CREDIT: Associated Press/Michael Dwyer
“If you want to read a real history book,” Matt Damon’s character tells his therapist, played by Robin Williams, in the film Good Will Hunting, “read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. That book will knock you on your ass.”
Zinn’s book was already popular on college campuses, but its cameo appearance in the Academy Award–winning movie significantly boosted its sales and Zinn’s name recognition. Few academics have had as wide a following as Zinn, a historian who himself became a historic figure. As a scholar, Zinn changed the way Americans view their history. He championed the notion that history should be told from the point of view of ordinary people, including society’s victims and dissenters. He popularized this view with A People’s History, first published in 1980, which has sold nearly 2 million copies and is now in its fifth edition. The book drew on and inspired the burgeoning field of social history, which focuses on the everyday lives of farmers, workers, women, African Americans, immigrants, and others—and on the movements they organized to improve living and working conditions. This perspective is now common in many American high school and college history textbooks, but it was not when Zinn first published A People’s History.
The son of Jewish immigrants, Zinn grew up in “all the best slums in Brooklyn” before being employed as a pipe fitter at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he met his wife. At twenty-one he joined the military and served in the Army Air Force during World War II as a B-17 bombardier, for which he was decorated, attaining the rank of second lieutenant.
After the war Zinn lived in public housing and continued working as a manual laborer for several years, eventually taking advantage of the GI Bill to enter college as a twenty-seven-year-old freshman. Working nights in a warehouse loading trucks, Zinn studied at New York University for his undergraduate degree, then earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in history from Columbia University. Zinn’s master’s thesis was about the 1914 coal strikes in Colorado, and his dissertation examined Fiorello La Guardia’s career in Congress. His 1959 book LaGuardia in Congress was nominated for the American Historical Association’s prestigious Albert J. Beveridge Prize.
As a part of his early research, Zinn also returned to Europe to study places he had bombed during the war. Although he felt that fighting fascism had had a moral element to it, he discovered that more civilians had been killed in bombing raids over France than had been previously documented and that the US military’s reasoning behind target selection was flawed.
In 1956 Zinn was hired by Spelman College, a historically black college for women in Atlanta, Georgia, to chair the history department. There he became involved in the civil rights movement, serving as an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and participating in protests (occasionally with his students). He wrote articles about the movement for The Nation and other magazines and then wrote two books—The Southern Mystique (1964) and SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964)—drawing on his firsthand engagement and eyewitness accounts, creating history in the present tense. With historian August Meier, he lobbied to end the Southern Historical Association’s practice of holding meetings at segregated hotels.
Among his students at Spelman was Alice Walker, who would become a famous novelist. She called Zinn “the best teacher I ever had.” Zinn also taught Marian Wright Edelman, the civil rights activist, lawyer, and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, and Bernice Johnson Reagon, a scholar and activist who founded the musical group Sweet Honey in the Rock.
Zinn later wrote about his approach to teaching during those turbulent times: “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’s encouragement of civil disobedience by students and his criticism of local and national political leaders created tensions with Spelman’s administrators, and Zinn was fired in 1963 despite having tenure. “I was fired for insubordination,” he recalled, “which happened to be true.” (In 2005 Zinn was the commencement speaker at Spelman when the school recognized his life’s work with an honorary doctorate.)
In 1964 Zinn was hired by the political science department at Boston University. He was a popular teacher known for his humor and personal warmth as well as for his unwavering support for student and faculty activism. He frequently spoke at teach-ins and rallies about the war in Vietnam. In 1968, he traveled with Father Daniel Berrigan to Hanoi to receive prisoners released by the North Vietnamese. He also authored two influential books about the war—The Logic of Withdrawal (1967) and Disobedience and Democracy (1968). With Noam Chomsky he edited and annotated The Pentagon Papers (1972), classified documents exposing America’s involvement in Vietnam that were leaked by defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg. Zinn also testified at Ellsberg’s trial.
Zinn frequently clashed with John Silber, Boston University’s autocratic president. Zinn twice led unsuccessful attempts by the faculty to remove the president, and he twice survived attempts by Silber to have him fired. Zinn was a cochair of the strike committee when Boston University professors walked out. After the strike was settled, he and four colleagues were charged with having violated their contract when they refused to cross a picket line of striking secretaries. The charges against “the BU Five” were soon dropped.
Zinn retired from the university in 1988, dismissing a lecture hall of several hundred students thirty minutes early so they could join him at a protest. Over the next twenty-two years Zinn continued publishing and public speaking, often talking to large audiences and receiving accolades for his inspiring lectures. He continued to write books about politics and history, as well as about the politics of writing history, and articles for The Nation, Z, Boston Globe, The Progressive, and other publications.
Zinn also wrote three plays that were produced in cities across the country—Daughter of Venus (about nuclear disarmament and personal commitment to social change), Marx in Soho (a one-man show in which Karl Marx is presented as a humane figure defending the original intent of his works), and Emma (a biographical play about the anarchist Emma Goldman).
Zinn also edited, with Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People’s History of the United States (2004), which provides original texts by or about the heroes in The People’s History. This collection served as the text for the made-for-television work The People Speak, which Matt Damon helped produce. Over the years, several collections of Zinn’s works and commentary on them have been published.
Zinn’s works, telling history from the view of rebels, organizers, and victims of war and colonialism, have reached millions of readers and viewers. People’s History is used widely in high school and college courses. Some historians have criticized his most popular book as simplistic cheerleading for heroes (“the people”) against villains (“the elites”). Nonetheless, as a writer, Zinn did for history what Carl Sagan did for physics and Stephen Jay Gould for evolutionary biology. He popularized and demystified topics that most academics reserve for other specialists and that many students find dull and lifeless.
Unusually for a scholar, Zinn’s fame and influence justified his writing an autobiography: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times (1994), which was later made into a documentary film.