1922-2010
"Behind the deceptive words designed to entice people into supporting violence -- words like democracy, freedom, self-defense, national security -- there is the reality of enormous wealth in the hands of a few, while billions of people in the world are hungry, sick, homeless."
-- Howard Zinn, preface, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
(from Wikipedia) Howard Zinn was an American historian and Professor of Political Science at Boston University from 1964 to 1988. He was the author of more than 20 books. Zinn was active in and wrote extensively about the civil rights, civil liberties and anti-war movements. In his best-selling A People's History of the United States (1980), "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 (The New York Times)."
I MET HOWARD ZINN ON FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2005, AT VASSAR COLLEGE, AFTER HE INTRODUCED "STAGED READINGS FROM HOWARD ZINN'S A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES PERFORMED BY CAMPUS AND COMMUNITY". HE WAS A GREAT, GENTLE, MODEST MAN.
Click here to read remembrances of Zinn by hip hop artists Talib Kweli, Q-Tip and John Legend.
To purchase Zinn's books, please click here.
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