“Be Honest About the History of Our Country”: Remembering the People’s Historian Howard Zinn at 90

This video is re-posted from Democracy Now!

Editor’s note: For anyone interested in being part of a group discussion using Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, you can sign up for the GRIID class A History of US Social Movements.

The late historian, writer and activist Howard Zinn would have turned 90 years old today. Zinn died of a heart attack at the age of 87 on January 27, 2010. After serving as a bombardier in World War II, Zinn went on to become a lifelong dissident and peace activist. He was active in the civil rights movement and many of the struggles for social justice over the past 50 years.

In 1980, Howard Zinn published his classic book, “A People’s History of the United States,” which would go on to sell more than a million copies and change the way we look at history in America.

We air an excerpt of a Zinn interview on Democracy Now! from May 2009, and another from one of his last speeches later that year, just two months before his death.

[image: Robert Shetterly]