Articles and Essays Archives - Page 8 of 15

Failure to Quit

By Howard Zinn. Z Magazine, 1990; excerpt from Failure to Quit.
This essay, written for Z Magazine in 1990, and reprinted in my book Failure to Quit, was inspired (if you are willing to call this an inspired piece) by my students of the Eighties. I was teaching a spring and fall lecture course with four hundred students in each course (and yet with lots of discussion). I looked hard, listened closely, but did not find the apathy, the conservatism, the disregard for the plight of others, that everybody (right and left) was reporting about "the me generation."

The Spirit of Rebellion

By Howard Zinn, from The Zinn Reader
Writing a column to appear in the July 4, 1975, issue of the Boston Globe, I wanted to break away from the traditional celebrations of Independence Day, in which the spirit of that document, with its call for rebellion and revolution, was most often missing. The column appeared with the title “The Brooklyn Bridge and the Spirit of the Fourth.”

When Respectability Was No Longer Respectable, and Virtue Required Acting Out, Not Leaning In

By Howard Zinn. Article. The Nation. August 6, 1960 and republished March 23, 2015.
One afternoon some weeks ago, with the dogwood on the Spelman College campus newly bloomed and the grass close-cropped and fragrant, an attractive, tawny-skinned girl crossed the lawn to her dormitory to put a notice on the bulletin board. It read: Young Ladies Who Can Picket Please Sign Below. The notice revealed, in its own quaint language, that within the dramatic revolt of Negro college students in the South today another phenomenon has been developing. This is the upsurge of the young, educated Negro woman against the generations-old advice of her elders...

President Obama with Nobel Prize • Photo by Pete Souza • WikiCommons

War and Peace Prizes

By Howard Zinn. Article. The Guardian. October 10, 2009.
I was dismayed when I heard Barack Obama was given the Nobel peace prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on two wars would be given a peace prize. Until I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel peace prizes. The Nobel committee is famous for its superficial estimates, won over by rhetoric and by empty gestures, and ignoring blatant violations of world peace.

Untold Truths About the American Revolution

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. July 2009.
"There are things that happen in the world that are bad, and you want to do something about them. You have a just cause. But our culture is so war prone that we immediately jump from, 'This is a good cause' to 'This deserves a war.' You need to be very, very comfortable in making that jump."

Barack Obama • Photo by Chuck Kennedy • WikiCommons

Changing Obama’s Mindset

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. May 2009.
"We are citizens, and Obama is a politician. You might not like that word. But the fact is he’s a politician. He’s other things, too—he’s a very sensitive and intelligent and thoughtful and promising person. But he’s a politician. If you’re a citizen, you have to know the difference between them and you—the difference between what they have to do and what you have to do. And there are things they don’t have to do, if you make it clear to them they don’t have to do it."

Sacco and Vanzetti

By Howard Zinn. Article. The Progressive and ZCommunications. April 14, 2007 and March 11, 2009.
On that 50th year after the execution, the New York Times reported that: "Plans by Mayor Beame to proclaim next Tuesday "Sacco and Vanzetti Day’ have been canceled in an effort to avoid controversy, a City Hall spokesman said yesterday." There must be good reason why a case 50-years-old, now over 75-years-old, arouses such emotion. I suggest that it is because to talk about Sacco and Vanzetti inevitably brings up matters that trouble us today: our system of justice, the relationship between war fever and civil liberties, and most troubling of all, the ideas of anarchism: the obliteration of national boundaries and therefore of war, the elimination of poverty, and the creation of a full democracy.

Remembering Murray Levin

By Howard Zinn. Article. The Monthly Review. February 2009.
I suspect that many on the U.S. left do not know the name of Murray Levin—political scientist, writer, teacher—who died at the age of seventy-two in late 1999. It would be hard to characterize his politics in simple terms; “socialist,” “radical,” “progressive?” In the thirty-five years I knew him, including twenty-four years as his close friend and colleague at Boston University, there was never any occasion to describe him in any of those ways. One thing, however, can be stated with confidence: Murray Levin made an important contribution to the radical movement in this country—by what he wrote, how he taught, and how he behaved as a dissident intellectual in the world of academe.

Studs Terkel • Photographer unknown • WikiCommons

Howard Zinn Defends Studs Terkel from Red-Baiting in the Times

By Howard Zinn. Article. The Progressive. November 2008.
"Reading Edward Rothstein’s sour commentary on Studs Terkel in the New York Times on November 2, I was surprised that Rothstein, presumably a sophisticated thinker, seems to believe one can separate one’s political views from a historical narrative, even from oral history. 'It is, in fact, impossible to separate Mr. Terkel’s political vision from the contours of his oral history,' he wrote."

Spend the Bailout Money on the Middle Class

By Howard Zinn. Article. The Nation. October 28, 2008.
It is sad to see both major parties agree to spend $700 billion of taxpayer money to bail out huge financial institutions that are notable for two characteristics: incompetence and greed. There is a much better solution to the financial crisis. But it would require discarding what has been conventional wisdom for too long: that government intervention in the economy ("big government") must be avoided like the plague, because the "free market" can be depended on to guide the economy toward growth and justice. Surely the sight of Wall Street begging for government aid is almost comic in light of its long devotion to a "free market" unregulated by government.

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Type of Content: Articles and Essays

Failure to Quit

The Spirit of Rebellion

When Respectability Was No Longer Respectable, and Virtue Required Acting Out, Not Leaning In

War and Peace Prizes

Untold Truths About the American Revolution

Changing Obama’s Mindset

Sacco and Vanzetti

Remembering Murray Levin

Howard Zinn Defends Studs Terkel from Red-Baiting in the Times

Spend the Bailout Money on the Middle Class

Read, Learn, & Make History

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