The Insubordinate Historian: The Life and Legacy of Howard Zinn
By Michael KammenNovember 29, 2012
Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left by Martin Duberman
IN 1943-45 HOWARD ZINN SERVED as bombardier for a U.S. Air Force B-17. Initially, just 21 years old in the service, he found himself in transit to Europe in charge of a mess hall on the Queen Marythat served more than 15,000 men twice a day in four shifts. The armed forces were still segregated, and black soldiers were relegated to the fourth shift. After a few days a “mix-up” occurred — perhaps no accident — and black troops poured in while white troops were still eating and sat down wherever they saw empty seats. A white sergeant with a southern accent pointed to the black soldier sitting next to him and called out to young Zinn: “Lieutenant, will you ask this soldier to move from this table?” Zinn, briefly flustered, collected himself and replied: “You fellows are going overseas in the same war. Seems to me you shouldn’t mind eating together. Sergeant, you’ll have to sit there or just pass up this meal. I won’t move either of you.” The sergeant hesitated, and then picked up his fork and began eating.
Why is Howard Zinn sufficiently significant to warrant a full-scale biography, this splendid one actually being the second? (A lesser one by Davis D. Joyce appeared in 2003.) Because he was one of the most outspoken radicals of his generation concerning issues of race, class, and opposition to American intervention overseas. His anti-war rallies drew hundreds if not thousands and helped to mobilize many activists. Working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he was a principal organizer of the March on Selma and the Mississippi Freedom Summer training schools in 1963. His People’s History of the United States (1980) has gone through multiple editions and been adopted as a text at countless schools for a full generation.
At great personal risk he sheltered Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers in his home during the winter of 1970-71 just before The New York Times published them. (Zinn was already under FBI surveillance. His telephone was later tapped.) He was a remarkable polemicist, producing numerous political tracts and essays spanning half a century, eventually harvested wholesale as The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy (Seven Stories Press, 1997). Most recently there is also The Indispensable Zinn: The Essential Writings of the “People’s Historian” (New Press, 2012) edited by Timothy Patrick McCarthy with a foreword by Noam Chomsky.
His causes were just. His heroes are instructive because they too were insubordinate, like him. They included the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion in 1786, “the black abolitionists who violated the law to free their brothers and sisters, the people who went to prison for opposing World War I, the workers who went on strike against powerful corporations, defying police and militia, the Vietnam veterans who spoke out against the war, the women who demanded equality in all aspects of life.” Along with Bernard Fall and Frances FitzGerald, Zinn was one of the earliest critics of U.S. policy in Vietnam.
He could not be more fortunate in his amicable biographer. Martin Duberman is a distinguished historian and biographer with impeccable credentials for this project. His expansive studies of Charles Francis Adams (1961), James Russell Lowell (1966), Paul Robeson (1988), and Lincoln Kirstein (2007) are thorough, thoughtful, and gracefully written. When Paul Robeson, Jr. invited Duberman to write his father’s biography and gave him unfettered access to the papers, he answered the question, “Why me?” by explaining that he admired Duberman’s “nuanced prose.” Robeson also knew that he was a man of the left who had done revisionist work on the abolitionists.
Like Zinn, Duberman has written several plays “on the side,” and like Zinn, he has been an activist for many decades on behalf of African Americans, as a critic of U.S. foreign policy, as well as achieving high visibility on behalf of gay rights and feminism. Even so, this book is not merely judicious. It is laudatory where praise is warranted yet critical in many respects, too. In Duberman’s book Left Out (2002) he calls himself a “tempered optimist” and frequently notes Zinn’s inherent optimism, even when causes seemed lost. In an essay written a decade ago, Duberman asked, “What are the essential qualities in a given biographer that heighten the chances for understanding a given life?” He has those qualities in spades for this particular life and times. Moreover, he is unduly modest. At one point he has occasion to mention a documentary play, In White America (1963), but doesn’t bother to mention that he is the author.
Howard Zinn (1922-2010) grew up amidst poverty in Brooklyn, New York, and became the family bookworm. He read Karl Marx as a teen and by 1937 felt indignation at the glaring gap between wealth and want in the United States. An encounter two years later with police in Times Square radicalized him, though he never made a commitment to any specific ideology and did not join the Communist Party. As with Duberman, anarchism eventually intrigued him. After serving in World War II he became intensely anti-war and soon entered New York University on the GI Bill, continuing on for his PhD in History at Columbia University. From 1956 until 1963 he taught at Spelman College in Atlanta, an elite school for African-American women, where his classes included everything from American to Chinese history. He was soon joined at Spelman by another bright young activist, Staughton Lynd, and the letters from their friendship help supply significant material for this book — Zinn having inexplicably destroyed much of his own archive during his later years.
Early on, Zinn was deeply involved in the civil rights movement and became an advisor to students at Spelman, including Alice Walker who has called him “the best teacher I ever had.” His engagement with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) — partaking in sit-ins to protest desegregation, Freedom Rides, and the March on Selma — enraged the conservative black president of Spelman, who fired him in 1963 for insubordination, even though he was a full professor and by then chairman of his department. Essentially, he was thrown out for civil rights activism. Having to resign from a black college under such circumstances reaches beyond ironic. It’s bizarre. Those years make for some of the most compelling reading in the book, a scintillating reminder of intense times. The same can be said about Zinn’s first harrowing trip to Hanoi with Dan Berrigan in 1968 in order to bring American POWs back from North Vietnam.
He also began publishing pieces in The Nation and The New Republic about abuses of civil liberties and never really stopped. At the end of his life he still wrote a monthly column for The Progressive. In 1964 Boston University offered him a position as associate professor of political science and he promptly launched his role as a polemicist and speaker at rallies opposed to the war in Vietnam. Eventually that would lead to his own 17-year war with John Silber, the authoritarian and repressive president of BU. Silber never tried to fire Zinn but repeatedly froze his salary in an effort to drive him away, especially after 1973 when Zinn also began writing radical columns on a regular basis for the Boston Globe.
He took teaching very seriously, so that when he retired from the classroom in 1988 he still had 400 students in his lecture course. Yes, he did give good grades readily, but that was not the primary reason for his popularity. Undergraduates are attracted to iconoclasm and lecturers who speak with moral authority. Moreover, he held forth fluently without notes and in a very relaxed manner.
Because he had such a sunny disposition and tried to avoid personal conflicts and confrontational situations, “everybody likes him,” said a departmental secretary. Cynicism was not his métier. His warm smile was ever ready. Zinn stood more than six feet tall but weighed a willowy 155 pounds with a great mane of dark hair that turned snow white in his later years. (The Davis Joyce biography has splendid photos of Zinn with the Lynds and with the MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, a very close friend and ally.)
Aside from his civic activism and polemical writing, Zinn will be best remembered for A People’s History of the United States, which has sold more than two million copies and spawned all sorts of offspring, such as Voices of a People’s History (a huge book of sources created in cooperation with Anthony Arnove, published in 2002) and even a documentary comic book by David Cogswell, titled Zinn for Beginners (2009). His goal in A People’s History was to call attention to all sorts of folks and events customarily overlooked in traditional surveys. He rejected Henry Kissinger’s notion that “history is the memory of states.” For Zinn it was the memory of ordinary people and their causes.
A major reason for the History’s success was his determined goal of using the past to illuminate the present. His approach, he wrote later, was to “find wisdom and inspiration from the past for movements seeking social justice in our time.” Even though he began with a now famous chapter critically devoted to Columbus, disproportionate space is devoted to the 20th century. The work is unabashedly guilty of what less partisan historians denigrate as the “Whig fallacy,” namely, seeing the past in the light of present concerns. If that feels like a fatal flaw, Duberman puts it this way: “His intent was to write an alternate not a comprehensive history.” But he also acknowledges that at times the book “lacks nuance, with the world divided into oppressors and oppressed, villains or heroes; the history of the U.S. is treated as mainly the story of relentless exploitation and deceit.” By failing to fully recognize the pastness of the past, to appreciate it on its own terms, the Whig cannot appreciate the radically different alternatives the past presents to the present.
In 1980, at the time of publication, Zinn wrote to Frances Fox Piven, a distinguished historian and close friend, explaining the project that had energized and occupied his time for three full years. “What I tried to do,” he told her, “was more emotional than analytical, to throw at people enough instances of people continuing to fight despite repression, despite containment of reform, to suggest that the energy is there for even more.” Zinn’s many letters to Piven are critically important for Duberman because they reveal quite candidly his sense of purpose and personal life.
One of Zinn’s major goals was to include a great deal of material usually left out of standard accounts of the American past. As he explained, “It became clear to me that the really critical way in which people are deceived by history is not that lies are told, but that things are omitted. If a lie is told you can check up on it. If something is omitted, you have no way of knowing it has been omitted.” Part of Duberman’s achievement involves the attention he pays to a lack of balance in A People’s History, what Zinn omitted and the resulting disproportions. Throughout the biography, Duberman’s critique is informed by up-to-date attention to current scholarship.
A People’s History received mixed reviews at the outset. Many academic historians at the time critiqued the imbalances in periods covered and the moralistic interpretations, but teachers, especially at the high school level, liked assigning it, either because they agreed with the relentless emphasis on exploitation or because they wanted to teach against it. In 1997 Matt Damon (who grew up as Zinn’s next-door neighbor) actually mentioned the book in the film Good Will Hunting (the soldier boy says, “that book will fucking knock you on your ass”), and soon after that it was cited in an episode of The Sopranos. So this book got genuine boosts into American popular culture and has held steady ever since.
After the publication of A People’s History, Zinn, age 58, became much less productive in print and even somewhat less involved in the public sphere than he had been. He never became an archive-based scholar, but continued to produce timely essays, even into his ninth decade. He remained very much in demand as a speaker on college and university campuses and accepted invitations compatible with his classes at BU. He also gave countless interviews in his 70s and 80s — reliable as a source of provocative remarks about government policies at home and abroad, but also devoted to people and causes that he felt had been neglected. In 1993 he wrote a thin memoir that many mainstream publishers rejected, but Beacon Press eventually brought it out in 1994 as You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times.
When Zinn became critical of historians, scholars, and writers, he usually targeted liberals like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. He rejected George Kennan, who opposed a “moralistic approach” to historical writing. And Zinn explicitly targeted what he called “aggressive liberalism,” by which he meant foreign policy initiatives that took the form of “beneficent imperialism,” saving the world by meddling overseas and expanding American power. Some have argued that too often Zinn viewed liberals, rather than conservatives and reactionaries, as the real enemy of the good society.
One of his sharpest conflicts involved historian Eugene Genovese, a man with very similar origins who also became a prominent radical during the 1960s but eventually swung to quixotic manifestations of conservatism. In 1999 Genovese told a reporter that Zinn’s ideology “slants the facts […] it basically transforms history into a good guys-bad guys view of the world.” Zinn responded indirectly in The Progressive: “I would not have become a historian if I thought it would become my professional duty to never emerge from the past, to study long-gone events and remember them only for their uniqueness, not connecting them to events going on in my time.”
It’s not as though Zinn was oblivious to the potential conflict between his values and his vocation. Looking back he wrote, “I was by profession a historian, by choice an activist, and the tension between the two was something I thought about constantly,” Duberman puts it very well in his pivotal chapter “Writing History.” Zinn’s insistence on looking to the past for inspiration:
In the fight against misery and alienation did contain a number of missteps and simplifications, but it raised the big questions regarding historical study and its potentially instrumental use in the fight against inequality and suffering. ‘History cannot provide confirmation,’ he once wrote, ‘that something better is inevitable; but it can uncover evidence that it is conceivable.’ Few historians of his generation or any other were willing to stick their necks out or risk rebuke to the same extent.
As the biography proceeds, the values and voices of these two writers increasingly merge, especially in chapter 11, devoted to “The Nineties.” The work contains countless dividends for the general reader: sufficient context for understanding the civil rights movement and the push for desegregation in the South; the genesis of protest against the U.S. role in Vietnam; some pages devoted to the success of long-term marriages, occasioned by Zinn’s infidelities (treated with discretion); a clear explanation of what black power meant when it emerged in the later 1960s, and also the tensions between older and younger blacks involving SNCC, the SCLC, the NAACP, the Urban League, and CORE.
All told, this is biography at its best, written by a master of the craft and a man who has lived the activist life and combined that with serious scholarship and innovative teaching. In 1966 at Princeton University, where Duberman taught initially, eyebrows were raised when he chose to teach not only a seminar devoted to the history of American radicalism, but sought permission from the president to give no letter grades. That really rocked the boat. For Zinn and Duberman, doing so became standard practice.
Michael Kammen’s books include two biographies: The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States (1996) and Robert Gwathmey: The Life and Art of a Passionate Observer (1999).
Michael Kammen was the Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture (emeritus) at Cornell University, where he taught from 1965 until 2008. In 1980-81 he held a newly created visiting professorship in American history at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and served in 1995-96 as President of the Organization of American Historians. In 2009 he received the American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction. His books include People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (1972), awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1973; A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (1986), awarded the Francis Parkman Prize and the Henry Adams Prize; Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991); A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture (2004), Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture (2006), and Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials (2010).
He wrote prolifically for the Los Angeles Review of Books before passing away in November 2013. He will be missed.
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"Historia ya ""The Insubordinate Historian: The Life and Legacy of Howard Zinn"" ya Michael Kammen, Novemba 29, 2012 - ""Uhai wa kushoto"" wa Martin Duberman, Novemba 29, 2012 - ""Historia ya Uasi: Maisha na Urithi wa Howard Zinn"" ya Michael Kammen, Novemba 29, 2012 - ""Uhai wa kushoto"" ya Martin Duberman, Novemba 29, 2012" "Mwanzoni, akiwa na umri wa miaka 21 tu katika huduma, alijikuta akisafiri kwenda Ulaya akiwa na jukumu la jumba la chakula kwenye meli ya ""Queen Mary"" ambalo lilitumikia wanaume zaidi ya 15,000 mara mbili kwa siku katika zamu nne." Majeshi bado yalikuwa yametenganishwa, na askari weusi walipelekwa kwenye zamu ya nne. Baada ya siku chache <unk>mchangamfu<unk> ulitokea <unk> labda hakuna ajali <unk> na askari weusi walimiminika wakati askari weupe walikuwa bado wakila na kuketi popote walipoona viti tupu. "Mdaktari mmoja mweupe mwenye lafudhi ya kusini alimwonyesha askari mweusi aliyeketi kando yake na kumwita kijana Zinn: ""Luteni, unaweza kumwambia askari huyu aondoke mezani hapa?"" Zinn, akiwa amefadhaika kwa muda mfupi, alijikusanya na akajibu: ""Ninyi mnataka kwenda nje ya nchi katika vita hivyo." Inaonekana kwangu unapaswa si akili kula pamoja. Sergeant, utakuwa na kukaa huko au tu kupita juu ya chakula hiki. Mimi si kuhamisha yeyote kati yenu. " Sergeant hesitated, na kisha alichukua fork yake na kuanza kula. "Kwa nini Howard Zinn ni muhimu vya kutosha kuhalalisha ""biografia kamili,"" hii ya ajabu ikiwa ni ya pili?" (Kwanza, kitabu cha Davis D. Joyce kilichochapishwa mwaka wa 2003 kinatajwa katika kitabu hicho.) Kwa sababu alikuwa mmoja wa wanamgambo wa waziwazi zaidi wa kizazi chake kuhusu masuala ya jamii, darasa, na upinzani kwa uingiliaji wa Marekani nje ya nchi. Maandamano yake ya kupinga vita yalivutia mamia, ikiwa si maelfu, na kusaidia kuwahamasisha wanaharakati wengi. Alifanya kazi na Kamati ya Uratibu ya Wanafunzi ya Nonviolent (SNCC) na alikuwa mratibu mkuu wa Machi ya Selma na Shule za Mafunzo ya Kiangazi ya Uhuru ya Mississippi mnamo 1963. Kitabu chake People's History of the United States (1980) kimepitia matoleo mengi na kimekubaliwa kama maandishi katika shule nyingi kwa kizazi chote. Aliweka hati za Daniel Ellsberg za Pentagon nyumbani kwake wakati wa majira ya baridi ya mwaka wa 1970 kabla tu ya gazeti la The New York Times kuzichapisha. Zinn alikuwa tayari chini ya uangalizi wa FBI. Baadaye simu yake ilisikilizwa.) "Mwanzoni mwa karne ya 19 aliandika makala nyingi za kisiasa na essays katika kipindi cha nusu karne, na hatimaye alivuna kwa wingi kama ""The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy"" (Seven Stories Press, 1997)." "Kama ilivyoelezwa katika kitabu cha The Indispensable Zinn: The Essential Writings of the People's Historian, kilichochapishwa na Timothy Patrick McCarthy na Noam Chomsky, ""Zini ya Kihistoria"" ni ya kwanza katika historia ya historia ya ulimwengu." Kusudi lake lilikuwa lenye haki. Mashujaa wake wanafundisha kwa sababu wao pia walikuwa wasiotii, kama yeye. "Wanawake wa vita vya Vietnam waliosema ""Sisi ni waasi"" na ""Wanaume wa vita"" waliosema ""Sisi ni waasi"" na ""Wanaume wa vita"" waliosema ""Sisi ni waasi"" na ""Wanawake wa vita"" waliosema ""Sisi ni waasi"" na ""Wanawake wa vita"" waliosema ""Sisi ni waasi"" na ""Wanawake wa vita"" waliosema ""Sisi ni waasi"" na ""Wanawake wa vita"" waliosema ""Sisi ni waasi"" na ""Wanawake wa vita"" waliosema ""Sisi ni wa vita.""" Hangeweza kuwa na bahati zaidi katika mwandishi wake wa maisha ya kirafiki. Martin Duberman ni mwanahistoria mashuhuri na mwandishi wa wasifu na sifa zisizo na kasoro kwa mradi huu. "Hata hivyo, katika kitabu chake cha ""Charles Francis Adams,"" James Russell Lowell, Paul Robeson, na Lincoln Kirstein, alichapisha ""Mambo ya Kihistoria"" na ""Mambo ya Kihistoria"" kwa njia ya kipekee." "Paul Robeson Jr. alipomwalika Duberman kuandika wasifu wa baba yake na kumpa upatikanaji wa karatasi hizo, alijibu swali ""Kwa nini mimi?"" kwa kueleza kwamba alivutiwa na maandishi ya Duberman ""ya nuance.""" Kama Zinn, Duberman ameandika michezo kadhaa ya kuigiza, na kama Zinn, amekuwa mwanaharakati kwa miongo mingi kwa niaba ya Waafrika Wamarekani, kama mkosoaji wa sera ya kigeni ya Marekani, na pia kufikia mwonekano wa juu kwa niaba ya haki za mashoga na wanawake. Hata hivyo, kitabu hiki si cha busara tu. Ni sifa ambapo sifa inahakikishwa lakini pia ni uchambuzi katika mambo mengi. Katika kitabu chake Left Out (2002) Duberman anajita "mwenye matumaini yenye hasira" na mara nyingi anataja matumaini ya Zinn, hata wakati sababu zilionekana kupotea. "Katika insha yake iliyoandikwa miaka kumi iliyopita, Duberman aliuliza, ""Ni sifa gani muhimu katika mwandishi wa wasifu zinazozidisha nafasi za kuelewa maisha fulani?"" Ana sifa hizo kwa wingi kwa maisha na nyakati hizi maalum." Isitoshe, yeye ni mwenye kiasi kupita kiasi. Katika hatua moja ana nafasi ya kutaja mchezo wa maandishi, Katika Marekani nyeupe (1963), lakini haina shida kutaja kwamba yeye ni mwandishi. Howard Zinn (1922-2010) alilelewa katika hali ya umaskini huko Brooklyn, New York, na akawa mnyama wa vitabu wa familia. Alipokuwa kijana alisoma kitabu cha Karl Marx na kufikia mwaka wa 1937 alikasirika sana kwa sababu ya tofauti kubwa kati ya utajiri na uhitaji nchini Marekani. Mkutano wa miaka miwili baadaye na polisi katika Times Square ulimfanya kuwa mkali, ingawa hakuwahi kujitolea kwa itikadi yoyote maalum na hakujiunga na Chama cha Kikomunisti. Kama ilivyo na Duberman, hatimaye anarchism ilimvutia. Baada ya kuhudumu katika Vita Kuu ya Pili ya Dunia, akawa mpinzani mkali wa vita na hivi karibuni aliingia Chuo Kikuu cha New York kwenye Muswada wa GI, akiendelea na PhD yake katika Historia katika Chuo Kikuu cha Columbia. Kuanzia mwaka 1956 hadi 1963 alifundisha katika Chuo cha Spelman huko Atlanta, shule ya wasomi kwa wanawake wa Kiafrika-Wamarekani, ambapo madarasa yake yalijumuisha kila kitu kutoka historia ya Marekani hadi ya China. Punde si punde, akijiunga na mwanaharakati mwingine mchanga mwenye akili, Staughton Lynd, na barua kutoka kwa urafiki wao husaidia kutoa nyenzo muhimu kwa kitabu hiki - Zinn akiwa ameharibu kwa njia isiyoelezeka sehemu kubwa ya kumbukumbu yake mwenyewe wakati wa miaka yake ya baadaye. Alipokuwa akifanya kazi katika chuo kikuu cha Spelman, aliwahi kuwa mshauri wa wanafunzi wa Spelman, pamoja na Alice Walker, ambaye alimwita "mwalimu bora zaidi niliyewahi kuwa naye" na kushiriki katika maandamano ya kupinga ubaguzi wa rangi, Freedom Rides, na Machi ya Selma, na kumkasirisha rais mweusi wa Spelman, ambaye alimfukuza kazi kwa sababu ya kutotii. Kimsingi, alifukuzwa kwa sababu ya uendeshaji wa haki za kiraia. Kulazimika kujiuzulu kutoka chuo cha weusi chini ya hali kama hizo hufikia zaidi ya kuchekesha. Ni ya ajabu. Miaka hiyo hufanya baadhi ya usomaji wa kuvutia zaidi katika kitabu hicho, ukumbusho wenye kung'aa wa nyakati zenye msukosuko. Zinn alisafiri kwa mara ya kwanza kwenda Hanoi na Dan Berrigan mwaka 1968 ili kuwaleta wafungwa wa vita wa Marekani kutoka Vietnam Kaskazini. Pia alianza kuchapisha vipande katika The Nation na The New Republic kuhusu unyanyasaji wa uhuru wa kiraia na kamwe hakuacha. Mwishoni mwa maisha yake bado aliandika safu ya kila mwezi kwa The Progressive. Mwaka 1964 Chuo Kikuu cha Boston kilimpa nafasi ya profesa msaidizi wa sayansi ya siasa na mara moja akaanza jukumu lake kama mpinzani na msemaji katika mikutano ya kupinga vita vya Vietnam. Baada ya miaka 17 ya vita, alishindana na John Silber, rais wa B.U. Silber hakujaribu kumfukuza Zinn, lakini mara kwa mara alizuia mshahara wake katika juhudi za kumfukuza, hasa baada ya 1973 wakati Zinn pia alianza kuandika safu za kimapinduzi kwa mara kwa mara kwa Boston Globe. Alifanya kazi ya ufundishaji kwa bidii sana, na alipostaafu mwaka wa 1988, alikuwa na wanafunzi 400 katika madarasa yake. Ndiyo, alitoa maksi nzuri kwa urahisi, lakini hiyo haikuwa sababu kuu ya umaarufu wake. Wanafunzi wa shahada ya kwanza huvutiwa na upinzani dhidi ya sanamu na wasomi wanaozungumza kwa mamlaka ya kiadili. Isitoshe, alizungumza kwa ufasaha bila kuandika maelezo na kwa njia ya kupumzika sana. Kwa sababu alikuwa na tabia ya jua na alijaribu kuepuka migogoro ya kibinafsi na hali ya mapigano, "kila mtu anapenda yeye", alisema katibu wa idara. Uhasama haukuwa kazi yake. Tabasamu yake ya joto ilikuwa tayari milele. Zinn alikuwa na urefu wa zaidi ya futi sita lakini alikuwa na uzito wa pauni 55 na nywele nyingi za rangi ya giza ambazo ziligeuka kuwa nyeupe kama theluji katika miaka yake ya baadaye. "Mwanzoni mwa mwaka wa 1960, Joyce aliandika kitabu cha ""The Life of David,"" ambacho kilikuwa na picha za Zinn na familia ya Lynd na mwana-linguisti wa MIT, Noam Chomsky, rafiki yake wa karibu na mshirika wake." Mbali na uendeshaji wake wa kiraia na maandishi ya utata, Zinn atakumbukwa zaidi kwa A People's History of the United States, ambayo imeuzwa zaidi ya nakala milioni mbili na kuzaa aina zote za wazao, kama vile Sauti za Historia ya Watu (kitabu kikubwa cha vyanzo vilivyoundwa kwa ushirikiano na Anthony Arnoux, kilichochapishwa mnamo 2002) na hata kitabu cha hadithi ya David Coggeswell, kilichoitwa Zinn for Beginners. Lengo lake katika A People's History lilikuwa kuvutia uangalifu kwa aina zote za watu na matukio ambayo kwa kawaida hupuuzwa katika uchunguzi wa jadi. Alipinga wazo la Henry Kissinger kwamba "historia ni kumbukumbu ya mataifa". Kwa Zinn ilikuwa kumbukumbu ya watu wa kawaida na sababu zao. Sababu kuu ya mafanikio ya Historia ilikuwa lengo lake la kuamua kutumia zamani ili kuangaza sasa. "Mtazamo wake, aliandika baadaye, ulikuwa ""kupata hekima na msukumo kutoka kwa zamani kwa harakati zinazotafuta haki ya kijamii katika wakati wetu."" - Columbus, Mtaalamu wa Maandishi wa Kiingereza, katika kitabu chake cha kwanza cha ""The New York Times"" cha mwaka wa 1920." Kazi hiyo ni bila aibu na hatia ya kile ambacho wanahistoria wasio na upendeleo huchambua kama "kosa la Whig", yaani, kuona zamani kwa mwangaza wa wasiwasi wa sasa. "Duberman anasema: ""Lengo lake lilikuwa kuandika historia mbadala, sio historia kamili, lakini pia anakiri kwamba wakati mwingine kitabu hicho kinakosa nuance, na ulimwengu umegawanywa katika wakandamizaji na wakandamizaji, wahalifu au mashujaa; historia ya Marekani hutendewa kama hadithi ya unyifu na udanganyifu, kwa kushindwa kutambua kabisa zamani, kuithamini kwa maneno yake mwenyewe, Whig hawezi kuthamini mbadala tofauti kabisa ambazo zamani hutoa kwa sasa.""" Katika barua yake ya mwaka 1980 kwa Frances Fox Piven, mwanahistoria mashuhuri na rafiki wa karibu, Zinn alielezea mradi huo ambao ulikuwa umemfanya awe na nguvu na kumchukua muda wake kwa miaka mitatu kamili. "Kile nilijaribu kufanya, ""alimwambia, ""ni hisia zaidi kuliko uchambuzi, kutupa watu visa vya kutosha vya watu wanaendelea kupigana licha ya ukandamizaji, licha ya kuzuia mageuzi, kupendekeza kwamba nishati iko kwa zaidi. "" Barua nyingi za Zinn kwa Piven ni muhimu sana kwa Duberman kwa sababu zinafunua waziwazi hisia yake ya kusudi na maisha ya kibinafsi." Mojawapo ya malengo makuu ya Zinn ilikuwa ni kuingiza habari nyingi ambazo kwa kawaida hazikuelezwa katika masimulizi ya kawaida ya historia ya Marekani. "Amesema: ""Ilikuwa wazi kwangu kwamba njia muhimu sana ambayo watu wanadanganywa na historia si kwamba uongo husemwa, lakini kwamba mambo huondolewa." Ikiwa uwongo umesema unaweza kuuchunguza. "Hakuna njia ya kujua kwamba kitu fulani kimepuuzwa."" Sehemu ya mafanikio ya Duberman inahusisha uangalifu anaotoa kwa ukosefu wa usawa katika ""Historia ya Watu,"" kile Zinn alichoachilia na ukosefu wa usawa unaotokana na hilo." Katika wasifu wote, ukosoaji wa Duberman unaarifiwa na umakini wa kisasa kwa udhamini wa sasa. Historia ya Watu ilipokea ukaguzi mchanganyiko mwanzoni. Wanahistoria wengi wa wakati huo walishutumu ukosefu wa usawa katika vipindi vilivyofunikwa na tafsiri za maadili, lakini walimu, haswa katika ngazi ya shule ya sekondari, walipenda kugawa, ama kwa sababu walikubaliana na msisitizo usio na mwisho juu ya unyonyaji au kwa sababu walitaka kufundisha dhidi yake. "Mwanzoni mwa mwaka wa 1997, Matt Damon, ambaye alikuwa jirani wa karibu wa Zane, alitaja kitabu hicho katika filamu ya ""Good Will Hunting"" (mvulana huyo wa kijeshi anasema, ""kitabu hicho kitakupiga kwenye punda wako""), na muda mfupi baadaye kilitajwa katika kipindi cha The Sopranos." Kwa hiyo kitabu hiki kilipata msukumo halisi katika utamaduni maarufu wa Marekani na kimedumu tangu wakati huo. Baada ya kuchapishwa kwa A People's History, Zinn, mwenye umri wa miaka 58, akawa na matokeo kidogo katika uchapishaji na hata kidogo kushiriki katika uwanja wa umma kuliko alikuwa. Hakuwa msomi wa kumbukumbu, lakini aliendelea kutengeneza insha za wakati unaofaa, hata katika muongo wake wa tisa. Aliendelea kuwa na mahitaji makubwa kama msemaji katika vyuo vikuu na vyuo vikuu na alikubali mialiko inayofaa na madarasa yake katika BU. Pia alitoa mahojiano mengi katika miaka yake ya 70 na 80 - kuaminika kama chanzo cha maoni ya kuchochea kuhusu sera za serikali nyumbani na nje ya nchi, lakini pia kujitolea kwa watu na sababu ambazo alihisi zilikuwa zimepuuzwa. "Mwaka wa 1993 aliandika kitabu cha kumbukumbu ambacho cha kwanza kilitolewa na Beacon Press, lakini baadaye kilitolewa mwaka wa 1994 kama ""You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times.""" Zinn alipowashutumu wanahistoria, wasomi, na waandishi, kwa kawaida aliwageukia watu wenye msimamo mkali kama vile Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Alikataa George Kennan, ambaye alipinga "mbinu ya maadili" ya kuandika historia. "Zinn alielezea ""liberalism ya uhasama"" ambayo ilimaanisha mipango ya sera za kigeni ambayo ilichukua fomu ya ""imperialism ya manufaa"" kuokoa ulimwengu kwa kuingilia nje ya nchi na kupanua nguvu ya Marekani." "Wengine wamesema kwamba mara nyingi Zinn aliwaona watu wa ""liberal"" badala ya watu wa ""conservative"" na ""reactionary"" kuwa adui halisi wa jamii nzuri." Mmoja wa mapigano yake makali zaidi alihusisha mwanahistoria Eugene Genovese, mtu mwenye asili sawa na yeye ambaye pia akawa mkali mashuhuri wakati wa miaka ya 1960 lakini hatimaye akageuka kuwa maonyesho ya ki-quixotic ya conservatism. "Mwanzoni mwa mwaka wa 1999, Genovese alimwambia mwandishi wa habari kwamba ""zao la Zinn linabadilisha ukweli, kwa kweli linabadilisha historia kuwa mtazamo wa watu wazuri na wabaya wa ulimwengu."" Zinn alijibu kwa njia isiyo ya moja kwa moja katika The Progressive: ""Singekuwa mwanahistoria ikiwa ningefikiri kuwa itakuwa wajibu wangu wa kitaaluma kutokua na mambo ya zamani na kuyajifunza na kuyakumbuka kwa sababu ya upekee wao, sio kuunganisha na matukio yanayotokea wakati wangu.""" "Akiangalia nyuma aliandika, ""Nilikuwa mwanahistoria kwa taaluma, kwa chaguo mwanaharakati, na mvutano kati ya hizo mbili ulikuwa kitu nilifikiria kila wakati,"" Duberman anaelezea vizuri sana katika sura yake muhimu ""Kuandika Historia"" - kusisitiza kwa Zinn kuangalia zamani kwa msukumo: ""Katika mapambano dhidi ya shida na kutengwa kulikuwa na idadi ya makosa na kurahisisha, lakini ilizua maswali makubwa kuhusu utafiti wa kihistoria na matumizi yake ya uwezekano wa vyombo." "Historia haiwezi kutoa uthibitisho, ""aliandika mara moja, ""kwamba kitu bora ni lazima; lakini inaweza kufunua ushahidi kwamba ni uwezekano. "" Waandishi wa historia wa kizazi chake au mwingine yeyote walikuwa tayari kuweka shingo zao nje au hatari ya kukemea kwa kiwango sawa." "Kama biografia inaendelea, maadili na sauti za waandishi hawa wawili huungana, hasa katika sura ya 11, iliyojitolea kwa ""The Nineties"" - kazi hiyo ina faida nyingi kwa msomaji wa kawaida: muktadha wa kutosha wa kuelewa harakati za haki za kiraia na kushinikiza kwa desegregation katika Kusini; asili ya maandamano dhidi ya jukumu la Marekani nchini Vietnam; kurasa kadhaa zilizowekwa kwa mafanikio ya ndoa za muda mrefu, zilizosababishwa na ukosefu wa uaminifu wa Zinn (kutendewa kwa busara); ufafanuzi wazi wa nini nguvu nyeusi ilimaanisha wakati ilitokea mwishoni mwa 1960." Kwa ujumla, hii ni wasifu bora, iliyoandikwa na bwana wa ufundi na mtu ambaye ameishi maisha ya uendeshaji na kuunganisha hiyo na elimu ya dhati na mafundisho ya ubunifu. Katika mwaka wa 1966 katika Chuo Kikuu cha Princeton, ambapo Duberman alifundisha awali, eyebrows walikuwa kuinuliwa wakati yeye alichagua kufundisha si tu semina kujitolea kwa historia ya Marekani radicalism, lakini alitafuta ruhusa kutoka kwa rais kutoa hakuna herufi maksi. Jambo hilo lilitikisa sana mambo. Kwa Zinn na Duberman, kufanya hivyo kukawa zoea la kawaida. Michael Kammen anaandika vitabu viwili vya maisha: The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States (1996) na Robert G. Guthmey: The Life and Art of a Passionate Observer (1999). Michael Kammen alikuwa Profesa wa Historia na Utamaduni wa Marekani wa Newton C. Farr (emeritus) katika Chuo Kikuu cha Cornell, ambapo alifundisha kutoka 1965 hadi 2008. Katika mwaka wa 1980 na 1981, alikuwa profesa mgeni katika historia ya Marekani katika Chuo cha Hautes Etudes huko Paris. Alichaguliwa kuwa mwanachama wa American Academy of Arts and Sciences na kutumika katika 1995-1996 kama Rais wa Shirika la Wanahistoria wa Marekani. Mwaka 2009 alipewa tuzo ya American Historical Association Award kwa sifa ya kitaaluma. "Kama vile ""Watu wa Paradox: Uchunguzi kuhusu Asili ya Utamaduni wa Amerika"" (1972), ""Mashine ambayo ingeenda yenyewe"" (1986), ""Mashine ya Paradox: Utamaduni wa Utamaduni wa Amerika"" (2004), ""A Time to Every Purpose"" (2004), ""Mashine ambayo ingeenda yenyewe"" (2006), na ""Kuchimba wafu: Historia ya Mafunzo ya Amerika"" (2010), ""Mashine ya Utamaduni"" (2004), ""Mashine ya Utamaduni wa Utamaduni wa Amerika"" (2004), na ""Mashine ya Utamaduni wa Utamaduni wa Amerika"" (2014), na ""Mashine ya Utamaduni wa Utamaduni wa Amerika.""" Aliandika kwa bidii kwa ajili ya Los Angeles Review of Books kabla ya kufariki mnamo Novemba 2013. Atakosawa. "Kama ilivyoelezwa katika makala ya ""Siku ya Uhakiki"" ya LAB, Chris Hedges, mwandishi wa vitabu vya liberal, alitangazwa kuwa ""mwandishi bora wa mazungumzo tangu Oscar Wilde.""" "Kama unavyojua, LARB ni shirika lisilo la faida linalotegemezwa na wasomaji.""" LARB inachapisha kila siku bila paywall kama sehemu ya utume wetu wa kufanya maandishi ya ukali, ya kuvutia na ya kuvutia juu ya kila kipengele cha fasihi, utamaduni na sanaa kwa umma. Tusaidie tuendelee na kazi hii kwa kutoa mchango wako unaopunguzwa kodi leo!