Howard Zinn, historian and political activist, succumbed to a heart attack swimming Wednesday at 87, evoking for me an image of this intrepid champion of the underdog struggling against the current. Something Zinn has done for over a half century with pugnacious wisdom and irascible humor. The linked obituary, although honorable, for the sake of social context, shares Princeton historian Sean Wilentz's critique of Zinn's counter-cultural history of the U.S.: "turning old heroes into villains...after awhile the glow gets unreal." For me, Zinn's people's history made real sense out of the raw deals and broken dreams I'd been dodging my whole life; family and friends losing jobs, struggling to make ends-meet, the strain on relationships. Zinn gives voice to every worker-minority-immigrant-woman-poor-farmer In American history used up and discarded like an old wheelbarrow. In his heart a belief that progress, such as it is, never fast or big enough, is always forged by the leadership of people and not the benevolent concessions of elites chronicled in textbooks. Class war? Fuckin'-A-right! But few can keep up the good fight. The jingoistic Americanism, greedy capitalism, hawkish militarism, the spiritual desolation and widespread social conservatism grinds you down. But not Zinn, swimming against the current until the very end. I don't know that I would have found my way to teaching without his People's History of the United States. For me, Howard Zinn is one of the very few great American heroes. R.I.P.
