Melville House Books

Howard Zinn (1922-2010)

Howard Zinn, historian, activist, professor, and author of one of the most popular historical surveys ever written about American history, A People’s History of the United States, which “had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and union organizers of the 1930s,” died Wednesday at age 87. The ever-active Zinn, a long-time history professor at Boston University, was traveling and suffered a heart attack while visiting Santa Monica, California.

His work “simply changed perspective and understanding for a whole generation,” says Noam Chomsky in a Boston Globe obituary by Mark Feeney and Bryan Marquard. “He opened up approaches to history that were novel and highly significant. Both by his actions, and his writings for 50 years, he played a powerful role in helping and in many ways inspiring the Civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.”

The Globe also quotes Zinn himself on his credo, in a short extract from his memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train,

From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.

Zinn quit teaching in 1988 to concentrate on his writing. The Globe notes that, “On his last day at BU, Dr. Zinn ended class 30 minutes early so he could join a picket line and urged the 500 students attending his lecture to come along. A hundred did.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.