The Legacy of Howard Zinn's Radical History

Episode Transcript

Don Dumas Without Zinn, I don't know what I would be doing right now.

Adwoa Adusei This is Don Dumas. He lives in San Diego, California – and when he first came across Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States, he was working in the mailroom of a law firm.

Don Dumas I was in my early twenties, and that job had a lot of downtime. One of my coworkers, he brought the book to work and he just, you know, dropped it on the counter, and I just picked it up and started reading it. And I was just absolutely enthralled with the book, and I just couldn't put it down.

[Pages flipping, music starts]

And having experienced poverty and violence and incarceration and all these things in my household, I just knew that the society in which we lived was fundamentally unjust. And in this book, A People's History, what it revealed to me was that there are powerful interest groups that keep people poor or keep the system operating as it does. And it showed me that working class folks have an interest in working in solidarity to help one another change this system.

[Music]

It really changed the trajectory of my life because I realized then that I wanted to be a history teacher. And my friend never got that book back. I just read it all, you know, right there.

Adwoa Adusei Don Dumas did in fact become a history teacher in San Diego county. He’s been teaching for sixteen years now. In 2020, he was honored as the San Diego County Teacher of the Year.

Virginia Marshall Dumas says that he still uses A People’s History of the United States in his classroom. It’s a book that tells the story of the United States from the perspective of the people, from the workers, the women, and those with marginalized identities.

Don Dumas Okay, the first few years in the classroom, we used a whole book. As I taught for a few more years, there's other great resources and books that I wanted to bring in. But I always stuck to a few chapters, year after year after year.

Virginia Marshall And over those sixteen years that Mr. Dumas has been teaching history, the profession has changed.

News reporter 1 The Republican governor’s administration is blocking an Advanced Placement African American history course.

News reporter 2 School districts deal with a slew of scrutiny on how students are taught race, racism, and America’s dark past.

Don Dumas We see people fighting to control what is taught in our history classes. And that's because if done properly, right, history has the power to teach people, to teach students how to resist, how to fight for their rights. And that’s one of the beautiful things about Zinn’s book is that it teaches us about those moments where people worked in solidarity to better their condition. 

Virginia Marshall Howard Zinn knew all too well how powerful history can be, and how controversial. Before he passed away in 2010, Zinn delivered the keynote address at the National Council for Social Studies in 2008 to a room full of history teachers. He said that the idea that we have been hearing a lot these days, that “America is the greatest,” is one that should be challenged by students and history teachers alike.

Howard Zinn Because when you begin to think that arrogantly, that somehow the United States is an exception to the things that plague other countries and other governments in the world, that kind of arrogance leads to trouble. I think that we need to have an honest view of our country. That’s where history comes in handy.

[Theme music]

Adwoa Adusei From Brooklyn Public Library, this is Borrowed and Returned: revisiting the books that changed us, and changed America, too. I’m Adwoa Adusei, librarian at BPL’s Library for Arts and Culture.

Virginia Marshall And I’m Virginia Marshall, audio producer at Brooklyn Public Library. Today’s episode: how Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of The United States changed the way we teach, talk, and write about our history.

[Theme music out]

Virginia Marshall In order to understand where Howard Zinn was coming from when he wrote A People’s History of the United States, we wanted to go back to the beginning. And the beginning for this story is fun for us, because it starts in Brooklyn.

Adwoa Adusei Howard Zinn was born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents in 1922. His family struggled to make ends meet during the Depression – and after graduating from Thomas Jefferson High School in East New York, young Howard Zinn went to work at Brooklyn’s Navy Yard.

Nick Witham He grew up seeing communists talking on street corners and he has a left-wing and radical view of American politics.

Virginia Marshall This is Nick Witham, a history professor at University College London whose latest book, Popularizing the Past, tells the story of Howard Zinn, as well as several other popular historians of the mid-20th century. Witham said that Zinn’s experience in the war really influenced his perspective on America.

Nick Witham He then served as an airman in World War II, was really committed to the fight against fascism and that was the thing that motivated him to go and fight. And he became quite disillusioned with what the war stood for. He was particularly  upset after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So he became all the more politicized and a kind of an opponent of American war and American power.

Adwoa Adusei After the war, Zinn decided to study history. He went to college and then graduate school on the GI bill. Then, he decided to become a teacher.

Virginia Marshall He was hired to teach history at Spelman College, a historically Black university for women in Atlanta. There, he became involved in the civil rights movement alongside his students. He taught a few women who would go on to change the world in their own ways, like the writer Alice Walker and the activist Marian Wright Edelman.

Adwoa Adusei At Spelman, Zinn got into some “good trouble,” as the late representative John Lewis would say. He helped his students organize sit-ins and other protests in the segregated south. In 1963, Zinn moved to Boston with his family.

[Protest, chanting sound]

Virginia Marshall It was while he was teaching at Boston University that the publishing company Harper & Row approached him about writing a history book.

Nick Witham They are looking for what they think of as, like, a new voice to write a new American history for the generation of people who have had their minds changed about American history by the 1960s, by the civil rights movement in particular and by the anti-war movement. And they think Howard Zinn is the person to write that book.

Adwoa Adusei It was a monumental project: to tell the story of the United States for a general audience, from the beginning to end. Howard Zinn jumped at the challenge – and what he wrote made quite an impact on readers.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz I had been teaching for about four years and really there weren't that many good texts.

Virginia Marshall This is Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. She’s a renowned scholar of Native American history.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz I come from rural Oklahoma originally. I have about 12 books published, working on another one. I'm also 86 years old.

Virginia Marshall Ortiz had finished her PhD at UCLA and was teaching in the newly-established Native Studies program at California State when A People’s History came out. She said a lot of her colleagues were shocked by the book.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz The other faculty, they thought it was too radical. [Laughs] You know, I mean, they weren't that conservative, but they thought it was too radical and they hadn't even read it.

Virginia Marshall From the very first chapter, A People’s History literally rocks the boat. Instead of starting where many histories of the Americas start, with Christopher Columbus’s crew standing on the deck of the Niña, the Pinta or the Santa Maria and spotting land — this book flipped the script.

Adwoa Adusei The first chapter of A People’s History begins like this: “Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat.”

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz The students loved it so much. Young people hate history because it's so boring, you know? And Howard is such a good writer. And it was so challenging to historians in general.

Virginia Marshall What was challenging about the book, Ortiz said, was that Zinn didn’t shy away from America’s often-violent history, starting in that first chapter. Here’s a bit more from the opening, read by BPL’s chief librarian, Nick Higgins.

The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders.

To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice.

Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish … And so on, to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can "see" history from the standpoint of others.

Nick Witham One of the most famous parts of the book is its first chapter.

Virginia Marshall Nick Witham again.

Nick Witham Which is quite a dramatic telling of European contact. And, you know, it's been one of the most controversial parts of the book.

Adwoa Adusei Howard Zinn wasn’t the first historian to call European conquest of the Americas a genocide. He was building on the work of other Native historians before him, scholars like Vine DeLoria and Jack Forbes and others.

Virginia Marshall But Zinn was the first historian to write a critical, bottom-up history of the United States … and have it sell millions of copies. The book entered the popular imagination in a way that few other history books ever have. The Sopranos riffed on Zinn, it came up in a Simpsons episode, and Matt Damon famously name-dropped the book in Good Will Hunting.

Matt Damon You want to read a real history book? Read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. That book will fucking knock you on your ass.

Robin Williams Better than Choamsky’s Manufacturing Dissent? You think that’s a good book?

Matt Damon You people baffle me…

Nick Witham And so it gets quite a lot of attention from conservative commentators but also from conservative campus activists who, right from the word go, saw this book as a kind of threat to their approach to American politics.

Adwoa Adusei Witham referenced an article that came out in 1987 that got a lot of attention. Thomas Sowell, a conservative intellectual, wrote about liberal bias on college campuses.

Nick Witham He basically says, if you're taking your kids to college campus, what you what you really need to do is try and go to the campus bookstore and see if Howard Zinn's book is in that bookstore, and if it is you need to think seriously about whether you want your child to go to that university because it's clearly a bastion of kind of left-wing thought.

[Music]

Those examples of right-wing campus activism, trying to undermine confidence in universities, is a contemporary conservative project and it's one that has its roots in that 1980s moment.

Virginia Marshall The conservative backlash didn’t stop there. Following Howard Zinn’s passing, then-governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels said the book should be banned in schools and universities throughout the state. He wrote emails to his colleagues about a ban – and later dug in his heels when the emails came to light.

Nick Witham So, I think one of the unfair ways in which Zinn gets attacked — and he does get attacked, because he’s a controversial figure — is that people think that he thought A People's History should be a kind of new bible for how we think about American history. But that's not the case. I think really what he was doing was just kind of lobbing a different perspective in there and saying, if we're going to have a truly, kind of, educated group of young people, they need to understand that history is about the multiple different perspectives we can take on the past.

And that's where the Mitch Daniels point misses the point, I think, because Mitch Daniels thought, if this book is being used, it is being used to teach un-American history. Whereas actually, usually, it's being used to teach exactly what historical knowledge is all about, which is understanding different people's perspectives and understandings of the past.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei Howard Zinn believed that the work of telling American history shouldn’t be done by just one person. He said that his telling of history is just that: one person’s telling, a history shaped by his experiences in Brooklyn and World War II and the activism of the 1960s. Those who knew him said that he always encouraged younger historians to make their marks on history, too.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz You know, he was such a giving person.

Virginia Marshall This is Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz again.

Adwoa Adusei She and Howard Zinn ran in similar academic and activist circles. And at some point, she spoke to him about his characterization of Native history in A People’s History of the United States .

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz He had a fantastic, long chapter on Native Americans, but not really on the history. It's in the contemporary period, you know, the Long March and Alcatraz.

Adwoa Adusei There was a disconnect, she told him, between the first chapter, which is about the sobering genocide of Native people during the European incursion and the modern story of Native activism in the 1960s and 70s.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz I said, ‘Well they killed them all off, and then they popped up at Alcatraz?’ [Laughs] I said, ‘What were they doing in between?’ And he said, ‘You have to write that book, because I don't know.

[Music]

Virginia Marshall The opportunity to write her own book on Native American history would come decades later, when Beacon Press approached Ortiz about writing a book for a series they were working on called ReVisioning History. Here’s Gayatri Patnaik, the director of Beacon Press.

Gayatri Patnaik We started the series in 2007, or 2008. You know, I wanted people from historically marginalized groups, whether they were Queer or Indigenous or Latinx, to find themselves in this history, which is to say, a great deal of history depicts marginalized communities as passive, but I wanted these books to show the incredible resistance that they showed historically, and still do.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz It wasn't supposed to be an academic kind of book. It was supposed to be well-written, to make it come alive more, you know. And it seemed like it was really easy. I have no problem writing literary style now, I've been practicing that for 15 years. I said, ‘You know, I'll write this in six months.’ Well, five years later, I finally got it written.

Virginia Marshall It was hard to wrestle an entire history of Indigenous North America into one book. But Ortiz said it all started to come together when she found a central theme.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz And it came to me one day, it was a light bulb going on. War! So really it's a book about a very militantly warlike United States. And I could not find a day in that history when the U.S. wasn't somewhere at war.

Adwoa Adusei Ortiz’s book for Beacon Press came out in 2015. It was called An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. And it’s been a resounding success

Gayatri Patnaik The book just kept increasing in popularity as time went by. People found it, Roxanne continued to do events, etc. But, it continues to be every week, one of our best selling titles at Beacon. We're well over half a million copies at this point.

Adwoa Adusei Patnaik said that one of the biggest markets for the book is young people and their teachers.

Gayatri Patnaik We did a YA adaptation of Indigenous Peoples’ History, as well as A Queer History of the US. And those books have really just taken off in a remarkable way. Young people would go to their teachers, for example, young Indigenous people, and would say, we want to learn this history.

Adwoa Adusei The ReVisioning History series now includes nearly a dozen titles, like A Queer History of the United States, A Disability History, An African American and Latinx History, and more.

Gayatri Patnaik Our next book in the series is by Gloria Brown Marshall. It's called A Protest History of the United States, which is very timely.

[Music]

I think Howard Zinn's book was absolutely an inspiration. These books kind of are next in line in terms of that vision of Howard's, kind of moving it forward, if that makes sense.

Adwoa Adusei One of the most significant impacts of this book – and a reason why it really did change America – is that it paved the way for other historians and writers to add to our story.

Virginia Marshall These days, there are a lot of writers telling our history from different perspectives, like Nikole Hannah Jones’s The 1619 Project, Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor’s From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation, Nick Estes’s Our History is the Future, and Ibrim X Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning. It’s no coincidence that these books are also the ones that you’ll see at the top of the most frequently banned and challenged book lists. These writers and their work challenges  the status quo, and that’s something that’s under scrutiny at the moment.

[music]

Adwoa Adusei Don Dumas, the San Diego history teacher, said he still teaches with A People’s History – and he always puts the book in conversation with other history books. He said he thinks a lot about the power that books and their teachers have. Especially in this political climate, he coaches other history teachers to stand by what they have their students read.

Don Dumas We are so ready to talk about the resistors, all of these people, right? Oh, you know, the Benjamin Lays the John Browns the White Rose, all these folks that did all these things. Okay. We are in a moment now where we have to decide, right? Are we going to capitulate? Are we going to just bow down without any sort of resistance because of our personal interests? And that’s one of the things that makes the people so heroic, right? Like what makes John Brown so heroic is — he was never personally at risk of becoming enslaved. He was white. Yet, he took it upon himself to say, ‘I cannot live in a society in which this particular evil is allowed to go unchallenged. And I’m willing to sacrifice my life.’ All we’re asking you to do is share a book. We should be able to do that.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei Special thanks to the Zinn Education project for connecting us to Don Dumas. They also have a ton of resources for teachers on their website, Zinn ED Project [dot] org.

Virginia Marshall Nick Witham wrote a whole book about American historians who popularized history in the post-war era. It’s called Popularizing the Past, and we’ll put a link to it in our show notes, as well as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States and the whole ReVisioning History series from Beacon Press.

Adwoa Adusei Our next episode comes out in two weeks. We’re talking about the beloved children’s book The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats.

Deborah Pope This book was not only about a child of color. It was also about class.

Virginia Marshall Borrowed and Returned is a production of Brooklyn Public Library. It’s written and produced by me, Virginia Marshall, and co-hosted with Adwoa Adusei. You can read a transcript of this episode and our show notes at BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] podcasts.  

Adwoa Adusei Brooklyn Public Library relies on the support of individuals for many of its most critical programs and services. To make a gift, please go to BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] donate. Our Borrowed advisory team is made up of Nick Higgins, Fritzi Bodenheimer, Robin Lester Kenton, and Damaris Olivo. Jennifer Proffitt and Ashley Gill run our social media. Laurie Elvove designed our logo. 

Virginia Marshall That’s it for this episode. Until next time… keep re-reading.