Howard Zinn dies (on edit: The one year anniversary!)

[villager]

This obit came up on a link to a "remembrance" piece...

Howard Zinn, Historian, Dies at 87

By HOWARD POWELL
Published: January 27, 2010

Howard Zinn, historian and shipyard worker, civil rights activist and World War II bombardier, and author of “A People’s History of the United States,” a best seller that inspired a generation of high school and college students to rethink American history, died Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 87 and lived in Auburndale, Mass.

The cause was a heart attack, which he had while swimming, his family said.

Proudly, unabashedly radical, with a mop of white hair and bushy eyebrows and an impish smile, Mr. Zinn, who retired from the history faculty at Boston University two decades ago, delighted in debating ideological foes, not the least his own college president, and in lancing what he considered platitudes, not the least that American history was a heroic march toward democracy.

Almost an oddity at first, with a printing of just 4,000 in 1980, “A People’s History of the United States” has sold nearly two million copies. To describe it as a revisionist account is to risk understatement. A conventional historical account held no allure; he concentrated on what he saw as the genocidal depredations of Christopher Columbus, the blood lust of Theodore Roosevelt and the racial failings of Abraham Lincoln. He also shined an insistent light on the revolutionary struggles of impoverished farmers, feminists, laborers and resisters of slavery and war.

<snip>

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/us/28zinn.html

[Mass]

1. One year already...

[silverweb]

2. Such a loss.

[DeSwiss]

3. K&R

"And our topic is topsy-turvy: civil disobedience. As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem.... Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience." http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/CivilObedience_ZR.html">~Howard Zinn

[patrice]

4. I recently discovered that iTunes has an unabridged People's History of the U.S. audiobook.

I really like audiobooks.

[NuclearDem]

5. Wow...I remember actually reading A People's History last year

Quite liked it...

[unhappycamper]

9. If you liked Zinn's writing, check out Paul Atwood.

Zinn was his thesis adviser.

[burrowowl]

6. K&R

A Great Man!

[gateley]

7. I hope it's not too late to extend my wishes to Rest In Peace, and to thank him. nt

[EFerrari]

8. K&R

[OneGrassRoot]

10. One my favorite Zinn quotes:

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places -- and there are so many -- where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

- Howard Zinn

[burrowowl]

11. Read the People's History of the United States

NOW!

[Better Believe It]

12. We miss him .... a lot. And we continue his fight for truth and justice.