Howard Zinn, 1922-2010

Wow, Harold gets no love? A hundred years from now, they will still be talking about A People’s History of the United States . It is that good.

Let the old left die with dignity with him. I hope his loved ones held him as his last agonal breath left his body.

He was wrong then and he was wrong now.

@Benedick:

Ooh, fighting words. How so?

A People’s History of the United States: The original Red Pill.

@Tommmcatt Say Relax: My guess is it is because he could be seen as the Code Pink of history scholarship. Polemics overshadowed his substantive point too often, and as a result others who came at things from a similar perspective as him were too often dismissed as being another over the top hack. (I don’t think he was an over-the-top hack, but he sometimes handed his intellectual opponents all the ammunition they needed).

Harumph. Howie was the bomb, and not just because I had occasion to drive him from central P’tucky to Washington Square Park in the early 80s after missing his campus appearance due to my evening radio gig. I gave Ma Nabisco a copy of PHOTUS as a gift when she naturalized.

Maybe he told the story to a million other people a million other times about getting clubbed over the head as a young man because he was on the fringes of a Communist Party rally, but when he shared it with the young Nabisco as I navigated the Holland Tunnel, it was personal.