Format: Magazine or Newspaper

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...
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A Moment with Howard Zinn

Interview with Howard Zinn • Moment Magazine, April/May 2010
"Shortly before his death, he spoke with Moment about his self-described radical views on American history and why he believed a one-state solution was ideal for both Arabs and Israelis."
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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.
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Collage of images and excerpted text.

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."
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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."
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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.
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‘Election Day Will Not Be Enough’: An Interview with Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn interviewed by Jessica Lee and John Tarleton. Indypendent. Nov. 14, 2008.
"Significant changes occur when social movements reach a critical point of power capable of moving cautious politicians beyond their tendency to keep things as they are — or when these movements, by direct action, bypass the political system and bring about change by acting directly on the obstacles to change."
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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."
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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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President Barack Obama and Senator John McCain • By Pete Souza • WikiCommons

The Obama Difference

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. October 2008.
"It seems that Barack Obama and John McCain are arguing over which war to fight. McCain says: Keep the troops in Iraq until we 'win.' Obama says: Withdraw some (not all) troops from Iraq and send them to fight and 'win' in Afghanistan. As someone who has fought in a war (World War II) and since then has protested against war, I must ask: Have our political leaders gone mad? Have they learned nothing from recent history? Have they not learned that no one 'wins' in a war, but that hundreds of thousands of human beings die, most of them civilians, many of them children?"
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Read, Learn, & Make History
Check out the Howard Zinn Digital Collection to search Zinn’s bibliography by books, articles, audio, video, and more.
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