Howard Zinn (born August 24, 1922) is an American historian and political scientist. His philosophy incorporates ideas from Marxism, anarchism, socialism, and social democracy. Since the 1960s, he has been an important figure in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements in the United States. Author of 20 books, including the popular A People's History of the United States, Zinn is Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department at Boston University. For 50 years, he has campaigned against the killing of civilians in time of war.
As a young adult, Howard Zinn worked as a shipyard worker and labor organizer in the Brooklyn shipyards. Later, he flew bombing missions in Europe during World War II, an experience that shaped his opposition to war. Zinn flew a B-17 with the 490th Bomb Group. In April, 1945 he participated in the bombing of Royan, France, the first time napalm was used in warfare. According to Zinn, the bombing took the lives of French civilians and also German soldiers who were doing little more than waiting out the closing days of the war. Nine years later, Zinn visited Royan to examine documents and interview residents. In his books, The Politics of History and The Zinn Reader, he concluded that the bombing was ordered by decision-makers for career advancement rather than for any legitimate military objective.
Zinn later said his experience as a bombardier, combined with his research into the reasons for and effects of the bombing of Royan, sensitized him to the ethical dilemmas faced by G.I.'s during wartime. *
Zinn questions the justifications for military operations inflicting civilian casualties in the Allied bombing of cities such as Dresden, Royan, Tokyo, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, Hanoi during the U.S. war in Vietnam, and Baghdad during the U.S. war in Iraq. In his pamphlet "Hiroshima: Breaking the Silence", Zinn laid out his case against targeting civilians. *. Instead of bombing civilians, he contends that the Axis powers could have been opposed during World War II through popularly organized acts of nonviolent resistance.
After World War II, Zinn attended New York University on the GI Bill, graduating with a B.A. in 1951 and Columbia University, where he earned an M.A. (1952) and Ph.D. in history with a minor in political science (1958). His doctoral dissertation LaGuardia in Congress was a study of Fiorello LaGuardia's congressional career. It depicts LaGuardia representing "the conscience of the twenties" as he fought for public power, the right to strike, and the redistribution of wealth by taxation. "His specific legislative program," Zinn wrote, "was an astonishingly accurate preview of the New Deal." It was published by the Cornell University Press for the American Historical Association.
In the decades that followed, Zinn supported the G.I. antiwar movement during the U.S. war in Vietnam, and in the 2001 film Unfinished Symphony, Zinn provides the historical context for the march, in 1971, by Vietnam Veterans against the War from Lexington, Massachusetts, to Bunker Hill, "which retraced Paul Revere's ride of 1775 and ended in a massive arrest of 410 veterans and civilians by the Lexington police." The film depicts "scenes from the 1971 'Winter Soldier' investigations, during which former G.I.s testified about atrocities" they either participated in or witnessed in Vietnam. *
In 1956, Zinn was appointed chairman of the department of history and social sciences at Spelman College, where he participated in the Civil Rights movement. Zinn served as an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Zinn collaborated with historian Staughton Lynd at Spelman and mentored young student activists including Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman. A tenured professor, Zinn was fired in June 1963 after siding with students in their desire to challenge Spelman's traditional emphasis of turning out "young ladies" when, as Zinn described in an article in The Nation, Spelman students were likely to be found on the picket line, or in jail for participating in the greater effort to break down segregation in public places in Atlanta. {Chapter 2, autobiography] An account of Zinn's years at Spelman is in You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times. His seven years at Spelman College, Zinn said, "are probably the most interesting, exciting, most educational years for me. I learned more from my students than my students learned from me." *
As a 39-year-old professor, Zinn said he observed 30 violations of the First and Fourteenth amendment rights to the United States Constitution in Albany, Georgia, including freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and equal protection of the laws. In an article on the Civil Rights movement in Albany, Zinn describes 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 wrote frequently about the struggle for Civil Rights, both as a participant and historian. and in 1960–61, he took a year off from teaching to write SNCC: The New Abolitionists and The Southern Mystique. [http://www.identitytheory.com/people/birnbaum10.html In his book on SNCC, Zinn describes how the sit-ins against segregation were initiated by students and, in that sense, independent of the older, more established civil rights organizations.
In 1964, he joined the faculty at Boston University where he taught history and civil liberties until 1988. He was a leading critic of the Vietnam War. Zinn's diplomatic visit to Hanoi with Rev. Daniel Berrigan during the Tet Offensive in January 1968 resulted in the return of three American airmen, the first American POWs released by the North Vietnamese since the U.S. bombing of that nation had begun. The event was widely reported in the news media and discussed in a variety of books including Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963-1975 by Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan Book Promotions: 1989) ISBN 0385175477. Zinn remained friends and allies with the brothers Dan and Philip over the years.
Daniel Ellsberg, a former RAND consultant who had secretly copied The Pentagon Papers, which described internal planning and policy decisions of the United States in the Vietnam War, gave a copy of them to Howard and Roslyn Zinn. autobiography, Zinn autobiography Along with Noam Chomsky, Zinn edited and annotated the copy of The Pentagon Papers that Ellsberg entrusted to him. Zinn's longtime publisher, Beacon Press, published what has come to be known as the Senator Gravel edition of The Pentagon Papers, four volumes plus a fifth volume with analysis by Chomsky and Zinn.
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 and later reflected 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 people," Zinn wrote in his autobiography. Most of the jurors later said they voted for acquittal. 161 However, the federal judge dismissed the case on grounds it had been tainted by the Nixon administration's 'plumber' operation, a burglary at the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist.
Zinn's testimony as to the motivation for government secrecy was confirmed in 1989 by Erwin Griswold, who as U.S. solicitor general during the administration of Richard M. Nixon prosecuted The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971.lie behind the secrets" by Tom Blanton, May 21, 2006, Los Angeles Times Griswold persuaded three Supreme Court justices to vote to stop The New York Times from continuing to publish the Pentagon Papers, an order known as "prior restraint." In 1989, Griswold admitted there was no actual national security damage from publication of the papers.* In a column in the Washington Post, Griswold wrote: "It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considerable experience with classified material that there is massive overclassification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another."
Zinn 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." *
Zinn has received the Thomas Merton Award and the Eugene V. Debs Award. In 1998, he won the Lannan Literary Award* for nonfiction and the following year won the Upton Sinclair Award, which honors social activism. He lives in the Auburndale neighborhood of Newton, Massachusetts with his wife Roslyn in the United States. The couple have two children, Myla and Jeff, and five grandchildren. Roslyn is an artist and editor who has a role in editing all of Howard's books.
Zinn's autobiography is You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. A biographical documentary film of the same name was produced in 2004 and shown in select theaters. It is availableDVD. The film, by Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller* featuring music by Billy Bragg, Woodie Guthrie, and Pearl Jam. The film includes footage of Howard and Roslyn Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Marian Wright Edelman, Daniel Ellsberg, Tom Hayden and Alice Walker. The 78-minute film on DVD includes these special features: On Human Nature and Aggression; his speech at Veterans for Peace Conference, 2004; and audio of his 1971 speech at the Boston Common on Civil Disobedience. In the film, Noam Chomsky says Zinn "changed the consciousness of a generation."
In the years since the first edition of "A People's History" was published in 1980, it has been assigned reading both as a high school and college textbook, and is one of the most widely known examples of critical pedagogy. In the spring of 2003, to commemorate the sale of the millionth copy of A People's History, a dramatic reading from the book was held at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. The reading featured Danny Glover, Andre Gregory, James Earl Jones, actress Myla Pitt, Marisa Tomei, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, Alfre Woodard, Harris Yulin, Jeff Zinn, producing artistic director of the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater and Howard Zinn as narrator. The event was aired on Democracy Now!, hosted by Amy Goodman, and is online at [http://www.democracynow.org/index.pl?issue=20040705 Democracy Now The program was also released as a book and CD under the title, The People Speak: American Voices, Some Famous, Some Little Known .
Interwoven with commentary by Zinn, both the book and the dramatic reading upon which the newer book is based, includes passages from Zinn's research in A People's History of the United States on Christopher Columbus on the Arawaks; Plough Jogger, a farmer and participant in Shays' Rebellion; Harriet Hanson, a Lowell mill worker; Frederick Douglass; Mark Twain; Mother Jones; Emma Goldman; Helen Keller; Eugene V. Debs; Langston Hughes; Genova Johnson Dollinger on a sit-down strike at General Motors in Flint, Michigan; an interrogation from a 1953 HUAC hearing; Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper and member of the Freedom Democratic Party; Malcolm X; and James Lawrence Harrington, a Gulf War resister, among others.
In 2004 Zinn published Voices of A People's History of the United States with Anthony Arnove. Voices expands on the concept and provides a large collection of dissident voices in long form. The book is intended as a companion to A People's History and parallels its structure.
Zinn was a consultant to the six-part documentary A People's History of the United States *, a television series produced by Alvin H. Perlmutter. According to the documentary's website, the series is expected to be broadcast in early 2007.
When Matt Damon, his mother, and brother moved next door to the Zinns in West Newton, Massachusetts, the families became friends, and the Zinns sometimes sat with the Damon boys. Damon included a reference to A People's History in his film Good Will Hunting, and read the latter half of People's History for an audiobook released February 1, 2003 (ISBN 0060530065). People's History was also referenced in a Columbus Day episode of the TV show The Sopranos.
In October 2005, Chicago's indie punk label Thick Records released a CD by Springfield-based indie rock band, Resident Genius, which featured excerpts from several Zinn talks, tying them into the band's songs. The CD is titled You Can't Blow Up A Social Relationship." The six Zinn excerpts are "a greatest hits of his speeches recorded over the last 15 years by Roger Leisner of Radio Free Maine. They touch on his 'usual' topics of engaged activism, history from below, war, the media and much more."*
Zinn's second play, Emma, is based on the life of the early 20th Century anarchist Emma Goldman. In the words of the publisher, South End Press: "With his wit and unique ability to illuminate history from below, historian and playwright Howard Zinn dramatizes the life of Emma Goldman, the anarchist, feminist, and free-spirited thinker who was exiled from the United States because of her outspoken views, including her opposition to World War I.
"As Zinn writes in his Introduction, Emma Goldman 'seemed to be tireless as she traveled the country, lecturing to large audiences everywhere, on birth control (‘A woman should decide for herself’), on the falsity of marriage as an institution (‘Marriage has nothing to do with love’), on patriotism (‘the last refuge of a scoundrel’) on free love (‘What is love if not free?’), and also on drama, including Shaw, Ibsen, and Strindberg.
"This book will be of immense interest to feminists, anarchists, American historians, and people interested in the long history of resistance and protest in the United States." *
His most recent is Marx in Soho, a play on history that has been continuously performed encouraging reviews*in" target="_blank" >small theaters throughout the United States, with Brian Jones in the title role starting in 1999 through 2005. In February 2005, Bob Weick took on the title role in a traveling tour. Details of the traveling tour are at [http://www.ironagetheatre.org/marx.html Iron Age Theatre.
"Only after the war did I begin to question the purity of the moral crusade. Dropping bombs from five miles high, I had seen no human beings, heard no screams, seen no children dismembered. But now I had to think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden, the deaths of 600,000 civilians in Japan, and a similar number in Germany. I came to a conclusion about the psychology of myself and other warriors: Once we decided, at the start, that our side was the good side and the other side was evil, once we had made that simple and simplistic calculation, we did not have to think anymore. Then we could commit unspeakable crimes and it was all right."
"I began to think about the motives of the Western powers and Stalinist Russia and wondered if they cared as much about fascism as about retaining their own empires, their own power, and if that was why they had military priorities higher than bombing the rail lines leading to Auschwitz. Six million Jews were killed in the death camps (allowed to be killed?). Only 60,000 were saved by the war—1 percent."
"A gunner on another crew, a reader of history with whom I had become friends, said to me one day: “You know this is an imperialist war. The fascists are evil. But our side is not much better.” I could not accept his statement at the time, but it stuck with me." *
"I would argue that dissent is the highest form of patriotism." - during an interview for TomPaine.com widely misattributed to Thomas Jefferson.[http://www.monticello.org/library/reference/quotes.html#confirm
He offered the following alternative to bombing Kosovo and stressed its effectiveness: "I think of South Africa, where a decision to engage in out-and-out armed struggle would have led to a bloody civil war with huge casualties, most of them black. Instead, the African National Congress decided to put up with apartheid longer, but wage a long-term campaign of attrition, with strikes, sabotage, economic sanctions, and international pressure. It worked." *
Asked to comment* in an interview published in May 2006, on the religious writing of author Michael Lerner Zinn replied:
In the population of the United States, Zinn said, "There is a hard core for whom religion is key. They are maybe twenty-five percent of the population. It's a mistake to try to appeal to that hard core. I define the spiritual in emotional terms—to the extent that religion can draw on the Ten Commandments (for example, thou shalt not kill), it is important. And I find the spiritual in the arts, because they nourish the spirit and move people. Artists like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, for example, and now Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam. We need more of these."
Pressed on whether or not he believes in life after death, Zinn replied:
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