Source or Publisher: Publishers & Broadcasters

The Others

By Howard Zinn. Article. The Nation. February 2, 2002.
Every day for several months, the New York Times did what should always be done when a tragedy is summed up in a statistic: It gave us miniature portraits of the human beings who died on September 11 — their names, photos, glimmers of their personalities, their idiosyncrasies, how friends and loved ones remember them. I was deeply moved, reading those intimate sketches—"A Poet of Bensonhurst...A Friend, A Sister...Someone to Lean On...Laughter, Win or Lose..." I thought: Those who celebrated the grisly deaths of the people in the twin towers and the Pentagon as a blow to symbols of American dominance in the world—what if, instead of symbols, they could see, up close, the faces of those who lost their lives?
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Afghanistan, U.S. Wars Gone By, and the Prospects for a Humane U.S. Foreign Policy

Talk by Howard Zinn. Democracy Now! October 22, 2001.
Protests against the U.S. and British attacks against Afghanistan continued around the world—from Belgium to Greece to London, Spain, Thailand, and Indonesia. In Burlington, Vermont this Sunday historian and activist Howard Zinn spoke to more than 1,000 people about the current U.S. war on Afghanistan in the context of previous interventions and the prospects for peace and a humane foreign policy.
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The Old Way of Thinking

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. September 2001. Also published as "Violence Doesn't Work" At IndyMedia and Common Dreams.
"The images on television have been heartbreaking. ...We knew that there must be thousands of human beings buried alive, but soon dead under a mountain of debris. We can only imagine the terror among the passengers of the hijacked planes as they contemplated the crash, the fire, the end. Those scenes horrified and sickened me. Then our political leaders came on television, and I was horrified and sickened again. They spoke of retaliation, of vengeance, of punishment."
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Manning Marable, Howard Zinn and Grace Paley Speak Out Against the March to War

Manning Marable, Howard Zinn, and Grace Paley interviewed by Amy Goodman. Democracy Now! September 13, 2001.
"Why can’t we take our cue from the rescue workers, from the compassion shown by the medical teams, the doctors and nurses and medical students, the firemen and policemen, whose thought—when they are taking care of these people and trying to find people and help them and cure them, their thought is not of retaliation. No, their thought is of human compassion and how to end the suffering."
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The Greatest Generation?

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. August 2001.
"They tell me I am a member of the greatest generation. That's because I saw combat duty as a bombardier in World War II, and we (I almost said 'I') won the war against fascism. ...That idea is perpetuated by an artillery barrage of books and films about World War II.. ...I wrote from my air base in England to my friend Joe Perry, who was flying B-24s out of Italy, kidding him about his big clunk of a plane, but the humor was extinguished when my last letter to him came back with the notation 'Deceased.'"
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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.
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Radical History: A Conversation with Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn interviewed by Harry Kreisler. Conversations with History. April 20, 2001.
KREISLER: Let's talk a little about your youth first and then talk about the other things. How specifically do you think your parents shaped your character?
ZINN: The only influence that had in my life was my observation of their lives. My observation that my father was working very hard, of honest hardworking men. My mother working very hard, raising four sons and yet, of course, they had nothing to show for it. That is, they were perfect counterpoints to the Horatio Alger myth that if you work hard in this country you will get somewhere. And I think that that intensified my feeling about the injustice of an economic system in which there are people all over the country like my parents who worked very, very hard had nothing to show for it.
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Robert Birnbaum Talks with the Author of A People’s History of the United States

Howard Zinn interviewed by Robert Birnbau. IdentityTheory.com . January 10, 2001.
"I talk to audiences in Oklahoma and Texas and here and there and mostly to audiences of people who don't really know my work. I certainly don't expect them to be sympathetic to my ideas. When I express my ideas — and they are radical ideas — except that I don't start off by saying, 'I'm now going to tell you radical ideas.' Or, 'I'm now going to expound ideas of socialism or attack capitalism. Or, 'This is going to be a hate imperialism talk.' None of that. People respond to common sense ideas about foreign policy and domestic policy. It encourages me about the potential in this country, despite who is running it."
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Tennis on the Titanic

Article by Howard Zinn. ZCommunications. December 16, 2000. The Progressive as "Disputed Elections, Concealed Facts," February 2001.
"As the prize of the presidency lurched wildly back and forth in the last days of the year, with the entire nation hypnotized by the spectacle, I had a vision. I saw the Titanic churning through the waters of the North Atlantic toward an iceberg looming in the distance, while passengers and crew were totally concentrated on a tennis game taking place on deck."
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The Electoral College and Election 2000: A Historical Perspective from Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn interviewed by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. Democracy Now! December 8, 2000.
"I mean, what’s astonishing, or maybe not so astonishing, is here over 200 years later, we are still operating with an undemocratic system of electing the president of the United States, a system which not only was flawed from the beginning by the requirements of the founding fathers, but had become more and more flawed as the election process has become dominated by two major parties, which monopolize the political arena, and dominated more and more by the fact that money decides who can reach the American people."
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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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