Howard Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose book A People’s History of the United States taught millions of teenagers how to infuriate their parents during dinner, died yesterday of a heart attack in in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling. Zinn was born in NYC in 1922; the son of Jewish immigrants, he was educated in public schools and worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. After serving as a bombardier in WWII, Zinn attended NYU on the GI Bill while working in warehouses, then earned doctoral degrees in history from Columbia, going on to be a political science professor at Boston University. In the '70s, university president John Silber accused Zinn of arson (later retracting the charge) and cited him as a prime example of teachers "who poison the well of academe."
At age 17, at the urging of some young Communists in his neighborhood, Zinn attended a political rally in Times Square. He would later tell the Associated Press how the violent police crackdown radicalized him:
Suddenly, I heard the sirens sound, and I looked around and saw the policemen on horses galloping into the crowd and beating people. I couldn’t believe that. And then I was hit. I turned around and I was knocked unconscious. I woke up sometime later in a doorway, with Times Square quiet again, eerie, dreamlike, as if nothing had transpired. I was ferociously indignant.
"A People’s History" was published in 1980; the initial run of 5,000 copies sold out through word-of-mouth and the book became a best-seller, reaching 1 million sales in 2003. Zinn called his book "a response to traditional works" and told the AP, "There’s no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete. My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times." Many establishment historians were unimpressed, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once sneered: "I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian."
But the hugely influential book fast become a pop culture signifier, and became even more popular after Matt Damon name-checked it in Good Will Hunting: "If you want to read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book will knock you on your ass." Ben Affleck, who co-wrote the screenplay and was friends with Zinn since childhood, said yesterday, "He taught me how valuable—how necessary—dissent was to democracy and to America itself. He taught that history was made by the everyman, not the elites."
One of Zinn’s last public writings was a brief essay on President Obama, published in The Nation this week: "I've been searching hard for a highlight. The only thing that comes close is some of Obama's rhetoric; I don't see any kind of a highlight in his actions and policies... I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president—which means, in our time, a dangerous president—unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction."
