Boston Globe Archives

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.”

War Is Not a Solution for Terrorism

By Howard Zinn. Article. Boston Globe and Common Dreams. September 2, 2006.
There is something important to be learned from the recent experience of the United States and Israel in the Middle East: that massive military attacks, inevitably indiscriminate, are not only morally reprehensible, but useless in achieving the stated aims of those who carry them out.

Questions for Howard Zinn: The People’s Historian

Howard Zinn interviewed by Joshua Glenn. Boston Globe. November 14, 2004.
IDEAS: Don't presidential elections reflect the will of the people as much as protest movements do?
ZINN: More important, I think, than who sits in the White House is who sits outside it. Whenever social injustices have had to be rectified, they were rectified not at the initiative of the president or Congress or the Supreme Court but because of social movements.…Only after thousands of black Americans demonstrated and were beaten, jailed, and killed was segregation in the South done away with. Despite winning the Nobel Peace Prize for it, it was not only Kissinger alone who ended the Vietnam War, but the antiwar movement.

The Case Against War on Iraq

By Howard Zinn. Article. Boston Globe. August 19, 2002.
The Bush administration's plan for preemptive war against Iraq so flagrantly violates both international law and common morality that we need a real national debate. The discussion should begin with the recognition that an attack on Iraq would constitute an attack on the Charter of the United Nations, since the United States would then be in violation of several provisions...

McVeigh’s Path to the Death Chamber

By Howard Zinn. Article. Boston Globe. June 16, 2001.
Now that Timothy McVeigh has been put to death, and some people's need for revenge or punishment may be satisfied, we can begin to think calmly of how he learned his twisted sense of right and wrong from the government that executed him.

Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?

By Howard Zinn. Article. Boston Globe. June 2, 1976.
Memorial Day will be celebrated as usual, by high-speed collisions of automobiles and bodies strewn on highways and the sound of ambulance sirens throughout the land. It will also be celebrated by the display of flags, the sound of bugles and drums, by parades and speeches and unthinking applause. It will be celebrated by giant corporations, which make guns, bombs, fighter planes, aircraft carriers and an endless assortment of military junk and which await the $100 billion in contracts to be approved soon by Congress and the President. There was a young woman in New Hampshire who refused to allow her husband, killed in Vietnam, to be given a military burial. She rejected the hollow ceremony ordered by those who sent him and 50,000 others to their deaths. Her courage should be cherished on Memorial Day.

Source or Publisher: Boston Globe

The Spirit of Rebellion

War Is Not a Solution for Terrorism

Questions for Howard Zinn: The People’s Historian

The Case Against War on Iraq

McVeigh’s Path to the Death Chamber

Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?

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