{"id":244017,"date":"2010-01-28T22:27:11","date_gmt":"2010-01-29T03:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/firedoglake.com\/?p=64089"},"modified":"2010-01-28T22:27:11","modified_gmt":"2010-01-29T03:27:11","slug":"r-i-p-howard-zinn-%e2%80%93-the-people%e2%80%99s-historian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/244017","title":{"rendered":"R.I.P. Howard Zinn \u2013 The People\u2019s Historian"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Howard<\/p>\n

Howard Zinn (photo: Left~Lens via Flickr)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Labor advocate, historian of the unprivileged, author and activist Professor Howard Zinn<\/a> is dead at 87. The New York Times covers it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

His book, A People’s History of the United States<\/a>, is a multi-million copy best seller. The Times is quick to characterize the book as a “leftist alternative to mainstream texts”. It certainly challenged capital’s comfortable myths in a way that school textbooks, which have to pass muster with rightwing Texas housewives and fundamentalists, and their collegiate analogues often do not.<\/p>\n

It introduced millions to the economics of slavery, how the American economy North and South depended on it since the 17th century and how it lasted a hundred years after the American Civil War. Columbus Day was never the same once you knew that within decades of his landing on Hispaniola, the island’s native population was gone owing to disease and European predation.<\/p>\n

The book also introduced them to the Trail of Tears<\/a>, one of many immense dislocations of the American Indian and an example of how the United States government violated every treaty it has ever signed with them. It made explicable a tagline on a t-shirt, showing Geronimo and a small armed band: “Fighting Terrorists Since 1492.”<\/p>\n

Howard Zinn introduced his readers to the economics of waging war, never more appropriate since the start of the current “Global War on Terror”. War is America’s and mankind’s most profitable industry. Mr. Zinn put into historical context such things as the agony of First World War poets, such as Wilfred Owen and his Dulce et Decorum Est<\/a>, and double Medal of Honor winner Marine Major Gen. Smedley Butler’s<\/a> characterization that “war is a racket” and his allegations of a Wall Street plot to overthrow FDR’s administration.<\/p>\n

Finally, he introduced his readers to the history and propaganda of the American labor movement. Howard Zinn was a longshoreman, a bombadier in the Second World War, a lecturer at historically black liberal arts Spelman College in Atlanta in the 1950’s, and a tenured professor of history at Boston University. He brought his experience as well as insight and scholarship to a subject most Americans are indoctrinated to ignore.<\/p>\n

He opened his readers’ eyes both to Andrew Carnegie’s famed libraries and Endowment for Peace, as well as the brutal strike-breaking techniques used at his Homestead, PA, steel mill. They were routine. John D. Rockefeller and his son used even more brutal methods, including machine guns, to suppress silver mine strikers in Ludlow, Colorado<\/a>, in 1914.<\/span><\/p>\n

Like his contemporary, medievalist Norman F. Cantor<\/a>, it would be fair to say he practiced “advocacy history”. Dr. Cantor, who died in 2004 and whose best known book was Civilization in the Middle Ages<\/em>, once criticized a dearly departed colleague, calling him<\/a>,<\/p>\n

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“verbose, disorganized, and often erroneous,”…a “tedious Brit” whose “lavish patronage of Marxists and British and French cronies” was a disgrace to the discipline.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Likewise, the Times’ death notice attempts to bracket Dr. Zinn with this quote from Kennedy family advocate and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.:<\/p>\n

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Even liberal historians were uneasy with Professor Zinn, who taught for many years at Boston University. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once said: \u201cI know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don\u2019t take him very seriously. He\u2019s a polemicist, not a historian.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Times gives Mr. Zinn this rebuttal:<\/p>\n

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\u201cThere\u2019s no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete,\u201d Professor Zinn said. \u201cMy idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I think he would also agree with Norman Cantor’s response to criticism that his remarks about his departed colleague were undecorous:<\/p>\n

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“There are a million copies of my medieval books in print, but I regard myself as a cultural critic as well as a historian. I’m particularly concerned with the training of historians, and who trains them, and how that impacts on the general culture.” Later,…he offered a more personal explanation of his acerbity: “The best writing, for me, comes . . . when I have sustained an unpleasant shock . . . or insults and abuse from a group of academic colleagues. Then I write to affirm my own dignity, humanity, and autonomy.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Howard Zinn challenged orthodoxy, he challenged comfortable perspectives and asked awkward questions. More importantly, he made YOU ask “Why?”, something many of us stop doing after the age of three. His model for doing so made it too uncomfortable to accept a simple, parental-like dismissal of, “Because I said so.” If that makes Wall Street and would be friends like Mr. Obama feel uncomfortable, it should. I think a man who believed that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” would be proud of that legacy. I hope he is. Goodbye, Howard.<\/p>\n

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Howard Zinn (photo: Left~Lens via Flickr) Labor advocate, historian of the unprivileged, author and activist Professor Howard Zinn is dead at 87. The New York Times covers it here. His book, A People’s History of the United States, is a multi-million copy best seller. The Times is quick to characterize the book as a “leftist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4849,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4849"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244017\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}