A Historian for Everyday People
[Laura Dean is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.]
Howard Zinn, historian, author and lifelong activist, spent his life writing about and remembering the lives of ordinary people. After his death this past Wednesday we begin to go about remembering him.
A native Brooklynite, Zinn attended New York City public schools and worked in shipyards until he joined the Army Air Force during World War II. He entered college on the GI Bill as a 27-year-old freshman and went on to receive his Ph.D. from Columbia University....
An activist-academic, Zinn didn't quite sit comfortably in either realm. In 1956 he joined the history department at Spelman College, a historically all-black women's college in Atlanta but was eventually dismissed for encouraging Spelman's young women to picket and engage in other "unladylike" activities. Later, as a professor at Boston University, Zinn got into many public spats with John Silbur, then-president of the school, for becoming too involved in protests....
As a historian he has been accused of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in rejecting all prevailing historical narratives. In a later work, entitled The Politics of History, Zinn decried the historian's role as a neutral documentarian of human events. Zinn's methods were lambasted by some historians who accused him of sacrificing historical detail and nuance to an ideology that painted all elites as villains and privileged the voices of the oppressed. Nevertheless, in the face of vociferous criticism, Zinn entered the canon of American historical teaching and is one of the most widely read historians of his time....
Read entire article at Forbes
Howard Zinn, historian, author and lifelong activist, spent his life writing about and remembering the lives of ordinary people. After his death this past Wednesday we begin to go about remembering him.
A native Brooklynite, Zinn attended New York City public schools and worked in shipyards until he joined the Army Air Force during World War II. He entered college on the GI Bill as a 27-year-old freshman and went on to receive his Ph.D. from Columbia University....
An activist-academic, Zinn didn't quite sit comfortably in either realm. In 1956 he joined the history department at Spelman College, a historically all-black women's college in Atlanta but was eventually dismissed for encouraging Spelman's young women to picket and engage in other "unladylike" activities. Later, as a professor at Boston University, Zinn got into many public spats with John Silbur, then-president of the school, for becoming too involved in protests....
As a historian he has been accused of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in rejecting all prevailing historical narratives. In a later work, entitled The Politics of History, Zinn decried the historian's role as a neutral documentarian of human events. Zinn's methods were lambasted by some historians who accused him of sacrificing historical detail and nuance to an ideology that painted all elites as villains and privileged the voices of the oppressed. Nevertheless, in the face of vociferous criticism, Zinn entered the canon of American historical teaching and is one of the most widely read historians of his time....