Type of Content: Excerpts

By Howard Zinn. Excerpt from The Zinn Reader, originally published in Declarations of Independence.
“Obey the law.” That is a powerful teaching, often powerful enough to overcome deep feelings of right and wrong, even to override the fundamental instinct for personal survival. . . . Peace, stability, and order are desirable. Chaos and violence are not. But stability and order are not the only desirable conditions of social life. There is also justice...

By Howard Zinn. Excerpt from A People’s History of the United States.
In light of the death of the President George H. W. Bush on November 30, 2018, we share some of Howard Zinn’s writing about the Bush administration.

By Howard Zinn • Excerpt from The Zinn Reader
was one of the speakers at historic Faneuil Hall in Boston (though named after an early slave trader, it was the scene of many meetings of anti-slavery groups before the Civil War) in 1991, when the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts organized a celebration of the Bicentennial of the Bill of Rights. I wanted to use the opportunity to make clear that whatever freedoms we have in the United States—of speech, of the press, of assembly, and more—do not come simply from the existence on paper of the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution, but from the struggles of citizens to bring those Amendments alive in reality.

By Howard Zinn. Excerpt from The Zinn Reader.
The political culture of the United States is dominated by voting. Every election year is accompanied by an enormous amount of attention, with the media and the politicians joining forces to try to persuade Americans that voting for one candidate or another is the most important act of citizenship. I decided to challenge that idea in this column, which appeared in the Boston Globe at the start of the election campaign of 1976.