I posted the following as a “Note” on Facebook in 2010 when Howard Zinn passed away. I am cleaning out my data there and this is one of the few things I published there that was worth keeping.

Howard Zinn 1922-2010

Every year in my AP U S history class I begin the curriculum talking about Columbus, and I always have my students read a few pages from Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” It was a book I read in my American History survey course in college, and it changed my perspective on history, and helped to guide me towards my eventual career. He changed the way the world views history, and while he is obviously controversial, he provided an antidote to history that had always been written by the winners. I always stress this particular paragraph which comes after Zinn talks about the atrocities that the explorers committed when coming to the new world:

“My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all) – that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.”

Historians and teachers will never achieve the fame and fortune of a rock star or a football player, but they can leave a much bigger imprint on the world and on the lives of others than someone who entertains us ever will. The world lost a great historian, teacher, and activist this week, but his ideas and perspective will live on forever. That is what is so great about ideas and education, no matter what, they can’t be taken away from us…and they can live on forever.