His dissertation, which received an honorable mention in the competition for the Albert J. Zinn began his teaching career at Upsala College and Brooklyn College before moving to Spelman College in Atlanta, where he inspired generations of students including such distinguished alumni as Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman. Perhaps because of his new reading of American history, his own humane worldview, and his belief that a historian cannot ignore his or her civic responsibilities as a citizen, Zinn became an activist, first in the civil rights campaign during which he served on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and then in the protests against the Vietnam War.
From Spelman College, Zinn moved to the political science department at Boston University, where he continued to inspire and mentor countless numbers of students his classes sometimes had hundreds enrolled with his teaching and his activism. Even after he took early retirement from the university in , Zinn kept speaking and writing about the issues that were at the heart of his political self, which, for him, was never separate from his intellectual being.
The inspiring speeches that punctuate large or even small gatherings is the last thing that has happened—the harder work is convincing people to get over their sense of isolation and powerlessness. Organizing was critical, but so was political clarity—and Zinn contributed to both.
But more importantly, Zinn challenged the entire premise of war itself, including the idea that poor and working-class soldiers enlisted to murder each other for the benefit of the rich had anything to do with democracy or freedom.
There is no end to the list of horrors and atrocities that face us today and which many of us feel simultaneously overcome and angered by. Whether it is the awful continuation of police abuse and violence in Black and Brown communities or the vicious attacks on immigrant communities as dictated by American policies and law.
In the face of these, and what feels like a million other challenges, it is all too easy to be pessimistic or cynical about the possibility of change and overwhelmed into doing nothing.
In other words, change always comes from below and not from the altruistic genius of elected officials. Change is neither linear nor is it guaranteed, but without struggle and resistance we will never get to the world that we want to live in—a world free from oppression, war, and inequality. We need Howard Zinn now more than ever. Not for the sake of romance or to construct another hero in history. We need his insights, his politics, and his commitment to the struggle for a better world.
But he would be the first to tell you that he developed those insights from his intimate collaboration with hundreds of others. We no longer have him, but his words will live forever. When this book was first published in the early s, Zinn wrote of the possibility for the reemergence of a movement against the continued reality of racism and inequality in American cities. What he wrote then remains important today and speaks to the unique abilities of Zinn to capture the political possibilities or necessities of a given moment based on historical experience.
There is no sign of. But the need for it is clear, and the ingredients for it are all around, waiting to be put together. There is a new generation of militant black youth, with enormous energy too often misused or wasted but capable of being mobilized if the right time and conditions appear.
If that [movement] can happen is. But not to believe in the possibility of dramatic change is to forget that things have changed, not enough, of course, but enough to show what is possible. We have been surprised before in history. We can be surprised again. Indeed, we can do the surprising. The reward for participating in a movement for social justice is not the prospect of future victory. It is the exhilaration of standing together with other people, taking risks together, enjoying small triumphs and enduring disheartening setbacks—together.
Used with permission of Beacon Press. Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature. VIA Beacon Press. Still, it was the young generation of the s that broke open the limits of what constituted legitimate and respected history. The shifts that the radical historians of the s triggered were diverse enough to defy encapsulation. A strict taxonomy might demarcate differences between the self-consciously Marxist work of an early wave, whose members included current or former Communists, Trotskyists, and Schachtmanites, and that of a younger cohort who listed toward anarchism and the counterculture.
Zinn shared many of these tenets. He relentlessly criticized American policy and seems to have stayed silent about the Soviet Union. Yet for all these affinities, Zinn remained aloof from the intellectual ferment of the seminar rooms, journal offices, and conferences where radical history was being born. Nor did Zinn ever write for a journal of later vintage, the Radical History Review.
Zinn expressed his radicalism through activism—first on the Vietnam War he sympathized with the NLF and then on a host of successor issues, on and off campus. That activism, more than his writing, came to constitute his public identity. John Silber, swaggering in from Texas, had a vendetta against the left, especially professors who politicized their research.
Heedless of due process, intolerant of dissent, Silber imposed his will on the faculty and students, generating only more unrest. Duberman reports that when Zinn received an offer to teach in Paris and secured Herbert Marcuse to teach in his stead, Silber vetoed what should have been a routine leave of absence.
Silber also denied Zinn promotions and raises for years. In , with help from the AAUP, he won an appeal to gain his long-withheld back pay. That Zinn deserved sympathy for his victimization by Silber, however, does not mean that his own ideas or pursuits were admirable.
Relevance is an uncertain guide to those embarked on a long, tortuous path of scholarship. Duberman is exceedingly gracious toward Zinn, praising his warm heart, his honorable intentions, his noble commitments. But damning it is: just as his thoughts on scholarship appear jejune, so Zinn himself—his measure taken in full—comes across as a lazy, conventional theorist, with an undeveloped political philosophy.
The book sold well and garnered an American Book Award nomination. An easily drinkable blend of the radical history that was now ripe on the vine, the book gave readers the American experience as seen by the losers and the victims. Zinn justified his overt display of sympathy with a stark methodological declaration.
He abjured any pretense of having written a comprehensive or balanced account. Having long ago disavowed objectivity, having dismissed even the hope of unpoliticized scholarship, Zinn stated plainly that he meant to take sides. The Constitution, the Civil War, the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima—all were self-serving acts, Zinn said, perpetrated by those in power to maintain power.
In the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era, this stance was alluring. But on the whole the reviews were not kind. But Zinn reduced historical analysis to political opinion.
Zinn rests satisfied with what strikes him as the scandalous revelation that claims of objectivity often mask ideological predilections. And on the basis of this sophomoric insight, he renounces the ideals of objectivity and empirical responsibility, and makes the dubious leap to the notion that a historian need only lay his ideological cards on the table and tell whatever history he chooses.
We have only to pick out such letters as we want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not suit our purpose.
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