, an American historian, and activist gave us, A People’s History of the United States, a more realistic view of America without interjecting the “political correctness” so inherent in the text books given to today’s students.

Comparing Zinn’s version with the textbooks you and I read in school reminds me of how our current President, ahem, George Bush and his sidekick Dick Cheney have been trying to re-write American history to conform to their own warped view of the universe. All you have to do is take a look of how the “Bush Crime Family” has been re-writing the scientific reports on Global Warming to align with their political agenda, making it up as they go along regardless of the impact it will have on our children and our children’s children.

In order to give my readers a perspective on the impact that historians can have on present and future societies, just take a look at Howard Zinn and his amazing life and his depiction of American history in his bestseller mentioned above. 

Howard Zinn is an American historian, political scientist, social critic, activist and playwright, born in 1922 and is currently a Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department at Boston University.

As a historian, Zinn found that the point of view expressed in traditional history books was often limited so he wrote a history texbook, A People’s History of the United States with the goal  of providing other perspectives of American history. The textbook depicts the struggles of Native American against European and U.S. conquest and expansion, slaves against slavery, unionists and other workers against capitalists, women against patriarchy, and African-Americans for Civil Rights.

He has been extremely active and an integral part of the Civil Rights movement having first been appointed chairman of the department of history and social sciences at Spelman College, where he lobbied with historian August Meier to end the practice of the Southern Historical Association of holding meetings at segregated hotels.

Zinn served as an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Spelman and wrote the book SNCC: The New Abolitionists in 1964. Although he was a tenured professor, he was dismissed, in June 1963, after siding with students in their desire to challenge Spelman’s traditional emphasis of turning out "young ladies."

He was likely to be found on the picket line, or in jail for participating in effort to break down segregation in public places in Atlanta which was recounted in his autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times.

READ MORE ON HOWARD ZINN

While at Spelman, Zinn wrote that he observed 30 Constitutional violations of the First and Fourteenth amendments including the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and equal protection of the laws. He also wrote an article on the civil rights movement in Albany,  describing the people who participated in the Freedom Rides to end segregation, and of the reluctance of President John F. Kennedy to enforce the law.  Zinn has also pointed out that the Justice Department under Robert F. Kennedy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation headed by J. Edgar Hoover, did little to nothing to stop the segregationists from brutalizing civil rights workers.

Fresh from writing two books about his research, observations about and participation in the Civil Rights movement in the South, Zinn accepted a position in the political science department at Boston University in 1964. His classes in civil liberties were among the most popular classes offered at BU with as many as 400 students subscribing each semester to the non-required class. He taught at BU for 24 years and retired in 1988. Zinn wrote one of the earliest books calling for the U.S. withdrawal from its war in Viet Nam. VietNam: The Logic of Withdrawal.

Although he eventually became one of the leaders of the Vietnam anti-war movement, he eagerly joined the Army Air Force during World War II to fight fascism and participated in one of the first military uses of napalm, which took place in Royan, France.

When Daniel Ellsberg secretly copied The Pentagon Papers, describing the internal planning and policy decisions of the United States in the Vietnam War, he gave a copy of them to Howard and Roslyn Zinn. He then, along with Noam Chomsky, edited and annotated the copy of The Pentagon Papers that Ellsberg entrusted to him.

At Ellsberg’s criminal trial for theft, conspiracy, and espionage in connection with the publication of the Pentagon Papers by The New York Times, defense attorneys called Zinn as an expert witness to explain to the jury the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from World War II to 1963. Zinn discussed that history for several hours, later reflecting on his time before the jury. "I explained there was nothing in the papers of military significance that could be used to harm the defense of the United States, that the information in them was simply embarrassing to our government because what was revealed, in the government’s own interoffice memos, was how it had lied to the American public. The secrets disclosed in the Pentagon Papers might embarrass politicians, might hurt the profits of corporations wanting tin, rubber, oil, in far-off places, but this was not the same as hurting the nation, the American people."

Zinn opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and has written several books about it. He asserts that the U.S. will end its war with, and occupation of, Iraq when resistance within the military increases, in the same way resistance within the military contributed to ending the U.S. war in Vietnam. He compares the demand by a growing number of contemporary U.S. military families to end the war in Iraq to the parallel "in the Confederacy in the Civil War, when the wives of soldiers rioted because their husbands were dying and the plantation owners were profiting from the sale of cotton, refusing to grow grains for civilians to eat," an interesting parallel.

The thing that moved me the most when reading A People’s History was that I had never heard about the events in the book as described by Zinn. It reminded me of history is always being rewritten by those with a personal and/or political agenda; like the Japanese omitting the atrocities committed against the Chinese and Koreans.

An extreme and even absurd example of this would be the attempts by a few to deny that Hitler’s holocaust never happened! Hard to believe? Then how can we, intelligent and well knowing people except the attempts of the to spin what’s happening on a daily basis.

THINK ABOUT IT!