I first learned from a status update on Facebook – really not the best way to discover devastating news. As I scrolled down, I read comments from FB friends who knew him. My friend Leticia said, “A huge loss – say a poem in his memory.” Others commented, “RIP Warrior!” “FB needs a sad button” “Reincarnate, soon, please” “Thank you for opening my eyes!” “Just goes to show you how much one life can change the world” and “One of the most important historians in living memory.” Howard wanted us all to know there was a hidden history of the United States… one made by ordinary people just trying to demand equality, and fairness, and justice, and freedom.”

My teacher friend Mark wrote, “Reading the opening pages of A People's History when I was maybe twenty years old, the chapter on Columbus was one of the five or ten events in my life that seriously blew my mind and left me looking at the world differently.” Another teacher who I don’t know, but whose comment appeared on a friend’s update said, “Howard Zinn lives on – I refer to his teachings, his thoughts, on a daily basis in my lessons in high school social studies! We all carry him now in our own lives!”

It’s hard to imagine a similar outpouring of affection toward any other contemporary historian. Countless comments from people familiar with him mourned what really is a terrible loss for humanity, and soon a FB page emerged called Thank You Howard Zinn – which is appropriate because Howard Zinn had true faith in people’s movements and collectively organizing around common interests. It is the only way to ever improve poor people’s conditions.   

Howard Zinn’s best-known book, A People’s History of the United States, re-set the mythological narrative of this nation’s history that had been told in school textbooks for generations. Rather than tell the point of view of the victors, of the industrialists, of those who own and govern the country, Zinn narrated from the perspective of the Indian, of the slave, of the female sweatshop worker, of the farmer in rebellion against unjust confiscation of his land.

Before Zinn, American historians presumed there to be a single objective historical truth, and it was the historian’s job to sew a cohesive narrative to explain its unfolding. But Zinn understood that historical outcomes – and their narrative – are a chorus of multiple voices, not just of those with power.

Zinn didn’t believe one could write an objective history. He said that history, like journalism, was an assembly of facts that the writer selects out of an infinite amount of data. Whether stated or not, any narrative will always be told from a point of view, from a subjective understanding of events. And Zinn’s intention was to broadcast the voices of the people who had been long-ignored by official versions taught in schools.

The orthodox narrative of our country has been telling us we are a democracy, and for that we should be grateful. That narrative charts how this president or that general bequeathed rights and freedom to us because he was a good man or wanted to do good for the people. Howard Zinn illustrated how that version is simply not true. While speculators were making oodles of money out of thin air in the roaring twenties, millions of people were starving prior to the great crash and official recognition of an economic depression. People’s right to vote, and by that time the franchise included women and black people, wasn’t enough to equalize society. Zinn quotes letters written to NY Congressman La Guardia during the jazz age in which poor families complain about being out of work and starved and recognizes that their condition is a result of the fact that, “there’s nothing in our Constitution about economic rights. It says that everybody has a right to life, but not to things that make life possible.”

In his later writings and lectures during the Clinton years, Zinn liked to draw parallels from that era. In the nineties, while the Dow Jones Average grew by leaps and bounds, our nation’s prison population soared to over two million. While a well-invested worker’s 401(K) promised to cushion a retiree’s nest egg, the divide between rich and poor grew. The fecund growth of millionaires and billionaires in the nineties was followed by further consolidations of wealth during the Bush years caused by massive tax cuts for the top 5% and further deregulation of the financial sector.

And somehow that system could not sustain itself.

So here we are today, in another economic depression. Those 401(K)s are wiped to half their value, Social Security increases have been frozen, foreclosures are at record highs, millions are unemployed, and though the social safety net is already emaciated from decades of budget cuts, new state cuts to social programs – like schools or programs for the disabled or elderly, etc – are announced on a daily basis.

Part of the reason Zinn is loved by so many is because he wasn’t afraid to talk about wealth inequality, wars of imperialism, and oppression of poor people that has existed since this nation’s start. This approach glaringly punctures holes in the traditional narrative of this country’s greatness – that if we just work hard enough, it is possible for us all to succeed. Those of us on welfare, unemployed, imprisoned, and foreclosed upon are in that position mainly because we haven’t taken advantage of this country’s opportunities. This is a radical approach, but judged by the million copies A People’s History sold, it is also a popular one.

Despite the overwhelming influence of money in our politics and social structure, people in this country have an aversion to talking about class. Such silence results in incredible misunderstandings of it. In the nineties, I used to teach GED classes to young people who lived in some of Chicago’s poorest communities, in Humboldt Park, in the Lathrop Homes and Cabrini Green. When I asked to what class they belonged, all said they were middle class. Really? I’d ask. Do you own your home?  No. Have a savings account?  No bank account of any kind. What’s your income? The tiny handful who did have jobs earned minimum wage.

At a lecture Zinn gave in April 2000 at the University of Chicago, he said it was “my early background, my work experience, which gave me a kind of class consciousness,” and added, ”the words 'class consciousness' doesn’t come easily to American tongues. We’re not supposed to have classes in this country. We’re supposed to be one big happy family. If you use those expressions which represent the universal interest which we all share, you know, like national security, national defense, national interests, it is as if our interests are the same: Exxon and me. But it seemed to me that all these attempts to envelop us in one common bond concealed something very important, and that is that from the beginning of our history we were a society that was driven by class interest and class division.”

Zinn is delightfully readable and his history is relevant, especially today. The language he uses is poetic. His breadth of scholarship across volumes of old newspaper articles and other archives unearthed gorgeous quotes by both the well known and anonymous.  No other historian quotes Fannie Lou Hammer, Langston Hughes, and Food Not Bombs equal in significance to t
hose of Presidents Johnson, Reagan or Clinton.

He left behind an enormous volume of writings, but these aren’t enough to measure his influence. He walked in picket lines, got arrested with striking janitors and war protestors. He fought the heads of his university department to side with his students in support of civil rights. He wrote articles, essays, did interviews and radio shows. Yes, he wrote The People Speak, but tens of thousands of people came out to hear Howard speak in the final decades of his life. Anyone who’s ever attended a Zinn lecture won’t soon forget the delightful smile, the pauses in his speaking pattern, and his remarkable sense of humor.  

Above all, Zinn liked to document what he called, “Democracy coming alive, not what the government did, not what’s in the Constitution, but what people did on their own.”

To get an idea of who he was, here are just a few Zinn Quotes: