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!
Howard Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose leftist "A People's History of the United States" became a million-selling alternative to mainstream texts and a favorite of such celebrities as Bruce Springsteen and Ben Affleck, died Wednesday. He was 87.
Zinn died of a heart attack in Santa Monica, Calif., daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn said. The historian was a resident of Auburndale, Mass.
Published in 1980 with little promotion and a first printing of 5,000, "A People's History" was – fittingly – a people's best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003. Although Zinn was writing for a general readership, his book was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country, and numerous companion editions were published, including "Voices of a People's History," a volume for young people and a graphic novel.
"I can't think of anyone who had such a powerful and benign influence," said the linguist and fellow activist Noam Chomsky, a close friend of Zinn's. "His historical work changed the way millions of people saw the past."
At a time when few politicians dared even call themselves liberal, "A People's History" told an openly left-wing story. Zinn charged Christopher Columbus and other explorers with genocide, picked apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and celebrated workers, feminists and war resisters.
Even liberal historians were uneasy with Zinn. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once said: "I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don't take him very seriously. He's a polemicist, not a historian."
In a 1998 interview with The Associated Press, Zinn acknowledged he was not trying to write an objective history, or a complete one. He called his book a response to traditional works, the first chapter – not the last – of a new kind of history.
"There's no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete," Zinn said. "My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times."
