Howard Zinn
The historian who championed the masses
Howard Zinn
1922–2010
For historian Howard Zinn, who has died at 87, the story of the United States was hardly a majestic tale of enlightened Founding Fathers and liberty for all. Rather, it was a 200-year exercise in oppression by slaveholders, robber barons, and white men in general against minorities, women, and the powerless. Zinn expressed his thesis most memorably in A People’s History of the United States (1980), which sold more than 2 million copies.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Zinn came to his progressive views early, said The Washington Post. Born to working-class parents, he was 17 when, during a communist-led protest in Times Square, he was “clubbed and beaten by police even though the rally was peaceful.” After serving in World War II, he earned his Ph.D. at Columbia and, in 1956, became history department chairman at Atlanta’s Spelman College, where he was active in the civil-rights struggle and was “jailed more than a half-dozen times for civil disobedience.” Fired for insubordination in 1963, he joined the faculty of Boston University, where he frequently clashed with its conservative president, John Silber, who said Zinn was trying to “poison the well of academe.”
Zinn vigorously protested the Vietnam War, traveling to Hanoi in 1968 to get American POWs released. But it was A People’s History that made him famous. “To describe it as revisionist is to risk understatement,” said The New York Times. Zinn emphasized “the genocidal depredations of Christopher Columbus, the bloodlust of Theodore Roosevelt, and the racial failings of Abraham Lincoln.” Simultaneously, he championed “the revolutionary struggles of impoverished farmers, feminists, and resisters of slavery and war.” Many of Zinn’s fellow historians took issue with his relentlessly left-wing tone; the liberal Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called him “a polemicist, not a historian.” But A People’s History was used widely in high school and college classrooms and found its way into popular culture. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck plugged it in Good Will Hunting, and it helped inspire “the starkest of Bruce Springsteen’s many albums, Nebraska.”
Zinn readily acknowledged that his masterwork had a distinct point of view. “If you look at history from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated,” he said, “it’s a different story.” He is survived by his wife and two children.
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
'A financial windfall for Iranian terrorism'
Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
By Harold Maass, The Week US Published
-
Orangutan heals cut with medicinal plant
Speed Read A Sumatran orangutan in Indonesia has been self-medicating to heal a wound on his cheek
By Peter Weber, The Week US Published
-
Turkey halts trade with Israel in latest Gaza rift
Speed Read The country plans to join South Africa's genocide case against Israel
By Peter Weber, The Week US Published
-
Benjamin Zephaniah: trailblazing writer who 'took poetry everywhere'
Why Everyone's Talking About Remembering the 'radical' wordsmith's 'wit and sense of mischief'
By The Week UK Published
-
Shane MacGowan: the unruly former punk with a literary soul
Why Everyone's Talking About The Pogues frontman died aged 65
By The Week UK Published
-
'Euphoria' star Angus Cloud dies at 25
Speed Read
By Catherine Garcia Published
-
Legendary jazz and pop singer Tony Bennett dies at 96
Speed Read
By Devika Rao Published
-
Martin Amis: literary wunderkind who ‘blazed like a rocket’
feature Famed author, essayist and screenwriter died this week aged 73
By The Week Staff Published
-
Gordon Lightfoot, Canadian folk legend, is dead at 84
Speed Read
By Peter Weber Published
-
Barry Humphries obituary: cerebral satirist who created Dame Edna Everage
feature Actor and comedian was best known as the monstrous Melbourne housewife and Sir Les Patterson
By The Week Staff Published
-
Mary Quant obituary: pioneering designer who created the 1960s look
feature One of the most influential fashion designers of the 20th century remembered as the mother of the miniskirt
By The Week Staff Published