Type of Content: Excerpts

By Howard Zinn. Excerpt from A People’s History of the United States.
Howard Zinn writes about the legacy of Black resistance in the 20th century, and the rise of the Black Power Movement in the 1960s and 70s. Although the government attempted to quell social unrest through civil rights legislation and to bring Black people into the political fold, Zinn writes, “It did not work. The Blacks could not be easily brought into ‘the democratic coalition’ when bombs kept exploding in churches, when new ‘civil rights’ laws did not change the root condition of Black people.”

By Howard Zinn. Excerpt from You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.
August 6 and 9 mark the anniversary of the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. In the following excerpt from You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, Howard Zinn, a WWII bombardier, recalls, “Hiroshima and Royan were crucial in my gradual rethinking of what I had once accepted without question—the absolute morality of the war against fascism.”

By Howard Zinn. Excerpt from You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. [Boston University President John Silber’s] employees had difficulty getting raises in their wages or their benefits. In self-defense, they organized into unions: the faculty, the secretaries and staff, the librarians. And in 1979, with various grievances not met, all these groups, at different times, went out on strike. For the faculty, the provocation was the university reneging on a contract at first agreed to by its negotiating committee.

By Howard Zinn. Excerpt from The Zinn Reader.
This year, as the Pentagon prepares to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, we revisit this essay by Howard Zinn written in 1998, the 30th anniversary year of when he traveled with the Reverend Daniel Berrigan to Hanoi to receive prisoners released by the North Vietnamese.

By Howard Zinn. Excerpt from You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
In the 1960s, Howard Zinn, along with Ella Baker, served as advisers to SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. On this 50th anniversary year of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery marches and the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, we revisit Zinn's first-hand account from Selma's Freedom Day in 1963. "The idea was to bring hundreds of people to register to vote, hoping that their numbers would decrease fear. And there was much to fear," Zinn writes.

By Howard Zinn. Excerpt from A People’s History of the United States.
For Thanksgiving, we highlight Native American resistance that caught the nation’s attention in the 1960s and 70s. As Howard Zinn wrote in Chapter 19 of A People’s History of the United States, “Never in American history had more movements for change been concentrated in so short a span of years.”