For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), his best-known book, had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and union organizers of the 1930s. 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.”…..and that I think is why so many of us have a special spot in our hearts for Howard Zinn, and may we all live up to the lessons he taught us and the reason we hold him in such an admired state. Whether he was thinking or speaking for us, or saying and doing the things we always wished we had the willpower to attempted, I am not quite sure, I just know that he is hero material (for me) in a world of few choice.
