Howard Zinn, author of A Peoples' History of the United States, has died at age 87.
As he wrote in his autobiography, "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train" (1994), "From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than 'objectivity'; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble."
He caused trouble, always in good causes. His work should be required reading. He will be missed.
I could put a hundred pages of profound quotes from his work here, but I will just put up just one more:
"This is a country dedicated to historical amnesia. Our radical past holds dangers for both those in power and those threatened by progressive change. We need to rescue the great battles for social justice from becoming either co-opted or simply erased from the history books. Our children don't learn about the people who made the Civil Rights Movement. Instead we get Dr. Martin Luther King on a McDonald's commemorative cup. Because of our country's organized ignorance, endless hours are wasted in every generation reinventing the wheel and relearning lessons already taught." -- Howard Zinn
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