Time Period: 1990-1999

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You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

By Howard Zinn. Book - Autobiography. Beacon Press. 1994; 2002; updated in 2018 with a foreword by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
In his memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, Zinn reflects on more than thirty years of fighting for social change, from his teenage years as a laborer in Brooklyn to teaching at Spelman College, where he emerged in the civil rights movement as a powerful voice for justice.
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Failure to Quit | HowardZinn.org

Failure to Quit

By Howard Zinn. Z Magazine, 1990; excerpt from Failure to Quit.
This essay, written for Z Magazine in 1990, and reprinted in my book Failure to Quit, was inspired (if you are willing to call this an inspired piece) by my students of the Eighties. I was teaching a spring and fall lec­ture course with four hundred students in each course (and yet with lots of discussion). I looked hard, listened closely, but did not find the apathy, the conservatism, the disregard for the plight of others, that everybody (right and left) was reporting about "the me generation."
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Obedience, Activism, and Social Change

Howard Zinn interviewed by David Barsamian. Excerpt. The Progressive, July 1997. The Historic Unfulfilled Promise.
As we approach a new calendar year, we revisit Howard Zinn's warmth, humor, and optimism in this interview with David Barsamian from July 1997. Zinn discusses being considered non-scholarly in the academic world ("...if you write stuff that an ordinary person can read, you’re suspect"). Originally published in The Progressive, the following is excerpted from The Historic Unfulfilled Promise.
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American History Review of the 20th Century: Manning Marable and Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn interviewed by Amy Goodman. Democracy Now! December 27, 1999.
"But what the history of this country shows, and especially in this century, is that democracy comes alive when people who see that the formal structure of government doesn’t help them. The formal structure of government does not change the 12-hour day, doesn’t change the conditions of work, doesn’t change the power of the corporations over working people. When people see that that formal structure doesn’t work, then they organize. They go out on strike. They demonstrate."
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Image: Howard Zinn in his office by Ted Polumbaum/Newseum.