by Adam Kostrich
Five years ago today, American historian, author and activist Howard Zinn died of a heart attack at 87. His work and life testify to the fruits of looking critically at our past. Zinn was born poor in Brooklyn, New York in 1922. During the Second World War he served as a bomber pilot in France and former Czechoslovakia. Quickly disillusioned by the distant nature of aerial bombings, he became a pacifist, later suggesting that “the history of bombing—and no one has bombed more than (the US)—is a history of endless atrocities, all calmly explained by deceptive and deadly language like ‘accident’, ‘military target’, and ‘collateral damage’.”
After the war, he attended college on the back of the G.I. Bill, a piece of legislation passed in the wake of World War II to aid American veterans’ readjustment to civilian life. He received a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 1958.
Zinn began his teaching career at Spelman College, a historically Black liberal arts women’s college in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1956. As the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, Zinn lobbied to end the Southern Historical Association’s practice of meeting at segregated hotels and accompanied students to a sit-in at the segregated white section of the Georgia state legislature in 1963. Though a tenured professor, he was fired at the end of 1963 for organizing and participating in sit-ins. The following year he accepted a post teaching Political Science at Boston University where he remained until his retirement.
Zinn authored and edited dozens of books and articles, but a few stand out as monumental achievements which changed American historical and political consciousness. In 1967, Zinn wrote Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, the first book to call for immediate and unconditional American withdrawal from Vietnam. Two years later, as the war raged on, he pushed the American Historical Association (AHA) to pass an official anti-war resolution. The resolution did not pass, for the head of the AHA literally wrested the microphone from Zinn’s hands while he appealed to his fellow members.
Around the same time, Zinn’s friend Daniel Ellsberg (a consultant with the air force think tank RAND, or Research And Development) secretly copied the Pentagon Papers, which detailed the history of the United States’ military involvement in Southeast Asia. Ellsberg gave the copy to Zinn and his wife Roslyn, and together, with family friend and fellow critical academic Noam Chomsky, they edited, annotated and published the papers in 1971 in a five-volume set: four volumes of documents and one volume of critical analysis by Zinn and Chomsky.
In 1980, he wrote A People’s History of the United States, intended to be an alternative textbook for students of American history. Starting from the first colonial settlements in the United States, Zinn shows the reader the “underside” of American history. First contact is told through Indigenous eyes; the American Revolution is told from the perspective of unemployed, disenfranchised whites; the Civil War is seen through the eyes of organized labour; women and people of colour show up as the focal points everywhere in narratives from which they had been marginalized for years.
A People’s History is one of the best-selling history books in American history, and is widely regarded as essential reading. Its emphasis on the histories of organized labour, women, disenfranchised and marginalized peoples of all possible walks of life not only changed the course of American scholarship, but changed the historical consciousness of a generation.
Twenty five years after its initial publication the book was re-released with critical assessments of both Gulf Wars.
The anniversary of Zinn’s death serves, if nothing else, as an opportunity to remember what he thought was the value of thinking critically about the past. In his own words: “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.”
This article first appeared in the Leveller Vol.7, No. 4 (Jan/Feb 2015).
