Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn, born December 7, 1922 in Brooklyn, New York, is an influential leftist and historian. Zinn is retired from a professorship at Boston University. He has received the Thomas Merton Award, the Eugene V. Debs Award, the Upton Sinclair Award, and the Lannan Literary Award. He lives in Auburndale, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Zinn was raised in a working-class family in Brooklyn, and flew bombing missions for the United States in World War II, an experience he now points to in shaping his opposition to war. In the 1956, he became a professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, a school for black women, where he soon became involved in the Civil rights movement. When he was fired in 1963 for insubordination, he moved to Boston University, where he became a leading critic of the Vietnam War. He is perhaps best known for A People's History of the United States, which presents American history through the eyes of those outside of the political and economic establishment: Native Americans, slaves, women, blacks, Populists, etc. His autobiography is You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train.
A reference to A People's History was made in the movie Good Will Hunting; Matt Damon grew up next door to Zinn.
Published Works
- SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964)
- New Deal Thought (editor) (1965)
- Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal (1967)
- Disobedience and Democracy (1968)
- The Politics of History (1970)
- The Pentagon Papers: Critical Essays (editor, with Noam Chomsky) (1972)
- Postwar America (1973)
- Justice in Everyday Life (editor) (1974)
- A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present (1980, revised 1995)
- Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology (1991)
- Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian (1993)
- You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times (1994)
- The Zinn Reader (1997)
- The Future of History (1999)
- Marx in Soho: A Play on History (1999)
- Terrorism and War (2002)