Bending History's Arc
Historian Howard Zinn: Still Gaining Acceptance
Howard Zinn remains too popular among people who’ve only read one history book, and not nearly respected enough by plenty of academics who know better. He deserves a second sympathetic biography if only to remind us about his Civil Rights activism…
The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, by Dave Zirin (Dutton), review runs on August 5th in the Los Angeles Review of Books
TO REVIEW THE LEGACY of popular historian Howard Zinn remaps the battleground as much as it re-evaluates this author’s work. Zinn’s blockbuster People’s History of the United States (1980) revisited the country’s past as it entered the modern era, carving out a new platform for marginalized voices. The book has now sold over four million copies. Academics argue about how seriously to take Zinn’s scholarship, but he scoped out what we now call an “intersectional” approach, mapping how social identities shape individual experience within systemic power structures. He did this just as the rightwing reaction to the US defeat in Vietnam was spawning monstrosities like Rambo to sanitize a generation of trauma. Zinn moved history forward by exposing the abuses of federal structural power, an angle that traditional academics had largely ignored.
These days, the academic parsing of Zinn’s flaws feels like misspent effort. Dave Zirin, sports writer for The Nation and a longtime Zinn enthusiast, offers instead a new biography, The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, written with access to Zinn’s letters and journals. Zirin’s book earns its place alongside Martin Duberman’s adroit 2012 biography, Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left, even as it veers into sentimentality. A People’s History, which remains a standard text used in countless classrooms, gained pop-culture prestige through mentions in Good Will Hunting and The Sopranos. Meanwhile, the Zinn Education Project, “Teaching People’s History,” helps teachers with lesson plans that emphasize the historical roles of women, workers, and people of color.
He was more interested in reaching readers than impressing other academics, and his work conveyed moral fervor in an accessible style that gripped students with its emphasis on fairness and social justice. The enduring commercial success of A People’s History remains a measure of his capacity to democratize historical understanding…
The original publication of A People’s History coincided with a ruthless conservative realignment, a moment Zirin ties to the symbolic violence of the 1980 campaign. Zinn recoiled at how Ronald Reagan launched his presidential bid from Neshoba County, Mississippi, a mere sixteen years after the local Ku Klux Klan brutally had murdered three civil rights workers there: James Chaney, a Black Mississippian, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two Jewish Northerners. Reagan did not have to defend Jim Crow; simply standing in that location signaled a perverse vindication. As Zirin observes, Reagan traveled “a few short miles from the swamp where Chaney’s, Goodman’s, and Schwerner’s lynched, mutilated bodies had been found” to announce to a rapturous crowd that “the South will rise again.” In Zirin’s formulation, “It was an amnesty for anyone who felt shame over having relatives in the Klan, being a spectator at a lynching, or throwing a bottle at a child trying to go to school.”
Today’s Confederate-flag-waving Christian nationalists go even further, wielding raw executive power to shutter archives, defund museums, and censor public school lessons. This right-wing resurgence makes Zinn’s counter-narrative all the more essential. His ambitious history provided a heroic lineage for an opposition suddenly locked out of power, offering a sober reminder of how long certain fights have lasted. When we read the expansive, narrative-driven histories of Jill Lepore, we see an author exploring the spaces Zinn helped to open—a testament to how thoroughly his counter-narrative altered the discipline’s boundaries. Historians can no longer ignore—or simply gesture toward—marginalized perspectives; instead, they are recognized as the central engine of the American story, threatening those desperate to mandate a whitewashed historical consensus… (continued next week at the Los Angeles Review of Books…)
joy division
The last issue (July 15) missed a couple major new releases from Joy Division:
Joy Division–Eternal (Live) 14CD Box Set (Rhino Official Store)
Joy Division–Still reissue, with May 1980, Birmingham live (40th Anniversary Clear Vinyl Reissue on Discogs)
noises off
From the archives: Neil Diamond and Tonal Whiplash Oscars (2022);
“Nothing To Get Hung About,” “Strawberry Fields Forever” at 59; “Por destino soy americano”; and catch the current Los Lobos tour for “Hey Joe,” and “Come On, Let’s Go.” Outside Boston, the band brought out Barrence Whitfield (of them storied Savages) for unrehearsed encores.
Coming soon: Michael Sokil compares Ringo’s drumming to Paul’s; David Thomson feels like movies have tricked him… Your assignment: please send Albanian protest photos.
Clicks on a spree: riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link