Type of Content: Articles and Essays

Downfall

By Howard Zinn. Article. ZCommunications. August 18, 2000.
I am surprised that my friend Hans Koning, a stalwart protester against the war in Vietnam, seems to have been taken in by the argument of Richard Frank, in his review of Frank's Downfall. Yes, we must all be willing to reconsider our most hardened judgements in the light of new evidence. But there is nothing in Frank's argument -- however assiduous his research -- to make those of us who see the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an unspeakable atrocity change our minds.
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Collage of excerpt text, Douglass photo, and 3 video clips

A Fourth of July Commentary

By Howard Zinn. Article. ZCommunications. July 4, 2000.
In this year 2000, I cannot comment more meaningfully on the Fourth of July than Frederick Douglass did when he was invited in 1852 to give an Independence Day address [on July 5]. He could not help thinking about the irony of the promise of the Declaration of Independence, of equality, life, liberty made by slaveowners, and how slavery was made legitimate in the writing of the Constitution after a victory for "freedom" over England."
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Portraits of Unsung Heroes by Robert Shetterly

Unsung Heroes

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. June 2000.
"Another question often put to me by students is: Don't we need our national idols? You are taking down all our national heroes — the Founding Fathers, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy. Granted, it is good to have historical figures we can admire and emulate. But why hold up as models the fifty-five rich white men who drafted the Constitution as a way of establishing a government that would protect the interests of their class-slaveholders, merchants, bondholders, land speculators?"
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Banner, The Heroes Around Us | HowardZinn.org

The Heroes Around Us

By Howard Zinn. Article. ZCommunications. May 7, 2000.
Recently, meeting with a group of high school students, I was asked by one of them: "I read in your book, A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, about the massacres of Indians, the long history of racism, the persistence of poverty in the richest country in the world, the senseless wars. How can I keep from being thoroughly alienated and depressed?" That same question has been put to me many times, in different forms, one of them being: "How come you are not depressed?" Who says I'm not? At least briefly.
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Sender Garlin

Article by Howard Zinn. ZCommunications. March 2000. Also in The Progressive as "One Radical Who Did It All," April 2000.
"As the twentieth century came to an end last December, an extraordinary man, whose life spanned the century, died at the age of ninety-seven. His name was Sender Garlin. I first met Sender, ten years before his death, when he was only eighty-seven years old. It was the fall of 1989, and I had traveled to Boulder to give a talk at the University of Colorado. One of the chief organizers of my stay was a man named Sender Garlin, a longtime radical journalist and pamphleteer. I did not know him, and so I was not prepared for the excitement of my encounter with him."
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Notes for a Gathering

By Howard Zinn. Article. ZCommunications. December 16, 2000.
I have been asked to imagine this situation: "The progressive third party movement has captured the White House, 60% of Congress and 30 Governorships. What do we do now?" First, we have a party, maybe three, with the third party being special. Then, we have Congress pass, and the President sign, the following legislation…
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A Flash of the Possible

By Howard Zinn. Article. The Progressive. January 2000.
"What happened in Seattle recently was not as large an event as the general strike of 1919. But it showed how apparently powerless people—if they unite in large numbers—can stop the machinery of government and commerce. In an era when the power of government, and of multinational corporations, is overwhelming, it is instructive to get even a hint of how fragile that power is when confronted by organized, determined citizens."
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Beyond the Soviet Union

By Howard Zinn. Article. ZCommunications. December 22, 1999.
I offer as my Commentary a response I just made to a letter by a retired professor in California, who wrote: “As a great admirer of Howard Zinn, I was profoundly disappointed by some of his comments made during his interview with David Barsamian in the March issue of Z Magazine.” Without reproducing my correspondent's letter I think the gist of his comments are clear from my responses. Fundamentally, he did not like my saying I was “very glad” the rule of the Soviet government ended. He took issue with my skepticism about violent revolutions. He made interesting, provocative, thoughtful arguments.
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A Larger Consciousness

By Howard Zinn. Article. ZCommunications. December 22, 1999. The Progressive, November 1999 as "Respecting the Holocaust."
"Some years ago, when I was teaching at Boston University, I was asked by a Jewish group to give a talk on the Holocaust. I spoke that evening, but not about the Holocaust of World War II, not about the genocide of six million Jews. It was the mid-Eighties, and the United States government was supporting death squad governments in Central America, so I spoke of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of peasants in Guatemala and El Salvador, victims of American policy. My point was that the memory of the Jewish Holocaust should not be encircled by barbed wire, morally ghettoized, kept isolated from other genocides in history."
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Seattle

Article by Howard Zinn. ZCommunications, December 22, 1999, The Progressive as "A Flash of Possibility," January 2000.
"…it suggested…how apparently powerless people, if they unite in large numbers, can bring the machinery of government and commerce to a halt."
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