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FBI releases 400-page Howard Zinn file

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 20:05:00 +0000

Surprising no one, the FBI announced today it had tracked the left-wing historian Howard Zinn for 25 years, despite having apparently no evidence that he ever committed a crime.

The bureau released over 400 pages of its file on Zinn, covering 1949 to 1974 -- when the bureau says its investigations ended -- in response to FOIA requests. Download the documents here. (See anything interesting? Leave a comment or shoot us an e-mail.)

As we often learn with these FBI releases, the bureau expended a remarkable amount of resources tracking the writings and movements of those who were linked to Communists (even by three or four degrees of separation) or who opposed the Vietnam War.

Audio: Intro to “A People’s History of the United States”

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:29:00 +0000

Howard Zinn, the American historian, author and activist, passed away yesterday at the age of 87 (Click here to read Gabriel Winant's obituary on Salon) Zinn wrote more than 20 books over the course of his career, but his most well-known remains "A People's History of the United States" -- in which he focuses on the history of America's Native-Americans, women, and other oft-neglected groups.

Click below to hear Zinn read the introduction to "A People's History" (with a brief appearance by Matt Damon):

Goodbye to people’s historian Howard Zinn

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:29:00 +0000

I have a friend from graduate school who, at 10 years old in rural Wisconsin, got his hands on "A People's History of the United States." He read it, and when he was done, he wrote Howard Zinn a letter, asking how to contribute to work of the kind Zinn was doing. The historian bothered to write the kid back, and laid out a path for him that led him to where I met him -- graduate school in history.

The story’s touching, I think, because it’s exactly the gentle-hearted and populist kind of thing a Zinn admirer would imagine he’d do. There’s something fitting about how Zinn’s peak of celebrity may have come about thanks to the working-class genius played by Matt Damon (his next-door neighbor in Boston) in "Good Will Hunting." (At one point in the film, Damon's character plugs "A People's History" to his therapist, played by Robin Williams.) At the heart of Zinn’s sensibility was the idea that American history is not the exclusive province of senators and generals or, for that matter, historians. It belongs to everyone (a notion he touched upon in one of his final interviews).