{"id":218599,"date":"2022-08-29T12:01:50","date_gmt":"2022-08-29T11:01:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=218599"},"modified":"2022-08-26T05:53:16","modified_gmt":"2022-08-26T04:53:16","slug":"howard-zinn-at-100-the-enduring-legacy-of-the-u-s-peoples-historian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/08\/howard-zinn-at-100-the-enduring-legacy-of-the-u-s-peoples-historian\/","title":{"rendered":"Howard Zinn at 100: the Enduring Legacy of the U.S. People\u2019s Historian"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Howard Zinn<\/p><\/div>\n

24 Aug 2022 marked six months since Russia launched its war on Ukraine, with millions displaced and tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers killed. That same day, August 24th, marked the centennial of the late historian Howard Zinn\u2019s birth. Zinn was an author, professor, and anti-war activist. His seminal book, A People\u2019s History of the United States, revealed a different, dissident perspective on the historical arc of the Western hemisphere, from Christopher Columbus\u2019 arrival in 1492 to the so-called \u201cWar on Terror.\u201d First published in 1980, A People\u2019s History has become a standard text, with over 2 million copies in print. Howard Zinn died in 2010, at the age of 87. His words, more than a decade after his death, are still worth hearing in a world wracked by war, racism and inequality.<\/p>\n

\u201cWar poisons everybody who engages in it,\u201d Howard Zinn said in a 2006 address in Madison, Wisconsin. The United States was waging two major wars at the time, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and supporting ongoing conflicts elsewhere. Howard Zinn continued, \u201cWe\u2019ve had a history of war after war after war after war. What have they solved? What have they done?\u201d<\/p>\n

Howard Zinn volunteered to serve in World War II, becoming a bombardier. He participated in the bombing of Royan, a small town along the coast of France, in April, 1945:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was a few weeks before the war was going to be over, and everybody knew it was going to be over,\u201d Zinn said on the Democracy Now! news hour in 2005. \u201cThere was a little pocket of German soldiers hanging around this little town of Royan on the Atlantic coast of France, and the Air Force decided to bomb them \u2014 1,200 heavy bombers, and I was in one of them, flew over this little town of Royan and dropped napalm \u2014 first use of napalm in the European theater. We don\u2019t know how many people we killed, how many people were terribly burned as a result of what we did. But I did it, like most soldiers do, unthinkingly, mechanically, thinking we\u2019re on the right side, they\u2019re on the wrong side, and therefore we can do whatever we want, and it\u2019s OK.\u201d<\/p>\n

Howard Zinn visited the French seaside resort in 1966 to speak with survivors. He wrote a detailed history of the raid and its consequences. \u201cIt was\u2026a very great sobering lesson about so-called good wars.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Zinn\u2019s 2006 Wisconsin speech, he described \u201cthe different ratio of civilian-to-military deaths in war\u2026 in World War I, 10 military dead for one civilian dead; in World War II, it was 50-50, half military, half civilian; in Vietnam, it was 70% civilian and 30% military; and in the wars since then, it\u2019s 80% and 85% civilian.\u201d<\/p>\n

Howard Zinn taught at Spelman, a historically Black women\u2019s college in Atlanta, during the height of the civil rights movement. Among his students were author Alice Walker and Children\u2019s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman. Zinn explained on Democracy Now!, \u201cAt Spelman, I got involved with my students in the actions that were going on in the South, the sit-ins, the demonstrations, the picket lines.\u201d His solidarity got him fired. In 2005, Professor Zinn was invited back to Spelman to deliver the commencement address.<\/p>\n

Howard Zinn became a prominent opponent of the war in Vietnam. In 1968, he and activist priest Father Daniel Berrigan flew to North Vietnam, coordinating the first release of U.S. prisoners of war held there. When renowned whistleblower Dan Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. government\u2019s secret history of its involvement in Vietnam, Howard Zinn and his late wife Roz hid a copy of the documents in their home. His dedication to peace and anti-war activism continued unabated throughout his life.<\/p>\n

August 24th, in addition to the anniversary of Zinn\u2019s birth, is also the day that Ukraine marks its independence from the Soviet Union. This year, independence celebrations were banned across Ukraine for fear of Russian attacks. Russia did attack a rail station on that day, in the eastern Ukrainian village of Chaplyne, killing at least 25 people, including children. On the same day, President Joe Biden announced an additional $3 billion in military aid to Ukraine, bringing the total in U.S. military aid to Ukraine since Biden took office to $13.5 billion.<\/p>\n

Howard Zinn is not here to condemn this war, or any of the others now being fought. But through his example, his activism, and the enduring relevance of his writings, we can commit, on the centennial of his birth, to reiterate one of his central messages: war is not the answer to conflict in the 21st century.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> <\/em>Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

24 Aug 2022 marked six months since Russia launched its war on Ukraine, with millions displaced and tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers killed. That same day marked the centennial of the late historian Howard Zinn\u2019s birth. He was an author, professor, and anti-war activist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":218600,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,260,1089,70],"class_list":["post-218599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-history","tag-howard-zinn","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218599\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}