Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn was the most controversial American historian of the late twentieth century — a man whose A People’s History of the United States (1980) sold over two million copies, was assigned in thousands of college and high school courses, was recommended by Will Hunting in the film Good Will Hunting (1997), and became the left’s answer to the patriotic narrative of American exceptionalism, while simultaneously being attacked by professional historians across the political spectrum as simplistic, tendentious, and fundamentally misleading. Whether you regard Zinn as a courageous truth-teller or a polemicist masquerading as a historian depends largely on your politics, but his influence on how Americans — particularly young Americans — understand their national history is beyond dispute.

Brooklyn and the War

Howard Zinn was born in Brooklyn in 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His parents were working-class — his father was a waiter and later a factory worker — and Zinn grew up in tenements during the Depression. He worked in a shipyard and enlisted in the Army Air Corps during World War II, serving as a bombardier and flying missions over Europe, including the bombing of Royan, France, in April 1945, an experience that turned him into a lifelong pacifist.

After the war, he attended New York University on the GI Bill, earned a PhD from Columbia University, and began teaching at Spelman College in Atlanta, a historically Black college, where he became deeply involved in the civil rights movement. He was an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was fired from Spelman in 1963 for his activism — an experience he described as one of the most important of his life.

SNCC and the Civil Rights Movement

SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964) was Zinn’s first major book — an account of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee written from the inside, by someone who had marched, been arrested, and advised the young activists. The book was an important early history of the civil rights movement and established Zinn’s method: history from below, written with passionate engagement rather than detached objectivity.

He joined the faculty of Boston University in 1964 and remained there until his retirement in 1988, teaching political science and becoming one of the most prominent antiwar voices during the Vietnam era.

A People’s History

A People’s History of the United States (1980) was Zinn’s masterwork — an explicitly revisionist narrative that retold American history from the perspective of those who had been conquered, enslaved, exploited, and marginalised: Native Americans, African Americans, women, immigrants, workers, and dissenters. Columbus was not a heroic explorer but a genocidal coloniser. The American Revolution served the interests of wealthy elites, not ordinary people. The Civil War was about property and power as much as about slavery. The labour movement was suppressed by state violence.

The book was not a work of original research — Zinn drew on existing scholarship, particularly the new social history that had emerged from the civil rights and antiwar movements — but it was a brilliant work of synthesis and popularisation, written in clear, forceful prose that made complex historiography accessible to general readers. It sold modestly at first, then steadily and then enormously, eventually reaching over two million copies in sales.

Critical Reception

The professional historical community’s response to A People’s History was mixed and has grown increasingly critical. Michael Kazin, a progressive historian, called it “bad history” that reduced the complexity of the American past to a simple story of oppression and resistance. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. dismissed it as a “deranged fairy tale.” Conservatives attacked it as left-wing propaganda. Even sympathetic historians acknowledged that Zinn’s unrelenting focus on exploitation and injustice distorted the American experience by ignoring the genuine achievements of democratic institutions and the complexity of historical actors’ motivations.

Zinn himself made no apologies. He argued that all history is political, that “objectivity” is a myth that serves the powerful, and that the purpose of history is not detached contemplation but active engagement with the present. “You can’t be neutral on a moving train,” he wrote — the title of his 1994 memoir.

Collecting Zinn

A People’s History of the United States (Harper & Row, 1980) in first edition with dust jacket is the primary target. The book has been continuously revised and expanded in subsequent editions, but the first edition is the collecting copy. SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Beacon Press, 1964) is the early civil rights work. You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Beacon Press, 1994) is the memoir. Voices of a People’s History of the United States (Seven Stories Press, 2004) is the companion anthology.