. In yet another—the very first comment Columbus makes about the Caribbean natives—he declares his desire to make friends with the Taíno and have them “be made free” and converted to Christianity.

Copy and Paste

A close examination of Zinn’s popular account of Columbus also exposes his inclination to plagiarize.

As Grabar notes, the first five and a half pages of the book “are little more than slightly altered passages” from the 1976 book Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth , by Zinn’s friend and fellow liberal activist Hans Koning. Reviewers and historians widely criticized Koning’s book as “highly polemical” and “reductionist.” Indeed, Koning was neither a Columbus scholar nor a historian. Although Zinn appears exclusively dependent on Koning’s book for his description of Columbus, he does not include Columbus: His Enterprise in his bibliography and offers only one citation of Koning’s book in the entirety of A People’s History.

Moreover, while seeking to portray the indigenous Caribbean peoples’ society as akin to a communist, feminist utopia, Zinn completely ignores accounts in the same sources he selectively quotes (like the writings of Bartolomé de las Casas) that expose the brutality of Amerindian culture.

For example, Las Cases notes that the Indians he met were cannibals, eating very little meat “unless it be the flesh of their enemies.” Nor does Zinn mention that the Talamanca Indians sent two virgin girls, ages eight and fourteen, as sexual gifts to Columbus’s ships. Columbus, to his credit, had the girls fed, clothed, and sent back, much to the confusion of the natives, who were amazed at the sexual continence of the European sailors.

Hopeless Romantic

Zinn’s portrayal of Native American cultures is an extremely simplistic, romanticized caricature that demonstrates how willing he is to forgo any attempt at legitimate, objective history in order to perpetuate his “European white people bad, Native Americans good” narrative.

In a later chapter on the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs in modern-day Mexico, Zinn claims Cortés pitted “Aztec against Aztec” in order to eradicate an advanced, civilized society.

In reality, it wasn’t hard for the Spaniards to persuade other indigenous peoples to rally to their side, given that the Aztecs had brutally sacrificed hundreds of thousands of them to their gods. In 1487, only five years before Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, the Aztecs celebrated the inauguration of their Great Temple by sacrificing more than eighty thousand captured prisoners from subjugated tribes.

Such negligence also defines Zinn’s portrayal of early interactions between North American Indian tribes and English colonists. Certainly there are examples of brutality on the part of European settlers in the seventeenth century as they moved into what is now Virginia and New England. Yet Zinn excuses as self-defense the 1622 Powhatan massacre of 347 English men, women, and children in Virginia, amounting to almost a third of the population of the colony, all as retribution for the death of one Powhatan warrior. Nor does he discuss the frequency with which Native American peoples actually allied with English settlers in order to resist the murderous, imperialistic actions of bellicose tribes like the Iroquois (who, like many indigenous peoples, engaged in cannibalism).

Indeed, the historical record is filled with examples of native tribes oppressing and massacring one another (as well as European colonists) and engaging in slavery, cannibalism, and genocide. Little of this appears in Zinn’s “historical” account. Instead, writes Zinn, the New World was “more egalitarian than in Europe” and a place “where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world.”

In his attempt to paint indigenous peoples as uniformly innocent, communitarian pacifists, Zinn is actually condescendingly reductionist. He vitiates indigenous peoples’ individual agency and the remarkable diversity found in the manifold civilizations that spanned two continents, spoke thousands of mutually unintelligible languages, and exhibited cultural practices that differed as much as those of the Lapps from the Lombards.

Who, we might ask, is the real racist here?

Free From the “Illusions of Objectivity”

None of this should be particularly surprising when considering Zinn’s own account of what he believed it meant to do history. The Marxist historian, who was investigated by the FBI for his affiliation with the Communist Party of the United States, rejected the idea that a professional historian should aim for objectivity. He once wrote: “By the time I began teaching and writing, I had no illusions about ‘objectivity,’ if that meant avoiding a point of view.”

He elsewhere claimed: “There is no such thing as pure fact, innocent of interpretation.” Perhaps that is why, as Grabar observes, Zinn so nonchalantly claimed that one-third of black Africans transported to the New World died on the voyage, when scholars doing real history estimate the number to be closer to 12 to 13 percent. If history is just polemical, fudging the numbers is inconsequential.

Of course, for those assigned Zinn’s A People’s History , they will recognize that this cursory consideration covers only the first few chapters, leaving untouched later discussions of the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, World War II, and the Vietnam War. Yet for those who understand Zinn’s modus operandi—selective and misleading historical anecdotes, plagiarism, simplistic and romanticized caricatures, and rhetorical polemics, all in the service of a Marxist reading of history—they will not be surprised by Zinn’s assertions or their inherent failures.

Lincoln, says Zinn, was no idealistic political savant but a bourgeois racist; World War II was no noble war against rapacious global totalitarianism but a con pushed by exploitative capitalists who were just as bad as the fascists.

Follow the footnotes, separate the polemics from the data, and you’ll easily decipher that Zinn’s purported history is the real ideological shell game.

About the Author

Casey Chalk is senior writer for  Crisis  magazine and a contributor at the  American Conservative  and  New Oxford Review .

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Does zinn's alternative history teach bad lessons.

Howard Zinn's  A People's History of the United States —  ­a radical alternative to established textbooks when it was first published in 1980 — has today become a standard source in how Americans learn about their nation's history. Now an analysis by Stanford University School of Education Professor  Sam Wineburg  shows how it perpetrates the same errors of historical practice as the tomes it aimed to correct.

It would be difficult to overstate the degree to which A People's History  has resonated with the American public. Although its perspective is unabashedly from the far left, its reach and influence extend far beyond that quarter with more than 2 million copies in print and prominent displays in suburban superstores.

Zinn was a featured speaker in 2008 at the National Council for the Social Studies — the nation's largest gathering of social studies teachers. When he died two years later, his book rose to seventh on Amazon's best-sellers list.

"In the 32 years since its original publication,  A People's History  has gone from a book that buzzed about the ear of the dominant narrative to its current status where, in many circles, it has  become  the dominant narrative," Wineburg writes in an  article  in the latest edition of  American Educator . "For many students,  A People's History  will be the first full-length history book they read, and for some, it will be the only one."

Wineburg, one of the world's top researchers in the field of history education, raises larger issues about how history should be taught. He says that Zinn's desire to cast a light on what he saw as historic injustice was a crusade built on secondary sources of questionable provenance, omission of exculpatory evidence, leading questions and shaky connections between evidence and conclusions.

Wineburg's critique focuses on the part of Zinn's narrative that covers the mid-thirties to the Cold War. Among the subjects it delves into is Zinn's assertion that African Americans were largely indifferent to the outcome of World War II. That claim, Wineburg explains, is based on three anecdotal bits — a quote from a black journalist, a quote from a black student and a poem published in the black press — and excludes any evidence to the contrary.

Indeed, says Wineburg, while Zinn pulled his anecdotes from a secondary source, Lawrence Wittner's 1969 book  Rebels Against War , Zinn also ignored evidence in that same book that undermines his claim. Among the examples Zinn overlooks is Wittner's point that 24 percent of the registrants eligible for the war were African American, while the percentage of draft-evasion cases involving blacks was only 4.4 percent of the total pursued by the Justice Department. And a similar trend held with conscientious objectors. "Surprisingly few black men became C.O.s," Wittner adds.

Similarly, Zinn roots his argument that the Japanese were prepared to surrender before the United States dropped the atomic bomb on a diplomatic cable from the Japanese to the Russians, supposedly signaling a willingness to capitulate. Wineburg writes that Zinn not only excludes the responses to the cable, but also that he fails in the later editions of the book to incorporate the vast new scholarship that emerged after the death of the Emperor Hirohito with the publication of memoirs and new availability of public records, all of which support the position of Japan's resolve to fight to the last.

Wineburg acknowledges that Zinn's book was an important contribution when first published. While the standard textbooks of that time presented a certainty about one view of the nation's history, from Manifest Destiny to the United States' moral superiority in the Cold War, Zinn put forward largely overlooked alternative perspectives, such as how slaves viewed the Constitution and how the Cherokees felt about President Andrew Jackson. Zinn weaved a seamless unified theory of oppression in which the rich and powerful afflict the poor and disenfranchised.

Over time, however, a problem emerged as Zinn's book became the single authoritative source of history for so many Americans, Wineburg said. In substituting one buttoned-up interpretation of the past for another, Wineburg finds, A  People's History  and traditional textbooks are mirror images that relegate students to similar roles as absorbers – not analysts – of information. Wineburg writes that a heavily filtered and weighted interpretation becomes dangerous when "we are talking about how we educate the young, those who do not yet get the interpretive game."

History, Wineburg notes, is messy. And the most responsible thing for educators to do is to leave elbowroom for the mess. "History as truth, issued from the left or the right, abhors shades of gray," Wineburg writes, adding, "Such a history atrophies our tolerance for complexity. It makes us allergic to exceptions to the rule. Worst of all it depletes the moral courage we need to revise our beliefs in the face of new evidence.

"It insures ultimately that tomorrow we will think exactly as we thought yesterday — and the day before and the day before that."

David Plotnikoff writes frequently for the Stanford University School of Education.

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Howard Zinn at 90 — Lessons from the People’s Historian

August 21, 2012

Painting of Howard Zinn by Robert Shetterly, Americans Who Tell the Truth.

By Bill Bigelow

This week — August 24 — would have been the 90th birthday of the great historian and activist Howard Zinn , who died in 2010. Zinn did not merely record history, he made it: as a professor at Spelman College in the 1950s and early 1960s, where he was ultimately fired for his outspoken support of students in the Civil Rights Movement, and specifically the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) ; as a critic of the U.S. war in Vietnam, and author of the first book calling for an immediate U.S. withdrawal ; and as author of arguably the most influential U.S. history textbook in print, A People’s History of the United States . “That book will knock you on your ass,” as Matt Damon’s character says in the film Good Will Hunting .

It’s always worth dipping into the vast archive of Zinn scholarship, but at the beginning of a school year, and as the presidential campaign heats up, now is an especially good time to remember some of Howard Zinn’s wisdom.

Shortly after Barack Obama’s election, the Zinn Education Project sponsored a talk by Zinn to several hundred teachers at the National Council for the Social Studies annual conference in Houston. Zinn reminded teachers that the point of learning about social studies was not simply to memorize facts, it was to imbue students with a desire to change the world. “A modest little aim,” Zinn acknowledged, with a twinkle in his eye.

In this talk, available as an online video as well as a transcription , Zinn insisted that teachers must help students challenge “fundamental premises which keep us inside a certain box.” Because without this critical rethinking of premises about history and the role of the United States in the world, “things will never change.” And this will remain “a world of war and hunger and disease and inequality and racism and sexism.”

In 2008, Zinn spoke to teachers at the National Council for the Social Studies conference. Video and transcript available online.

A key premise that needs to be questioned, according to Zinn, is the notion of “national interests,” a term so common in the political and academic discourse as to be almost invisible. Zinn points out that the “one big family” myth begins with the Constitution’s preamble: “We the people of the United States. . .” Zinn noted that it wasn’t “we the people” who established the Constitution in Philadelphia — it was 55 rich white men. Missing from or glossed over in the traditional textbook treatment are race and class divisions , including the rebellions of farmers in Western Massachusetts, immediately preceding the Constitutional Convention in 1787. No doubt, the Constitution had elements of democracy, but Zinn argues that it “established the rule of slaveholders, and merchants, and bondholders.”

Teaching history through the lens of class, race, and gender conflict is not simply more accurate, according to Zinn; it makes it more likely that students — and all the rest of us — will not “simply swallow these enveloping phrases like ‘the national interest,’ ‘national security,’ ‘national defense,’ as if we’re all in the same boat.”

As Zinn told teachers in Houston: “No, the soldier who is sent to Iraq does not have the same interests as the president who sends him to Iraq. The person who works on the assembly line at General Motors does not have the same interest as the CEO of General Motors. No — we’re a country of divided interests, and it’s important for people to know that.”

Another premise Zinn identified, one that has become an article of faith among the Tea Party crowd, is “American exceptionalism” — the idea that the United States is fundamentally freer, more virtuous, more democratic, and more humane than other countries. For Zinn, the United States is “an empire like other empires. There was a British empire, and there was a Dutch empire, and there was a Spanish empire, and yes, we are an American empire.” The United States expanded through deceit and theft and conquest, just like other empires, although textbooks cleanse this imperial bullying with legal-sounding terms like the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cession.

And going to war on behalf of “our country” is offered as the highest expression of patriotism — in everything from the military recruitment propaganda that saturates our high schools to the social studies curriculum that features photos of U.S. troops heroically battling “enemy soldiers” in a section called “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in the popular high school textbook Modern World History .

Howard Zinn cuts through this curricular fog: “War is terrorism. . . . Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause. That’s what terrorists are about.” Zinn demands that we reexamine the premise that war is necessary, a proposition not taken seriously in any high school history textbook I’ve ever seen. Instead, wars get sold to Americans — especially to the young people who fight those wars—as efforts to spread liberty and democracy. As Howard Zinn said many times, if you don’t know your history, it’s as if you were born yesterday. Leaders can tell you anything and you have no way of knowing what’s true.

Thus when we single out people in our curriculum as icons, as “people to admire and respect,” Zinn advocated shedding the traditional pantheon of government and military leaders: “But there are other heroes that young people can look up to. And they can look up to people who are against war. They can have Mark Twain as a hero who spoke out against the Philippines war. They can have Helen Keller as a hero who spoke out against World War I, and Emma Goldman as a hero. They can have Fannie Lou Hamer as a hero, and Bob Moses as a hero, the people in the Civil Rights Movement — they are heroes.”

Howard and Roz Zinn at a SNCC demonstration in Cambridge.

And to this, there is one final “people’s history” premise we need to remember — whether in education or the world outside of schools. As Howard Zinn reminded the audience of social studies teachers in Houston: “People change.” Zinn did not look to President Obama to initiate social transformation; but in 2008, he saw the election as confirmation that the long history of anti-racist struggle in the United States produced an outcome that would have been inconceivable 30 years prior. And this shift in attitude should give us hope.

As we remember Howard Zinn on what would have been his 90th birthday, let’s count him among the many social justice heroes who offer proof that people’s efforts make a difference — that ordinary people can change the world.

Posted on: Huffington Post | Common Dreams .

© 2012 The Zinn Education Project, a project of Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

Bill Bigelow is curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine and co-director of the Zinn Education Project. He is the author and co-editor of numerous publications including Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years   and A People’s Curriculum for the Earth: Teaching Climate Change and the Environmental Crisis .