Howard Zinn

1922–2010 · 88 years Tier III

The shipyard worker who became a bombardier, then doubted the bombs

Portrait of Howard Zinn — Jim from Stevens Point, WI, USA — 2009 — CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

His parents were factory workers who had immigrated from Austria-Hungary and Siberia; during the Depression his father dug ditches, washed windows and waited tables. They ordered him the collected works of Charles Dickens through cereal coupons, one of the only sets of books in the house. At a Times Square rally in his teens, mounted police charged the crowd and knocked him unconscious, an experience he later dated his politics to. At eighteen he apprenticed as a shipfitter at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and helped organize the apprentices over pay and safety. Then came the war: he trained as a bombardier and, in April 1945, weeks before Germany surrendered, dropped napalm on the French town of Royan on a mission that killed more than a thousand civilians.

He used the GI Bill for a BA at NYU and a PhD at Columbia, then chaired history at Spelman College in Atlanta, where he advised the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and helped shape the curriculum for the 1964 Freedom Schools — and where the college fired him in 1963 for backing student sit-ins the administration wanted stopped. He spent the next twenty-four years teaching political science at Boston University, drawing lecture halls of four hundred students, and in 1980 published A People's History of the United States, a survey of the country told from the standpoint of the enslaved, the striking and the dispossessed rather than the generals and the presidents. It has sold millions of copies and remains a fixture of high school reading lists and faculty-lounge arguments alike.

Nine years after Royan he went back and researched what he had actually done: a raid ordered days before the war ended, against a town whose garrison posed no remaining strategic threat, using napalm the Air Force was still field-testing. He called it, in his own words, une tragique erreur — a tragic error — and it never left his writing about war afterward. The book that made him famous drew a related argument from historians who admired the project and doubted the craft: Michael Kazin, a fellow leftist, called it bad history gilded with virtuous intentions, and Sam Wineburg accused it of the same selective use of sources it was written to correct. Zinn's answer was that objectivity was itself a kind of politics — the historian's way of staying out of power's way.

Roslyn Shechter, his wife of sixty-four years, died in 2008; Zinn followed on January 27, 2010, of a heart attack while swimming in Santa Monica, at eighty-seven. A People's History was still selling more than a hundred thousand copies a year when he died, and that same year The People Speak, a documentary built from readings of the ordinary voices in his book, reached television. The Zinn Education Project, started in 2008 by a former student, now supplies lesson plans built on his approach to thousands of classrooms — the kind of institutional afterlife the Spelman administration that fired him in 1963 never anticipated.

Lifespan

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Howard Zinn's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

SNCC: The New Abolitionists book
A firsthand account of the civil rights movement he advised 1964
Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal book
One of the earliest books to call for U.S. withdrawal 1967
A People's History of the United States book
His best-selling and most influential work 1980
You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train book
His memoir 1994
Voices of a People's History of the United States book
Co-edited with Anthony Arnove 2004

Life in brief

with age at each point

August 24, 1922 aged 0 Born in Brooklyn, New York
1940 aged ~18 Apprentices as a shipfitter at the Brooklyn Navy Yard
April 1945 aged 22 Bombs Royan, France, with napalm as an Army Air Corps bombardier He researched the raid nine years later and called it a tragic error.
1958 aged ~36 Earns his PhD in history from Columbia University
June 1963 aged 40 Fired from Spelman College for backing student activists
1964 aged ~42 Helps design curriculum for Mississippi Freedom Summer schools
1980 aged ~58 Publishes A People's History of the United States
January 27, 2010 aged 87 Dies of a heart attack in Santa Monica, California