A People's History of Ada, Oklahoma

One of the perks of my day job (aside from giving girls flowers all day) is I'm generally on the road driving all around the county for four to six hours at a time.  And thanks to the magic of audio books, I've been catching up on all those huge tomes I've been meaning to read for years.  Last Thanksgiving, it was Don Quixote.  April was spent on Moby Dick, which was much more darkly humorous than I had expected.  Over the summer it was Ulysses (seriously, it took about two months).  October was War and Peace, which was actually much less painful than I thought it'd be.



Howard Zinn

 In October I found an MP3 of Howard Zinn's  A People's History of the United States:  The 20th Century.  Read by Matt Damon, The 20th Century focused on the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War.  Toward the end of the Gulf War section, Zinn highlighted some of the activist protests that began springing up across the country in late 1990.  I almost ran off the road when I heard Damon read this:

In Ada, Oklahoma, while East Central Oklahoma State University was "adopting" two National Guard units, two young women sat quietly on top of the concrete entrance gate with signs that read "Teach Peace ... Not War."  One of them, Patricia Biggs, said:  "I don't think we should be over there.  I don't think it's about justice and liberty, I think it's about economics.  The big oil corporations have a lot to do with what is going on over there....  We are risking people's lives for money."

How cool is this?  Ada, Oklahoma and East Central students were mentioned in arguably one of the the most influential history books of the 20th century.  How did I live ten years in this town (and spend five of those years attending classes at East Central) without ever knowing about this?  Hell, I was even a history minor for a while!