Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn was an American historian, playwright, and socialist born on August 24, 1922 and died January 27, 2010. Zinn wrote over twenty books, including the influential A People's History of the United States and A Young People's History of the United States.

While he might of described himself as "something of an anarchist, something of a socialist. Maybe a democratic socialist" these concepts are actually in conflict with each other and even diametrically opposed.

Socialism is defined as a, "political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated" not by the individuals of society but by the collective. As a political and economic theory it may seem utopian as described by some academics but any historian who honestly examins the known facts of its historical record from the "free bread" of Rome to the collectivization of Lenon and Stalin's Russia or Mao's China should be repulsed by any casual praise of the socialists philosophy much less the advocacy of socialism.

Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers an authoritarian state or rulers undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a society without rulers. Socialism is never without rulers whether it is the collective as a whole or those whom the collective elect.

While democratic socialism may exist on a small scale it will almost inevitably lead to the centralization of power. Socialism is a philosophy that includes a redistribution of wealth that is always accomplished by and through political authority which rules over the people by force. The fact that socialism claims to be democratic only means that 51% of the people can take what the other 49% produce.

An individual that advocates almost any form of socialism would have to be suffering from some form of cognitive dissonance or historical dysphoria.

The "Historian of historians", Polybius warned that this philosophy where the masses have "an appetite for benefits and the habit of receiving them by way of a rule of force and violence" will "degenerate again into perfect savages and find once more a master" and a ruler. Human nature will cause a decline in certain noble aspects of healthy and functioning communities within society without the regular practice of fervent charity.

Early Christians knew this because both Jesus and John the Baptist taught that you care

for while He wrote extensively about the Civil Rights Movement and anti-war movement, and labor history of the United States. His memoir, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Beacon Press, 2002), was also the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn's life and work. Zinn died of a heart attack in 2010, at age 87.[5]

To describe it as a revisionist account is to risk understatement. A conventional historical account held no allure; he concentrated on what he saw as the genocidal depredations of Christopher Columbus, the blood lust of Theodore Roosevelt and the racial failings of Abraham Lincoln. He also shined an insistent light on the revolutionary struggles of impoverished farmers, feminists, laborers and resisters of slavery and war. Such stories are more often recounted in textbooks today; they were not at the time.[22]

Writing in Dissent, Georgetown University history professor Michael Kazin argued that Zinn is too focused on class conflict, and wrongly attributes sinister motives to the American political elite. He characterized the book as an overly simplistic narrative of elite villains and oppressed people, with no attempt to understand historical actors in the context of the time in which they lived. Kazin wrote:

The ironic effect of such portraits of rulers is to rob 'the people' of cultural richness and variety, characteristics that might gain the respect and not just the sympathy of contemporary readers. For Zinn, ordinary Americans seem to live only to fight the rich and haughty and, inevitably, to be fooled by them.[23]

Kazin argued that A People's History fails to explain why the American political-economic model continues to attract millions of minorities, women, workers, and immigrants, or why the socialist and radical political movements Zinn favors have failed to gain widespread support among the American public.

Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Christopher Phelps, associate professor of American studies in the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham wrote:

Professional historians have often viewed Zinn's work with exasperation or condescension, and Zinn was no innocent in the dynamic. I stood against the wall for a Zinn talk at the University of Oregon around the time of the 1992 Columbus Quincentenary. Listening to Zinn, one would have thought historians still considered Samuel Eliot Morison's 1955 book on Columbus to be definitive. The crowd lapped it up, but Zinn knew better. He missed a chance to explain how the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s have transformed the writing and teaching of history, how his People's History did not spring out of thin air but was an effort to synthesize a widely shared shift in historical sensibilities. Zinn's historical theorizing, conflating objectivity with neutrality and position with bias, was no better.

The critics would be churlish, however, not to acknowledge the moving example Zinn set in the civil-rights and Vietnam movements, and they would be remiss not to note the value of A People's History, along with its limitations. Zinn told tales well, stories that, while familiar to historians, often remained unknown to wider publics. He challenged national pieties and encouraged critical reflection about received wisdom. He understood that America's various radicalisms, far from being "un-American," have propelled the nation toward more humane and democratic arrangements. And he sold two-million copies of a work of history in a culture that is increasingly unwilling to read and, consequently, unable to imagine its past very well.[5]

In The New York Times Book Review in a review of A Young People's History Of The United States, volumes 1 and 2, novelist Walter Kirn wrote:

That America is not a better place—that it finds itself almost globally despised, mired in war, self-doubt and random violence—is also a fact, of course, but not one that Zinn's brand of history seems equal to. His stick-figure pageant of capitalist cupidity can account, in its fashion, for terrorism—as when, in the second volume, subtitled "Class Struggle to the War on Terror," he notes that Sept. 11 was an assault on "symbols of American wealth and power"—but it doesn't address the themes of religious zealotry, technological change and cultural confusion that animate what I was taught in high school to label "current events" but that contemporary students may as well just call "the weirdness." The line from Columbus to Columbine, from the first Independence Day to the Internet, and from the Boston Tea Party to Baghdad is a wandering line, not a party line. As for the "new possibilities" it points to, I can't see them clearly.[7]

Professors Michael Kazin and Michael Kammen condemn the book as a black-and-white story of elite villains and oppressed victims, a story that robs American history of its depth and intricacy and leaves nothing but an empty text simplified to the level of propaganda.[23][24]

In 2003, Zinn was awarded the Prix des Amis du Monde Diplomatique for the French version of this book Une histoire populaire des États-Unis.[25]

Other editions and related works A version of the book titled The Twentieth Century contains only chapters 12–25 ("The Empire and the People" to "The 2000 Election and the 'War on Terrorism'"). Although it was originally meant to be an expansion of the original book, recent editions of A People's History now contain all of the later chapters from it.

In 2004, Zinn and Anthony Arnove published a collection of more than 200 primary source documents titled Voices of a People's History of the United States, available both as a book and as a CD of dramatic readings. Writer Aaron Sarver notes that although Kazin "savaged" Zinn's A People's History of the United Sta