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

Immediately marks the centennial of historian Howard Zinn’s delivery. Greater than a decade after Zinn’s demise in 2010, his best-selling A Folks’s Historical past of the US (1980) stays the most well-liked—and radical—introduction to American historical past, having not too long ago surpassed 4 million copies offered. Zinn did greater than some other historian to popularize the historiographical revolution of the Lengthy Sixties, bringing from the campuses to the general public its highlight on the oppression of teams previously marginalized in US historical past textbooks: African Individuals, staff, Native Individuals, girls—and on their liberation actions. Instead of conventional textbook triumphalism, Zinn’s Folks’s Historical past provided a scathing account of American capitalism’s position in selling financial, racial, and sexual inequality.

A World Conflict II bombardier who, within the wake of Hiroshima, got here out of that struggle profoundly disillusioned with the American warfare state, Zinn noticed historical past as providing proof to separate rhetoric from actuality in US international coverage, enabling Individuals to probe “what number of instances have presidents mentioned we’re going to struggle for democracy, and what have these wars actually been about?” Zinn was a number one critic of the Vietnam Conflict, who revealed one of the vital influential books calling for its finish, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal (1967). In A Folks’s Historical past, Zinn provided what could be the most profoundly anti-war introduction to American historical past ever written. Zinn, as historian Robin D.G. Kelley put it, was a “chronicler of the inhumanity of struggle…. [In A People’s History] antiwar activists have been the heroes, not tank commanders, the cavalry, or fighter pilots. Think about a historical past e book that sells over 1,000,000 copies that doesn’t promote struggle!”

Zinn’s historic work mirrored different key elements of his life expertise. A baby of working-class immigrants, Zinn spoke and wrote of rising up class-conscious, keenly conscious of the distinction between his delivery household’s poverty within the Despair years of his youth and the pictures of affluence conveyed by Hollywood. Class battle could be a serious theme in his Folks’s Historical past.

So was the search for racial equality. From 1956–63, Zinn taught at Spelman School, a traditionally black girls’s school in Atlanta, each mentoring and taking inspiration from his college students, who helped to steer the sit-in motion and the Pupil Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Zinn and Ella Baker have been the one older adults on SNCC’s govt committee, and he would go on to jot down the primary e book on the scholar wing of the Black Freedom Motion, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964). It was his expertise with this nonviolent grass roots insurgency that dedicated him to the sort of “bottom-up” view of historical past and politics that will characterize his Folks’s Historical past. This expertise additionally gave him a profoundly antiracist perspective on American exceptionalism, wherein he argued that “there’s not a rustic in world historical past wherein racism has been extra essential for thus lengthy a time as the US. And the issue of the ‘coloration line,’ as W.E.B. Du Bois put it, continues to be with us.”

The Spelman expertise additionally woke up Zinn to the position of sexual inequality in American historical past. His 1960 Nation article, “Finishing School for Pickets,” on the Spelman college students’ protests towards Jim Crowism and their revolt towards campus sexual paternalism was among the many first to focus on the activism of black girls college students. Zinn could be fired for supporting that revolt.

A part of what made A Folks’s Historical past so standard was Zinn’s candor about his biases. Zinn made no pretense of neutrality—a daring departure from bland textbooks. In one of the vital memorable passages from the e book’s opening chapter, Zinn made such a impartial pose sound amoral. He argued that there was an “inevitable taking of sides which comes from choice and emphasis in historical past,” that in “a world of battle…between conqueror and conquered, grasp and slaves, capitalists and staff, dominators and dominated in race and intercourse…victims and executioners, it’s the job of considering individuals, as Albert Camus prompt, to not be on the facet of the executioners.” For Zinn this ethical positioning yielded a type of advocacy historical past, wherein he championed the oppressed, telling Columbus’s story from the standpoint of the indigenous individuals he conquered and brutalized, “the Structure from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson, as seen by the Cherokees,” and so forth.

Zinn’s iconoclastic strategy to American historical past has at all times infuriated right-wingers, who view it as anti-American. This was the case with Reed Irvine, head of Accuracy in Academia, who sought to ban and even burn A Folks’s Historical past within the Eighties, and extra not too long ago with Donald Trump, who in his final 12 months within the White Home denounced Zinn as a harmful propagandist, who, together with essential race concept and the 1619 Undertaking, was supposedly corrupting the nation’s younger by making “college students ashamed of their very own historical past.” Neither lecturers nor college students have discovered such condemnations persuasive.

Zinn has had extra cheap critics: historians who see him as simplifying historical past by demonizing elites, romanticizing the working class and never grappling with its acceptance of capitalism. However such criticism underscores the truth that a long time after its publication, A Folks’s Historical past nonetheless issues, and it’s nonetheless sparking debate in historical past lecture rooms.

Additionally enduring is Zinn’s concern that too many excessive colleges lack the educational freedom to debate dissident historic interpretations, which led him in 2008 to cofound the Zinn Education Project (ZEP). Immediately, with its spectacular on-line presence, ZEP reaches greater than 100,000 lecturers, and never solely promotes individuals’s historical past and progressive pedagogy however has additionally spearheaded resistance to the current bans imposed by Republican legislatures and governors on essential race concept and on candid educating about race and gender in historical past lecture rooms.

In gentle of such bans, the query Individuals would possibly replicate on to commemorate Zinn’s a centesimal birthday is whether or not our nation is free sufficient to permit its youth to learn and talk about individuals’s historical past, the 1619 challenge, and important race concept—a historical past that reveals that these past the elite matter; a historical past that in Zinn’s phrases, can “promote democracy by giving individuals the concept that they can also take part in historical past.”

FIVE OF HOWARD ZINN’S BEST NATION ARTICLES

“Finishing School for Pickets,” August 6, 1960

“Kennedy: The Reluctant Emancipator,” December 1, 1962

“Emancipation From Dogma: The Old Left and the New,” April 4, 1966

“Three Prisoners: The Petty Route Home,” April 1, 1968

“The Others: What if We Could See the Afghan War Dead as We’ve Seen the September 11th Victims?,” January 24, 2002

For extra of Zinn’s Nation articles, see Howard Zinn, Some Truths Are Not Self-Evident (2014)