Zinn's "on Race" Traces Violence, Victories in Civil Rights Movement

Friday 12 August 2011
Eleanor J. Bader, Truthout | Book Review
http://truth-out.org/race/1313086585

"on Race" by Howard Zinn is the Truthout Progressive Pick of the Week. Receive it as a gift from Truthout for a minimum donation of $20.

"on Race"
by Howard Zinn, Introduction by Cornel West
Seven Stories Press, 2011, $14.95 paperback, 236 pages

Princeton professor Cornell West's tribute to the late Howard Zinn says it all: "Zinn was an activist intellectual who moved smoothly from the library to the street, from the office to the jail, from the lecture room to the political rally. Zinn had more influence and impact on the public than other intellectuals of his generation."

By all accounts, Zinn was a mensch, a man whose down-to-earth brilliance and rich sense of humor touched those he engaged, from students, to colleagues and comrades. His 2010 passing is still being mourned.

Fortunately, Zinn's 25 books and hundreds of articles and speeches provide a lasting testament to both his humanity and political savvy. In addition, Seven Stories Press, an independent book publisher based in New York City, has added to Zinn's legacy by releasing three new anthologies of his work - "on Race," "on History," and "on War." While many of the pieces in each collection were previously published, it is nevertheless exciting to read or reread Zinn's energizing words.

"on Race" begins with essays penned in the late 1950s and early '60s. As the white, Jewish chairman of the history department at Atlanta's Spelman College, the oldest historically black academy for women in the US, Zinn did not anticipate being a central player in the period's racial upheaval. But he was, and the 14 pieces in "on Race" bring the realities of segregation, and the moral outrage and rebellion it generated, into such vivid relief that readers will literally feel the era's passionate momentum. His stark descriptions offer a powerful rendering of what transpired and why. Never a dispassionate reporter, Zinn's account is the emotional outpouring of a participant.

Take "The Southern Mystique," penned in 1963. "The South is monstrous and marvelous at the same time. Every cliché ever uttered about the South, every stereotype attached to its people, white and Negro [sic], is true," he wrote. "Prejudice, discrimination, race hatred, are real problems, to the point of viciousness, even murder, but their mystery, for those who look hard is gone ... The most vicious thing about segregation - more deadly than its immediate denial of certain goods and services - is its perpetuation of the mystery of racial differences. Because there is not a magical and omnipotent dispeller of the mystery: it is contact. The Southern mystique vanishes when one sees whites and Negroes behave like human beings."

Zinn's upbeat spirit, his unwavering belief that progressive shifts are not just possible, but inevitable, is showcased in "A Quiet Case of Social Change," written in 1959. In it, he offers readers an inside peak at the desegregation of Atlanta's public libraries. Unlike lunch counter sit-ins, bus boycotts or demonstrations to contest bigotry, the campaign to desegregate city libraries was the result of dogged persistence.

In the first incident, Dr. Irene Dobbs Jackson, an African-American professor of French walked into the "white only" Carnegie Library and filled out a membership application, She was the first African-American to do so. Dr. Jackson's action was the start of a well-orchestrated campaign in which dozens of black people began to enter Carnegie and request books and articles. After being rebuffed - told that the materials could either be sent to a Negro reading room or perused in the dank basement of the Carnegie building, far from white eyes - these aspiring patrons let it be known that a lawsuit would be filed if the policy did not change.

In short order, the Library Board met and, at the behest of the mayor, city attorney and chief of police, extended library access to all city residents. Zinn notes that the shift "caused no great commotion. The director received a few angry letters. Dr. Jackson was kept awake one night by nasty telephone calls: "You that integratin' nigger? This is the KKK." And as she sat at the library table reading that first day, a man came by and slammed his books down hard on the table in voiceless protest. But the general reaction was an enormous silence. Lo and behold, this bolstered people's confidence in the power of community organizing; if people of all races could read and research together, what else might they achieve?

Zinn's optimism about multiracial unity is contagious. What's more, his homage to the many unheralded women and girls who, like Professor Jackson, buttressed the civil rights movement, is an important corrective to popular notions of male-led social activism. Similarly, he offers a critical appraisal of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson - too often championed for pushing legislation outlawing the most blatant expressions of prejudice - by pointing out how little they actually did to stymie racial hate mongering.

The Department of Justice comes in for particular criticism due to the agency's penchant for siding with police who claimed they were simply "maintaining order" when they attacked protesters.

Zinn recounts dozens of heinous abuses, among them:

•In July 1962, Mrs. Slater King, the pregnant wife of a prominent Georgia activist, drove to a jail in Mitchell County to deliver food to a young woman who had been arrested at a protest earlier that day. King's three children accompanied her. As she approached the jail a Deputy accosted her and told her to leave. "Mrs. King walked slowly to her car," Zinn writes. "A Deputy pointed her out, cursed her, threatened to arrest her if she didn't hurry.' She was subsequently kicked, hit on the head, and knocked unconscious."

•Several days later, a white Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee member, William Hansen, was jailed after leading a prayer session in Albany, Georgia. He was "beaten into senselessness as he sat on the floor reading. His jaw and several ribs were broken," Zinn continues. "Bleeding profusely from the mouth, he asked the jailer for medical aid and was told that was not within the jailer's jurisdiction."

•A Black attorney who went to check on Hansen was beaten by the Sheriff; he was so badly injured he required hospitalization.
All three incidents were reported to federal authorities, Zinn writes, but the government did nothing. Even worse, despite lip service about investigating the 1964 murder of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, the deaths went unsolved for 41 years.

"The civil rights movement illuminated the hypocrisy of the liberal promise," he concludes in "Solving the Race Problem." "It makes overt, and recorded on television for the world to see, an old daily fact of American life: that a Black person who protested his [sic] condition, or moved one step out of line, would be arrested, or beaten, or inundated with water hoses, or killed, and the government of the United States - the most powerful government in the world - would not act to save him." Secondly, it illustrated that white sympathizers would also be denied protection.

Zinn's rage is palpable as he slams government inaction and argues that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent Voting Rights Act of 1965 were small, if hard-won, victories to appease increasingly enraged people the world over.

"Will the hostility ever end?" Zinn asks. His answer: "Not until Black and white people discover together, the source of their long feud - an economic system which has deprived them and their children for centuries, to the benefit of, first, the Founding Fathers, and lately, the hundred or so giant corporations that hog the resources of this bountiful nation."

Here, here.

Zinn wasn't afraid to speak truth to power - whether it meant condemning capitalism or criticizing political elites. Heartfelt and thoughtful, "on Race" addresses both how far we've come and how far we've yet to go in achieving the colorblind society of which Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement dreamed. Lastly, the collection serves as a clear-eyed reminder that history is shaped by those who act.

Indeed, "on Race" is an inspiring celebration of community organizing and activism, a true championing of what el pueblo can do when we act together.

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Eleanor J. Bader is a freelance writer, teacher and feminist activist from Brooklyn, New York. She writes for The Brooklyn Rail, ontheissuesmagazine.com, RHrealitycheck.org and other progressive blogs and publications.

Lies My Teacher Told Me

http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0684818868/thekonformist

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
James W. Loewen

Audio, CD $21.89
Audible Audio Edition, Unabridged $26.95 or Free with Audible 30-day free trial

From Publishers Weekly

Loewen's politically correct critique of 12 American history textbooks—including The American Pageant by Thomas A. Bailey and David M. Kennedy; and Triumph of the American Nation by Paul Lewis Todd and Merle Curti—is sure to please liberals and infuriate conservatives. In condemning the way history is taught, he indicts everyone involved in the enterprise: authors, publishers, adoption committees, parents and teachers. Loewen (Mississippi: Conflict and Change) argues that the bland, Eurocentric treatment of history bores most elementary and high school students, who also find it irrelevant to their lives. To make learning more compelling, Loewen urges authors, publishers and teachers to highlight the drama inherent in history by presenting students with different viewpoints and stressing that history is an ongoing process, not merely a collection of—often misleading—factoids. Readers interested in history, whether liberal or conservative, professional or layperson, will find food for thought here.

From Booklist

When textbook gaffes make news, as with the tome that explained that the Korean War ended when Truman dropped the atom bomb, the expeditious remedy would be to fire the editor. Loewen would rather hire a new team of authors bent on the pursuit of context instead of factoids. In Loewen's ideal text, events and people illuminating the multicultural holy trinity of race, gender, and social class would predominate over the fixation on heroes and acts of government. Such is the mood adopted throughout this critique of 12 American history texts in current use. Vetting 10 topics they commonly address--from the Pilgrims to the Vietnam War--Loewen bewails a long train of alleged omissions and distortions. To account for the deplorable situation, he offers this quasi-Marxist explanation: "Perhaps we are all dupes, manipulated by elite white male capitalists who orchestrate how history is written as part of their scheme to perpetuate their own power and privilege at the expense of the rest of us." Certainly students' appalling ignorance of history is troublesome, and broken families and excessive TV viewing are at least the equals of white male conspirators as the cause. However, libraries located where dissatisfaction with textbooks exists should be interested in Loewen's critique. Gilbert Taylor --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

A lively critique. -- The New York Times

A treat to read and a serious critique of American education. -- Award citation, American Book Award

An extremely convincing plea for truth in education. -- San Francisco Chronicle

Every history teacher in the land needs to read this book. -- San Jose Mercury News

Every teacher, every student of history, every citizen should read this book. -- Howard Zinn

Honest and well-written. -- Harper's Magazine

Lies My Teacher Told Me goes beyond recounting fallacies of history and correcting American image: it surveys social issues misreported, ideas misrepresented, and encourages students of history to think about not only the facts, but the reporting which embellishes and colors their presentation. An invaluable guide for the reader. -- Midwest Book Review

Remarkable. -- USA Today

Winner of the 1996 American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship

Americans have lost touch with their history, and in this thought-provoking book, Professor James Loewen shows why. After surveying twelve leading high school American history texts, he has concluded that not one does a decent job of making history interesting or memorable. Marred by an embarrassing combination of blind patriotism, mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies, these books omit almost all the ambiguity, passion, conflict, and drama from our past. In ten powerful chapters, Loewen reveals that:

The United States dropped three times as many tons of explosives in Vietman as it dropped in all theaters of World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Ponce de Leon went to Florida mainly to capture Native Americans as slaves for Hispaniola, not to find the mythical fountain of youth
Woodrow Wilson, known as a progressive leader, was in fact a white supremacist who personally vetoed a clause on racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations
The first colony to legalize slavery was not Virginia but Massachusetts

From the truth about Columbus's historic voyages to an honest evaluation of our national leaders, Loewen revives our history, restoring to it the vitality and relevance it truly possesses.

About the Author

James W. Loewen is professor of sociology at the University of Vermont. He is coauthor of the first integrated state-history textbook, Mississippi: Conflict and Change, and creator of The Truth About Columbus: A Subversively True Poster Book for a Dubiously Celebratory Occasion.

Chapter 1

Handicapped by History
The Process of Hero-making

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.
James Baldwin

One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only remember that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner.., and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.
W. E. B. Du Bois

By idolizing those whom we honor, we do a disservice both to them and to ourselves....We fail to recognize that we could go and do likewise.
Charles V. Willies

This Chapter is About Heroification, a degenerative process (much like calcification) that makes people over into heroes. Through this process, our educational media turn flesh-and-blood individuals into pious, perfect creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest.

Many American history textbooks are studded with biographical vignettes of the very famous (Land of Promise devotes a box to each president) and the famous (The Challenge of Freedom provides "Did You Know?" boxes about Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States, and Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun, among many others). In themselves, vignettes are not a bad idea. They instruct by human example. They show diverse ways that people can make a difference. They allow textbooks to give space to characters such as Blackwell and Hansberry, who relieve what would otherwise be a monolithic parade of white male political leaders. Biographical vignettes also provoke reflection as to our purpose in teaching history: Is Chester A. Arthur more deserving of space than, say, Frank Lloyd Wright? Who influences us more today -- Wright, who invented the carport and transformed domestic architectural spaces, or Arthur, who, urn, signed the first Civil Service Act? Whose rise to prominence provides more drama -- Blackwell's or George Bush's (the latter born with a silver Senate seat in his mouth)? The choices are debatable, but surely textbooks should include some people based not only on what they achieved but also on the distance they traversed to achieve it.

We could go on to third- and fourth-guess the list of heroes in textbook pantheons. My concern here, however, is not who gets chosen, but rather what happens to the heroes when they are introduced into our history textbooks and our classrooms. Two twentieth-century Americans provide case studies of heroification: Woodrow Wilson and Helen Keller. Wilson was unarguably an important president, and he receives extensive textbook coverage. Keller, on the other hand, was a "little person" who pushed through no legislation, changed the course of no scientific discipline, declared no war. Only one of the twelve history textbooks I surveyed includes her photograph. But teachers love to talk about Keller and often show audiovisual materials or recommend biographies that present her life as exemplary. All this attention ensures that students retain something about both of these historical figures, but they may be no better off for it. Heroification so distorts the lives of Keller and Wilson (and many others) that we cannot think straight about them.

Teachers have held up Helen Keller, the blind and deaf girl who overcame her physical handicaps, as an inspiration to generations of schoolchildren. Every fifth-grader knows the scene in which Anne Sullivan spells water into young Helen's hand at the pump. At least a dozen movies and filmstrips have been made on Keller's life. Each yields its version of the same clichE. A McGraw-Hill educational film concludes: "The gift of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan to the world is to constantly remind us of the wonder of the world around us and how much we owe those who taught us what it means, for there is no person that is unworthy or incapable of being helped, and the greatest service any person can make us is to help another reach true potential."

To draw such a bland maxim from the life of Helen Keller, historians and filmmakers have disregarded her actual biography and left out the lessons she specifically asked us to learn from it. Keller, who struggled so valiantly to learn to speak, has been made mute by history. The result is that we really don't know much about her.

Over the past ten years, I have asked dozens of college students who Helen Keller was and what she did. They all know that she was a blind and deaf girl. Most of them know that she was befriended by a teacher, Anne Sullivan, and learned to read and write and even to speak. Some students can recall rather minute details of Keller's early life: that she lived in Alabama, that she was unruly and without manners before Sullivan came along, and so forth. A few know that Keller graduated from college. But about what happened next, about the whole of her adult life, they are ignorant. A few students venture that Keller became a "public figure" or a "humanitarian," perhaps on behalf of the blind or deaf. "She wrote, didn't she?" or "she spoke" -- conjectures without content. Keller, who was born in 1880, graduated from Radcliffe in 1904 and died in 1968. To ignore the sixty-four years of her adult life or to encapsulate them with the single word humanitarian is to lie by omission.

The truth is that Helen Keller was a radical socialist. She joined the Socialist party of Massachusetts in 1909. She had become a social radical even before she graduated from Radcliffe, and not, she emphasized, because of any teachings available there. After the Russian Revolution, she sang the praises of the new communist nation: "In the East a new star is risen! With pain and anguish the old order has given birth to the new, and behold in the East a man-child is born! Onward, comrades, all together! Onward to the campfires of Russia! Onward to the coming dawn!" Keller hung a red flag over the desk in her study. Gradually she moved to the left of the Socialist party and became a Wobbly, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the syndicalist union persecuted by Woodrow Wilson.

Keller's commitment to socialism stemmed from her experience as a disabled person and from her sympathy for others with handicaps. She began by working to simplify the alphabet for the blind, but soon came to realize that to deal solely with blindness was to treat symptom, not cause. Through research she learned that blindness was not distributed randomly throughout the population but was concentrated in the lower class. Men who were poor might be blinded in industrial accidents or by inadequate medical care; poor women who became prostitutes faced the additional danger of syphilitic blindness. Thus Keller learned how the social class system controls people's opportunities in life, sometimes determining even whether they can see. Keller's research was not just book-learning: "I have visited sweatshops, factories, crowded slums. If I could not see it, I could smell it."

At the time Keller became a socialist, she was one of the most famous women on the planet. She soon became the most notorious. Her conversion to socialism caused a new storm of publicity -- this time outraged. Newspapers that had extolled her courage and intelligence now emphasized her handicap. Columnists charged that she had no independent sensory input and was in thrall to those who fed her information. Typical was the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, who wrote that Keller's "mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her development."

Keller recalled having met this editor: "At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him." She went on, "Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent."

Keller, who devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind, never wavered in her belief that our society needed radical change. Having herself fought so hard to speak, she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union to fight for the free speech of others. She sent $100 to the NAACP with a letter of support that appeared in its magazine The Crisis -- a radical act for a white person from Alabama in the 1920s. She supported Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate, in each of his campaigns for the presidency. She composed essays on the women's movement, on politics, on economics. Near the end of her life, she wrote to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, leader of the American Communist party, who was then languishing in jail, a victim of the McCarthy era: "Loving birthday greetings, dear Elizabeth Flynn! May the sense of serving mankind bring strength and peace into your brave heart!"

One may not agree with Helen Keller's positions. Her praise of the USSR now seems naïve, embarrassing, to some even treasonous. But she was a radical -- a fact few Americans know, because our schooling and our mass media left it out.

What we did not learn about Woodrow Wilson is even more remarkable. When I ask my college students to tell me what they recall about President Wilson, they respond with enthusiasm. They say that Wilson led our country reluctantly into World War I and after the war led the struggle nationally and internationally to establish the League of Nations. They associate Wilson with progressive causes like women's suffrage. A handful of students recall the Wilson administration's Palmer Raids against left-wing unions. But my students seldom know or speak about two antidemocratic policies that Wilson carried out: his racial segregation of the federal government and his military interventions in foreign countries.

Under Wilson, the United States intervened in Latin America more often than at any other time in our history. We landed troops in Mexico in 1914, Haiti in 1915, the Dominican Republic in 1916, Mexico again in 1916 (and nine more times before the end of Wilson's presidency), Cuba in 1917, and Panama in 1918. Throughout his administration Wilson maintained forces in Nicaragua, using them to determine Nicaragua's president and to force passage of a treaty preferential to the United States.

In 1917 Woodrow Wilson took on a major power when he started sending secret monetary aid to the "White" side of the Russian civil war. In the summer of 1918 he authorized a naval blockade of the Soviet Union and sent expeditionary forces to Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok to help overthrow the Russian Revolution. With the blessing of Britain and France, and in a joint command with Japanese soldiers, American forces penetrated westward from Vladivostok to Lake Baikal, supporting Czech and White Russian forces that had declared an anticommunist government headquartered at Omsk. After briefly maintaining front lines as far west as the Volga, the White Russian forces disintegrated by the end of 1919, and our troops finally left Vladivostok on April 1, 1920.

Few Americans who were not alive at the time know anything about our "unknown war with Russia," to quote the title of Robert Maddox's book on this fiasco. Not one of the twelve American history textbooks in my sample even mentions it. Russian history textbooks, on the other hand, give the episode considerable coverage. According to Maddox: "The immediate effect of the intervention was to prolong a bloody civil war, thereby costing thousands of additional lives and wreaking enormous destruction on an already battered society. And there were longer-range implications. Bolshevik leaders had clear proof.., that the Western powers meant to destroy the Soviet government if given the chance."

This aggression fueled the suspicions that motivated the Soviets during the Cold War, and until its breakup the Soviet Union continued to claim damages for the invasion.

Wilson's invasions of Latin America are better known than his Russian adventure. Textbooks do cover some of them, and it is fascinating to watch textbook authors attempt to justify these episodes. Any accurate portrayal of the invasions could not possibly show Wilson or the United States in a favorable light. With hindsight we know that Wilson's interventions in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua set the stage for the dictators Batista, Trujillo, the Duvaliers, and the Somozas, whose legacies still reverberate. Even in the 1910s, most of the invasions were unpopular in this country and provoked a torrent of criticism abroad. By the mid-1920s, Wilson's successors reversed his policies in Latin America. The authors of history textbooks know this, for a chapter or two after Wilson they laud our "Good Neighbor Policy," the renunciation of force in Latin America by Presidents Coolidge and Hoover, which was extended by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Textbooks might (but don't) call Wilson's Latin American actions a "Bad Neighbor Policy" by comparison. Instead, faced with unpleasantries, textbooks wriggle to get the hero off the hook, as in this example from The Challenge of Freedom: "President Wilson wanted the United States to build friendships with the countries of Latin America. However, he found this difficult...."Some textbooks blame the invasions on the countries invaded: "Necessity was the mother of armed Caribbean intervention," states The American Pageant. Land of Promise is vague as to who caused the invasions but seems certain they were not Wilson's doing: "He soon discovered that because of forces he could not control, his ideas of morality and idealism had to give way to practical action." Promise goes on to assert Wilson's innocence: "Thus, though he believed it morally undesirable to send Marines into the Caribbean, he saw no way to avoid it." This passage is sheer invention. Unlike his secretary of the navy, who later complained that what Wilson "forced [me] to do in Haiti was a bitter pill for me," no documentary evidence suggests that Wilson suffered any such qualms about dispatching troops to the Caribbean.

All twelve of the textbooks I surveyed mention Wilson's 1914 invasion of Mexico, but they posit that the interventions were not Wilson's fault. "President Wilson was urged to send military forces into Mexico to protect American investments and to restore law and order," according to Triumph of the American Nation, whose authors emphasize that the president at first chose not to intervene. But "as the months passed, even President Wilson began to lose patience." Walter Karp has shown that this version contradicts the facts -- the invasion was Wilson's idea from the start, and it outraged Congress as well as the American people. According to Karp, Wilson's intervention was so outrageous that leaders of both sides of Mexico's ongoing civil war demanded that the U.S. forces leave; the pressure of public opinion in the United States and around the world finally influenced Wilson to recall the troops.

Textbook authors commonly use another device when describing our Mexican adventures: they identify Wilson as ordering our forces to withdraw, but nobody is specified as having ordered them in! Imparting information in a passive voice helps to insulate historical figures from their own unheroic or unethical deeds.

Some books go beyond omitting the actor and leave out the act itself. Half of the twelve textbooks do not even mention Wilson's takeover of Haiti. After U.S. marines invaded the country in 1915, they forced the Haitian legislature to select our preferred candidate as president. When Haiti refused to declare war on Germany after the United States did, we dissolved the Haitian legislature. Then the United States supervised a pseudo-referendum to approve a new Haitian constitution, less democratic than the constitution it replaced; the referendum passed by a hilarious 98,225 to 768. As Piero Gleijesus has noted, "It is not that Wilson failed in his earnest efforts to bring democracy to these little countries. He never tried. He intervened to impose hegemony, not democracy." The United States also attacked Haiti's proud tradition of individual ownership of small tracts of land, which dated back to the Haitian Revolution, in favor of the establishment of large plantations. American troops forced peasants in shackles to work on road construction crews. In 1919 Haitian citizens rose up and resisted U.S. occupation troops in a guerrilla war that cost more than 3,000 lives, most of them Haitian. Students who read Triumph of the American Nation learn this about Wilson's intervention in Haiti: "Neither the treaty nor the continued presence of American troops restored order completely. During the next four or five years, nearly 2,000 Haitians were killed in riots and other outbreaks of violence." This passive construction veils the circumstances about which George Barnett, a U.S. marine general, complained to his commander in Haiti: "Practically indiscriminate killing of natives has gone on for some time." Barnett termed this violent episode "the most startling thing of its kind that has ever taken place in the Marine Corps."

During the first two decades of this century, the United States effectively made colonies of Nicaragua, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and several other countries. Wilson's reaction to the Russian Revolution solidified the alignment of the United States with Europe's colonial powers. His was the first administration to be obsessed with the specter of communism, abroad and at home. Wilson was blunt about it. In Billings, Montana, stumping the West to seek support for the League of Nations, he warned, "There are apostles of Lenin in our own midst. I can not imagine what it means to be an apostle of Lenin. It means to be an apostle of the night, of chaos, of disorder." Even after the White Russian alternative collapsed, Wilson refused to extend diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. He participated in barring Russia from the peace negotiations after World War I and helped oust Béla Kun, the communist leader who had risen to power in Hungary. Wilson's sentiment for self-determination and democracy never had a chance against his three bedrock "ism"s: colonialism, racism, and anticommunism. A young Ho Chi Minh appealed to Woodrow Wilson at Versailles for self-determination for Vietnam, but Ho had all three strikes against him. Wilson refused to listen, and France retained control of Indochina. It seems that Wilson regarded self-determination as all right for, say, Belgium, but not for the likes of Latin America or Southeast Asia.

At home, Wilson's racial policies disgraced the office he held. His Republican predecessors had routinely appointed blacks to important offices, including those of port collector for New Orleans and the District of Columbia and register of the treasury. Presidents sometimes appointed African Americans as postmasters, particularly in southern towns with large black populations. African Americans took part in the Republican Party's national conventions and enjoyed some access to the White House. Woodrow Wilson, for whom many African Americans voted in 1912, changed all that. A southerner, Wilson had been president of Princeton, the only major northern university that refused to admit blacks. He was an outspoken white supremacist -- his wife was even worse -- and told "darky" stories in cabinet meetings. His administration submitted a legislative program intended to curtail the civil rights of African Americans, but Congress would not pass it. Unfazed, Wilson used his power as chief executive to segregate the federal government. He appointed southern whites to offices traditionally reserved for blacks. Wilson personally vetoed a clause on racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The one occasion on which Wilson met with African American leaders in the White House ended in a fiasco as the president virtually threw the visitors out of his office. Wilson's legacy was extensive: he effectively closed the Democratic Party to African Americans for another two decades, and parts of the federal government remained segregated into the 1950s and beyond. In 1916 the Colored Advisory Committee of the Republican National Committee issued a statement on Wilson that, though partisan, was accurate: "No sooner had the Democratic Administration come into power than Mr. Wilson and his advisors entered upon a policy to eliminate all colored citizens from representation in the Federal Government."

Of the twelve history textbooks I reviewed, only four accurately describe Wilson's racial policies. Land of Promise does the best job:

Woodrow Wilson's administration was openly hostile to black people. Wilson was an outspoken white supremacist who believed that black people were inferior. During his campaign for the presidency, Wilson promised to press for civil rights. But once in office he forgot his promises. Instead, Wilson ordered that white and black workers in federal government jobs be segregated from one another. This was the first time such segregation had existed since Reconstruction! When black federal employees in Southern cities protested the order, Wilson had the protesters fired. In November, 1914, a black delegation asked the President to reverse his policies. Wilson was rude and hostile and refused their demands.

Unfortunately, except for one other textbook, The United States -- A History of the Republic, Promise stands alone. Most of the textbooks that treat Wilson's racism give it only a sentence or two. Five of the books never even mention this "black mark" on Wilson's presidency. One that does, The American Way, does something even more astonishing: it invents a happy ending! "Those in favor of segregation finally lost support in the administration. Their policies gradually were ended." This is simply not true.

Omitting or absolving Wilson's racism goes beyond concealing a character blemish. It is overtly racist. No black person could ever consider Woodrow Wilson a hero. Textbooks that present him as a hero are written from a white perspective. The coverup denies all students the chance to learn something important about the interrelationship between the leader and the led. White Americans engaged in a new burst of racial violence during and immediately after Wilson's presidency. The tone set by the administration was one cause. Another was the release of America's first epic motion picture.

The filmmaker David W. Griffith quoted Wilson's two-volume history of the United States, now notorious for its racist view of Reconstruction, in his infamous masterpiece The Clansman, a paean to the Ku Klux Klan for its role in putting down "black-dominated" Republican state governments during Reconstruction. Griffith based the movie on a book by Wilson's former classmate, Thomas Dixon, whose obsession with race was "unrivaled until Mein Kampf." At a private White House showing, Wilson saw the movie, now retitled Birth of a Nation, and returned Griffith's compliment: "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so true." Griffith would go on to use this quotation in successfully defending his film against NAACP charges that it was racially inflammatory.

This landmark of American cinema was not only the best technical production of its time but also probably the most racist major movie of all time. Dixon intended "to revolutionize northern sentiment by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat!...And make no mistake about it -- we are doing just that." Dixon did not overstate by much. Spurred by Birth of a Nation, William Simmons of Georgia reestablished the Ku Klux Klan. The racism seeping down from the White House encouraged this Klan, distinguishing it from its Reconstruction predecessor, which President Grant had succeeded in virtually eliminating in one state (South Carolina) and discouraging nationally for a time. The new KKK quickly became a national phenomenon. It grew to dominate the Democratic Party in many southern states, as well as in Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon. During Wilson's second term, a wave of antiblack race riots swept the country. Whites lynched blacks as far north as Duluth.

If Americans had learned from the Wilson era the connection between racist presidential leadership and like-minded public response, they might not have put up with a reprise on a far smaller scale during the Reagan-Bush years. To accomplish such education, however, textbooks would have to make plain the relationship between cause and effect, between hero and followers. Instead, they reflexively ascribe noble intentions to the hero and invoke "the people" to excuse questionable actions and policies. According to Triumph of the American Nation: "As President, Wilson seemed to agree with most white Americans that segregation was in the best interests of black as well as white Americans."

Wilson was not only antiblack; he was also far and away our most nativist president, repeatedly questioning the loyalty of those he called "hyphenated Americans." "Any man who carries a hyphen about with him," said Wilson, "carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready." The American people responded to Wilson's lead with a wave of repression of white ethnic groups; again, most textbooks blame the people, not Wilson. The American Tradition admits that "President Wilson set up" the Creel Committee on Public Information, which saturated the United States with propaganda linking Germans to barbarism. But Tradition hastens to shield Wilson from the ensuing domestic fallout: "Although President Wilson had been careful in his war message to state that most Americans of German descent were 'true and loyal citizens,' the anti-German propaganda often caused them suffering."

Wilson displayed little regard for the rights of anyone whose opinions differed from his own. But textbooks take pains to insulate him from wrongdoing. "Congress," not Wilson, is credited with having passed the Espionage Act of June 1917 and the Sedition Act of the following year, probably the most serious attacks on the civil liberties of Americans since the short-lived Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. In fact, Wilson tried to strengthen the Espionage Act with a provision giving broad censorship powers directly to the president. Moreover, with Wilson's approval, his postmaster general used his new censorship powers to suppress all mail that was socialist, anti-British, pro-Irish, or that in any other way might, in his view, have threatened the war effort. Robert Goldstein served ten years in prison for producing The Spirit of '76, a film about the Revolutionary War that depicted the British, who were now our allies, unfavorably. Textbook authors suggest that wartime pressures excuse Wilson's suppression of civil liberties, but in 1920, when World War I was long over, Wilson vetoed a bill that would have abolished the Espionage and Sedition acts. Textbook authors blame the anticommunist and anti-labor union witch hunts of Wilson's second term on his illness and on an attorney general run amok. No evidence supports this view. Indeed, Attorney General Palmer asked Wilson in his last days as president to pardon Eugene V. Debs, who was serving time for a speech attributing World War I to economic interests and denouncing the Espionage Act as undemocratic. The president replied, "Never!" and Debs languished in prison until Warren Harding pardoned him. The American Way adopts perhaps the most innovative approach to absolving Wilson of wrongdoing: Way simply moves the "red scare" to the 1920s, after Wilson had left office!

Because heroification prevents textbooks from showing Wilson's shortcomings, textbooks are hard pressed to explain the results of the 1920 election. James Cox, the Democratic candidate who was Wilson's would-be successor, was crushed by the nonentity Warren G. Harding, who never even campaigned. In the biggest landslide in the history of American presidential politics, Harding got almost 64 percent of the major-party votes. The people were "tired," textbooks suggest, and just wanted a "return to normalcy." The possibility that the electorate knew what it was doing in rejecting Wilson never occurs to our authors. It occurred to Helen Keller, however. She called Wilson "the greatest individual disappointment the world has ever known!"

It isn't only high school history courses that heroify Wilson. Textbooks such as Land of Promise, which discusses Wilson's racism, have to battle uphill, for they struggle against the archetypal Woodrow Wilson commemorated in so many history museums, public television documentaries, and historical novels.

For some years now, Michael Frisch has been conducting an experiment in social archetypes at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He asks his first-year college students for "the first ten names that you think of" in American history before the Civil War. When Frisch found that his students listed the same political and military figures year after year, replicating the privileged positions afforded them in high school textbooks, he added the proviso, "excluding presidents, generals, statesmen, etc." Frisch still gets a stable list, but one less predictable on the basis of history textbooks. Seven years out of eight, Betsy Ross has led the list. (Paul Revere usually comes in second.)

What is interesting about this choice is that Betsy Ross never did anything. Frisch notes that she played "no role whatsoever in the actual creation of any actual first flag." Ross came to prominence around 1876, when some of her descendants, seeking to create a tourist attraction in Philadelphia, largely invented the myth of the first flag. With justice, high school textbooks universally ignore Betsy Ross; not one of my twelve books lists her in its index. So how and why does her story get transmitted? Frisch offers a hilarious explanation: If George Washington is the Father of Our Country, then Betsy Ross is our Blessed Virgin Mary! Frisch describes the pageants reenacted (or did we only imagine them?) in our elementary school years: "Washington [the god] calls on the humble seamstress Betsy Ross in her tiny home and asks her if she will make the nation's flag, to his design. And Betsy promptly brings forth -- from her lap! -- the nation itself, and the promise of freedom and natural rights for all mankind."

I think Frisch is onto something, but maybe he is merely on something. Whether or not one buys his explanation, Betsy Ross's ranking among students surely proves the power of the social archetype. In the case of Woodrow Wilson, textbooks actually participate in creating the social archetype. Wilson is portrayed as "good," "idealist," "for self-determination, not colonial intervention," "foiled by an isolationist Senate," and "ahead of his time." We name institutions after him, from the Woodrow Wilson Center at the Smithsonian Institution to Woodrow Wilson Junior High School in Decatur, Illinois, where I misspent my adolescence. If a fifth face were to be chiseled into Mount Rushmore, many Americans would propose that it should be Wilson's. Against such archetypal goodness, even the unusually forthright treatment of Wilson's racism in Land of Promise cannot but fail to stick in students' minds.

Curators of history museums know that their visitors bring archetypes in with them. Some curators consciously design exhibits to confront these archetypes when they are inaccurate. Textbook authors, teachers, and moviemakers would better fulfill their educational mission if they also taught against inaccurate archetypes. Surely Woodrow Wilson does not need their flattering omissions, after all. His progressive legislative accomplishments in just his first two years, including tariff reform, an income tax, the Federal Reserve Act, and the Workingmen's Compensation Act, are almost unparalleled. Wilson's speeches on behalf of self-determination stirred the world, even if his actions did not live up to his words.

Why do textbooks promote wartless stereotypes? The authors' omissions and errors can hardly be accidental. The producers of the filmstrips, movies, and other educational materials on Helen Keller surely know she was a socialist; no one can read Keller's writings without becoming aware of her political and social philosophy. At least one textbook author, Thomas Bailey, senior author of The American Pageant, clearly knew of the 1918 U.S. invasion of Russia, for he wrote in a different venue in 1973, "American troops shot it out with Russian armed forces on Russian soil in two theatres from 1918 to 1920." Probably several other authors knew of it, too. Wilson's racism is also well known to professional historians. Why don't they let the public in on these matters?

Heroification itself supplies a first answer. Socialism is repugnant to most Americans. So are racism and colonialism. Michael Kammen suggests that authors selectively omit blemishes in order to make certain historical figures sympathetic to as many people as possible. The textbook critic Norma Gabler has testified that textbooks should "present our nation's patriots in a way that would honor and respect them"; in her eyes, admitting Keller's socialism and Wilson's racism would hardly do that.37 In the early 1920s the American Legion said that authors of textbooks "are at fault in placing before immature pupils the blunders, foibles and frailties of prominent heroes and patriots of our Nation." The Legion would hardly be able to fault today's history textbooks on this count.

Perhaps we can go further. I began with Helen Keller because omitting the last sixty-four years of her life exemplifies the sort of culture-serving distortion that will be discussed later in this book.ers?

Heroification itself supplies a first answer. Socialism is repugnant to most Americans. So are racism and colonialism. Michael Kammen suggests that authors selectively omit blemishes in order to make certain historical figures sympathetic to as many people as possible. The textbook critic Norma Gabler has testified that textbooks should "present our nation's patriots in a way that would honor and respect them"; in her eyes, admitting Keller's socialism and Wilson's racism would hardly do that.37 In the early 1920s the American Legion said that authors of textbooks "are at fault in placing before immature pupils the blunders, foibles and frailties of prominent heroes and patriots of our Nation." The Legion would hardly be able to fault today's history textbooks on this count.

Perhaps we can go further. I began with Helen Keller because omitting the last sixty-four years of her life exemplifies the sort of culture-serving distortion that will be discussed later in this book. We teach Keller as an ideal, not a real person, to inspire our young people to emulate her. Keller becomes a mythic figure, the "woman who overcame" -- but for what? There is no content! Just look what she accomplished, we're exhorted -- yet we haven't a clue as to what that really was.

Keller did not want to be frozen in childhood. She herself stressed that the meaning of her life lay in what she did once she overcame her disability. In 1929, when she was nearing fifty, she wrote a second volume of autobiography, entitled Midstream, that described her social philosophy in some detail. Keller wrote about visiting mill towns, mining towns, and packing towns where workers were on strike. She intended that we learn of these experiences and of the conclusions to which they led her. Consistent with our American ideology of individualism, the truncated version of Helen Keller's story sanitizes a hero, leaving only the virtues of self-help and hard work. Keller herself, while scarcely opposing hard work, explicitly rejected this ideology.

I had once believed that we were all masters of our fate -- that we could mould our lives into any form we pleased....I had overcome deafness and blindness sufficiently to be happy, and I supposed that anyone could come out victorious if he threw himself valiantly into life's struggle. But as I went more and more about the country I learned that I had spoken with assurance on a subject I knew little about. I forgot that I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment....Now, however, I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of everyone.

Textbooks don't want to touch this idea. "There are three great taboos in textbook publishing," an editor at one of the biggest houses told me, "sex, religion, and social class." While I had been able to guess the first two, the third floored me. Sociologists know the importance of social class, after all. Reviewing American history textbooks convinced me that this editor was right, however. The notion that opportunity might be unequal in America, that not everyone has "the power to rise in the world," is anathema to textbook authors, and to many teachers as well. Educators would much rather present Keller as a bland source of encouragement and inspiration to our young -- if she can do it, you can do it! So they leave out her adult life and make her entire existence over into a vague "up by the bootstraps" operation. In the process, they make this passionate fighter for the poor into something she never was in life: boring.

Woodrow Wilson gets similarly whitewashed. Although some history textbooks disclose more than others about the seamy underside of Wilson's presidency, all twelve books reviewed share a common tone: respectful, patriotic, even adulatory. Ironically, Wilson was widely despised in the 1920s, and it was only after World War II that he came to be viewed kindly by policymakers and historians. Our postwar bipartisan foreign policy, one of far-reaching interventions sheathed in humanitarian explanations, was "shaped decisively by the ideology and the international program developed by the Wilson Administration," according to N. Gordon Levin, Jr. Textbook authors are thus motivated to underplay or excuse Wilson's foreign interventions, many of which were counterproductive blunders, as well as other unsatisfactory aspects of his administration.

A host of other reasons -- pressure from the "ruling class," pressure from textbook adoption committees, the wish to avoid ambiguities, a desire to shield children from harm or conflict, the perceived need to control children and avoid classroom disharmony, pressure to provide answers -- may help explain why textbooks omit troublesome facts. A certain etiquette coerces us all into speaking in respectful tones about the past, especially when we're passing on Our Heritage to our young. Could it be that we don't want to think badly of Woodrow Wilson? We seem to feel that a person like Helen Keller can be an inspiration only so long as she remains uncontroversial, one-dimensional. We don't want complicated icons. "People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions," Helen Keller pointed out. "Conclusions are not always pleasant." Most of us automatically shy away from conflict, and understandably so. We particularly seek to avoid conflict in the classroom. One reason is habit: we are so accustomed to blandness that the textbook or teacher who brought real intellectual controversy into the classroom would strike us as a violation of polite rhetoric, of classroom norms. We are supposed to speak well of the deceased, after all. Probably we are supposed to maintain the same attitude of awe, reverence, and respect when we read about our national heroes as when we visit our National Cathedral and view the final resting places of Helen Keller and Woodrow Wilson, as close physically in death as they were distant ideologically in life.

Whatever the causes, the results of heroification are potentially crippling to students. Helen Keller is not the only person this approach treats like a child. Denying students the humanness of Keller, Wilson, and others keeps students in intellectual immaturity. It perpetuates what might be called a Disney version of history: The Hall of Presidents at Disneyland similarly presents our leaders as heroic statesmen, not imperfect human beings. Our children end up without realistic role models to inspire them. Students also develop no understanding of causality in history. Our nation's thirteen separate forays into Nicaragua, for instance, are surely worth knowing about as we attempt to understand why that country embraced a communist government in the 1980s. Textbooks should show history as contingent, affected by the power of ideas and individuals. Instead, they present history as a "done deal."

Do textbooks, filmstrips, and American history courses achieve the results they seek with regard to our heroes? Surely textbook authors want us to think well of the historical figures they treat with such sympathy. And, on a superficial level at least, we do. Almost no recent high school graduates have anything "bad" to say about either Keller or Wilson. But are these two considered heroes? I have asked hundreds of (mostly white) college students on the first day of class to tell me who their heroes in American history are. As a rule, they do not pick Helen Keller, Woodrow Wilson, Christopher Columbus, Miles Standish or anyone else in Plymouth, John Smith or anyone else in Virginia, Abraham Lincoln, or indeed anyone else in American history whom the textbooks implore them to choose. Our post-Watergate students view all such "establishment" heroes cynically. They're bor-r-ring.

Some students choose "none" -- that is, they say they have no heroes in American history. Other students display the characteristically American sympathy for the underdog by choosing African Americans: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, perhaps Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, or Frederick Douglass. Or they choose men and women from other countries: Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, or (now fading fast) Mikhail Gorbachev or Boris Yeltsin.

In one sense this is a healthy development. Surely we want students to be skeptical. Probably we want them to challenge being told whom to believe in. But replying "none" is too glib, too nihilistic, for my taste. It is, however, an understandable response to heroification. For when textbook authors leave out the warts, the problems, the unfortunate character traits, and the mistaken ideas, they reduce heroes from dramatic men and women to melodramatic stick figures. Their inner struggles disappear and they become goody-goody, not merely good.

Students poke fun at the goody-goodiest of them all by passing on Helen Keller jokes. In so doing, schoolchildren are not poking cruel fun at a disabled person, they are deflating a pretentious symbol that is too good to be real. Nonetheless, our loss of Helen Keller as anything but a source of jokes is distressing. Knowing the reality of her quite amazing life might empower not only deaf or blind students, but any schoolgirl, and perhaps boys as well. For like other peoples around the world, we Americans need heroes. Statements such as "If Martin Luther King were alive, he'd..." suggest one function of historical figures in our contemporary society. Most of us tend to think well of ourselves when we have acted as we imagine our heroes might have done. Who our heroes are and whether they are presented in a way that makes them lifelike, hence usable as role models, could have a significant bearing on our conduct in the world.

We now turn to our first hero, Christopher Columbus. "Care should be taken to vindicate great names from pernicious erudition," wrote Washington Irving, defending heroification. Irving's three-volume biography of Columbus, published in 1828, still influences what high school teachers and textbooks say about the Great Navigator. Therefore it will come as no surprise that heroification has stolen from us the important facets of his life, leaving only melodramatic minutiae.

Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Touchstone; 1 edition (September 3, 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0684818868
ISBN-13: 978-0684818863

Howard Zinn: The Historian Who Made History

E of S Nation: This isn't about sports, but if you know my work, especially A People's History of Sports in the United States, then you know I am eternally indebted to the great historian Howard Zinn who died yesterday. Please read or ignore. In tribute to Howard who always stood with the underdog, I unabashedly pick the Saints to win the Super Bowl.

In struggle and sports,

Dave Z

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/522763/howard_zinn_the_historian_who_made_history

Howard Zinn: The Historian Who Made History
By Dave Zirin

Howard Zinn, my hero, teacher, and friend died of a heart attack on Wednesday at the age of 87. With his death, we lose a man who did nothing less than rewrite the narrative of the United States. We lose a historian who also made history.

Anyone who believes that the United States is immune to radical politics never attended a lecture by Howard Zinn. The rooms would be packed to the rafters, as entire families, black, white and brown, would arrive to hear their own history made humorous as well as heroic. "What matters is not who's sitting in the White House. What matters is who's sitting in!" he would say with a mischievous grin. After this casual suggestion of civil disobedience, the crowd would burst into laughter and applause.

Only Howard could pull that off because he was entirely authentic. When he spoke against poverty it was from the perspective of someone who had to work in the shipyards during the Great Depression. When he spoke against war, it was from the perspective of someone who flew as a bombardier during World War II, and was forever changed by the experience. When he spoke against racism it was from the perspective of someone who taught at Spelman College during the civil rights movement and was arrested sitting in with his students.

And of course, when he spoke about history, it was from the perspective of having written A People's History of the United States, a book that has sold more than two million copies and changed the lives of countless people. Count me among them. When I was 17 and picked up a dog-eared copy of Zinn's book, I thought history was about learning that the Magna Carta was signed in 1215. I couldn't tell you what the Magna Carta was, but I knew it was signed in 1215. Howard took this history of great men in powdered wigs and turned it on its pompous head.

In Howard's book, the central actors were the runaway slaves, the labor radicals, the masses and the misfits. It was history writ by Robin Hood, speaking to a desire so many share: to actually make history instead of being history's victim. His book came alive in December with the debut of The People Speak on the History Channel as actors, musicians, and poets, brought Zinn's book alive.

Howard was asked once whether his praise of dissent and protest was divisive. He answered beautifully: "Yes, dissent and protest are divisive, but in a good way, because they represent accurately the real divisions in society. Those divisions exist - the rich, the poor - whether there is dissent or not, but when there is no dissent, there is no change. The dissent has the possibility not of ending the division in society, but of changing the reality of the division. Changing the balance of power on behalf of the poor and the oppressed."

Words like this made Howard my hero. I never thought we would also become friends. But through our mutual cohort, Anthony Arnove, Howard read my sports writing and then gave his blessing to a book project we called A People's History of Sports in the United States.

We also did a series of meetings together where I would interview Howard on stage. Even at 87, he still had his sharp wit, strong voice, and matinee-idol white hair. But his body had become frail. Despite this physical weakness, Howard would stay and sign hundreds of books until his hand would shake with the effort.

At our event in Madison, Wisconsin, Howard issued a challenge to the audience. He said, "Our job as citizens is to honestly assess what Obama is doing. Not measured just against Bush, because against Bush, everybody looks good. But look honestly at what Obama's doing and act as engaged and vigorous citizens."

He also had no fear to express his political convictions loudly and proudly. I asked him about the prospects today for radical politics and he said,

"Let's talk about socialism. … I think it's very important to bring back the idea of socialism into the national discussion to where it was at the turn of the [last] century before the Soviet Union gave it a bad name. Socialism had a good name in this country. Socialism had Eugene Debs. It had Clarence Darrow. It had Mother Jones. It had Emma Goldman. It had several million people reading socialist newspapers around the country… Socialism basically said, hey, let's have a kinder, gentler society. Let's share things. Let's have an economic system that produces things not because they're profitable for some corporation, but produces things that people need. People should not be retreating from the word socialism because you have to go beyond capitalism."

Howard Zinn taught millions of us a simple lesson: Agitate. Agitate. Agitate. But never lose your sense of humor in the process. It's a beautiful legacy and however much it hurts to lose him, we should strive to build on Howard's work and go out and make some history.

How the great Howard Zinn made all our lives better

Harvey Wasserman
solartopia@gmail.com
How the great Howard Zinn made all our lives better
January 28, 2010

Howard Zinn was above all a gentleman of unflagging grace, humility and compassion.

No American historian has left a more lasting positive legacy on our understanding of the true nature of our country, mainly because his books reflect a soul possessed of limitless depth.

Howard’s PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES will not be surpassed. As time goes on new chapters will be written in its spirit to extend its reach.

But his timeless masterpiece broke astonishing new ground both in its point of view and its comprehensive nature. The very idea of presenting the American story from the point of view of the common citizen was itself revolutionary. That he pulled it off with such apparent ease and readability borders on the miraculous. That at least a million Americans have bought and read it means that its on-going influence is immense. It is truly a history book that has and will continue to change history for the better.

But that doesn’t begin to account for Howard’s personal influence. He was a warm, unfailingly friendly compadre. He shared a beautiful partnership with his wonderful wife Roz, a brilliant, thoroughly committed social worker about whom he once said: “You and I just talk about changing the world. She actually does it.”

But Howard was no ivory tower academic. His lectures were engaging, exciting and inspirational. But they took on an added dimension because he was personally engaged, committed and effective. He chose to write books and articles in ways that could impact the world in which they were published. He showed up when he was needed, and always had a sixth sense about exactly what to say, and how.

Perhaps the most meaningful tribute to pay this amazing man is to say how he affected us directly. Here are two stories I know intimately:

In 1974, my organic commune-mate Sam Lovejoy toppled a weather tower as a protest against the coming of a nuclear power plant. When Sam needed someone to testify on how this act of civil disobedience fit into the fabric of our nation’s history, Howard did not hesitate. His testimony in that Springfield, Massachusetts courtroom (see “Lovejoy’s Nuclear War” via www.gmpfilms.com) remains a classic discourse on the sanctity of non-violent direct action and its place in our national soul. (Sam was acquitted, and we stopped that nuke!)

Three years earlier I sent Howard a rambling 300-page manuscript under the absurdly presumptuous title A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, 1860-1920. Written in a drafty communal garage in the Massachusetts hills by a long-haired 20-something graduate school dropout, the manuscript had been rejected by virtually every publisher in America, often accompanied with nasty notes to the tune of: “NEVER send us anything like this again.”

But I sent a copy to Howard, whom I had never met. He replied with a cordial note typed on a single sheet of yellow paper, which I still treasure. I showed it to Hugh Van Dusen at Harper & Row, who basically said Harper had no idea why anyone would ever read such a book, but that if Howard Zinn would write an introduction, they’d publish it (though under a more appropriate title).

He did, and they did…and my life was changed forever.

Thankfully, Hugh then had the good sense to ask Howard to write a REAL people’s history by someone---the ONLY one---who could handle the job. He did….and ALL our lives have been changed forever.

Howard labored long and hard on his masterpiece, always retaining that astonishing mixture of humor and humility that made him such a unique and irreplaceable treasure. No one ever wrote or spoke with a greater instinct for the True and Vital. His unfailing instinct for what is just and important never failed him---or us. The gentle, lilting sound of his voice put it all to unforgettable music that will resonate through the ages.

A few days ago I wrote Howard asking if he’d consider working on a film about the great Socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs, whose story Howard's books have uniquely illuminated.

Eugene V. Debs was beloved by millions of Americans who treasured not only his clarity of a shared vision for this nation, but his unshakeable honesty and unquestioned integrity.

Debs ran five times for president. He conducted his last campaign from a federal prison cell in Atlanta, where he was locked up by Woodrow Wilson. He got a million votes (that we know of). “While there is a soul in prison,” he said, unforgettably, “I am not free.”

Debs had deeply shaken Wilson with his brilliant, immeasurably powerful opposition to America’s foolish and unjust entry into World War I, and his demands for a society in which all fairly shared. In the course of his magnificent decades as our pre-eminent labor leader, Debs established a clear vision of where this nation could and should go for a just, sustainable future. Enshrined in Howard’s histories, it remains a shining beacon of what remains to be done.

Through his decades as our pre-eminent people’s historian, through his activism, his clarity and his warm genius, Howard Zinn was also an American Mahatma, a truly great soul, capable of affecting us all.

Like Eugene V. Debs, it is no cliché to say that Howard Zinn truly lives uniquely on at the core of our national soul. His PEOPLE’S HISTORY and the gift of his being just who he was, remains an immeasurable, irreplaceable treasure.

Thanks, Howard, for more than we can begin to say.
--
Harvey Wasserman is Senior Editor of http://freepress.org, where this article first appeared.

A Heartbeat and a Guitar

http://www.nationbooks.org/book/196/A%20Heartbeat%20and%20a%20Guitar

A Heartbeat and a Guitar
Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears
Antonino D'Ambrosio
October 2009 ISBN: 1568584075

Johnny Cash recorded Bitter Tears in 1964, four years before his live performance at Folsom Prison and six years before he recorded Man in Black. More importantly, Cash placed himself in the middle of the fervent social upheavals gripping the nation at the time–the civil rights movement was rising, the Vietnam War was escalating, the anti-nuclear weapons campaign was galvanizing and the free speech and women's movement starting to bloom. One year removed from his monumental hit Ring of Fire, Cash was facing censorship and an angry backlash from radio stations, DJs, and fans, for speaking out on behalf of Native people. Cash decided to fight back.

A Heartbeat and a Guitar tells of the collaboration of two distinct yet connected musicians–iconoclast Johnny Cash and little known folk artist Peter LaFarge–and the album they created, Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian. It also tells of the unique personal, political and cultural struggles that informed this album–especially the fight for Native people's rights–one that has influenced scores of musicians and activists, from Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan to American Indian Movement co-founder Dennis Banks and Native activist-artist John Trudell.

Weaving multiple narrative threads and bringing in the stories of the long forgotten Native war hero Ira Hayes (immortalized in the Iwo Jima flag-raising photo), legendary musicians and producers, courageous Native activists, polarizing political leaders and outspoken citizen-artists, D'Ambrosio's A Heartbeat and a Guitar tells a sweeping story of an untold moment in Cash's career. In this inimitable account–which includes 34 never before seen photos by photographs by Jim Marshall and Diana Davies–A Heartbeat and a Guitar strays out of the recording studio and into the presidential campaigns, government halls, Indian reservations, picket lines, bohemian cafes, university campuses, factory lines, civil rights marches, fish-ins and anti-war protests.

What readers are saying

"Antonino D'Ambrosio has really done his homework like no one ever before. I performed with Cash for 40 years and have read every book written about him yet D'Ambrosio astonishingly reveals another side of Cash framed around perhaps his most important work, Bitter Tears. A Heartbeat and a Guitar is a rare and extraordinary work, thanks to D'Ambrosio's exceptional and masterful storytelling. This book must be read, not just by Cash fans, but everyone who loves music and believes in its power and spirit. D'Ambrosio's work, like Cash himself, is highly original and a force to be reckoned with."
–Johnny Western, musician and longtime emcee of The Johnny Cash Show.

"This book is a truly fascinating journey, charting the historical and social context of a courageous musical statement by one of our greatest rebel voices."
–Jim Jarmusch, filmmaker

"[The book] is a rich history, not only of Johnny Cash's life, but of the Indian struggle for justice... full of fascinating character sketches of the great folk singers of the Sixties, and their part in the social movements of that exciting era. I believe D'Ambrosio has made an important contribution to the cultural history of our time."
–Howard Zinn

"Antonino D'Ambrosio is the voice of a new generation–passionate, intelligent and fierce–whose work educates and inspires. He now brings his unique voice to tell a unique story of Johnny Cash's recording of the protest record Bitter Tears. It's the album no one knows about but is perhaps Cash's greatest record–and Antonino proves it."
–Chuck D of Public Enemy

About the Authors

Antonino D'Ambrosio is a writer, filmmaker, photographer and musician. He is the founder and director of La Lutta New Media Collective, a media activism and documentary film production group based in New York City. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The Progressive, Monthly Review, Color Lines, New Labor Forum and other publications. His recent documentaries include Desaparecidos and Piccolo Colli: The People of Russell Street. D'Ambrosio is the author of Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Politics of Joe Strummer; the film version features original art and animation by Shepard Fairey and original music from a wide range of musicians including Antibalas, Saul Williams, Chuck D and Thievery Corporation. His most recent short film is No Free Lunch, starring comedian Lewis Black.

Zinn: 9/11 Truth Is For “Fanatics”

http://www.prisonplanet.com/zinn-911-truth-is-for-fanatics-has-no-practical-political-significance.html

Zinn: 9/11 Truth Is For “Fanatics”, Has “No Practical Political Significance”
New comments cause more outrage after leftist historian said he didn’t care about what really happened on 9/11
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Friday, Nov 21, 2008

Just days after left-wing anti-war icon Howard Zinn told an audience that he didn’t care if 9/11 was an inside job, he has repeated the sentiment, stating that questions regarding the attacks have “no practical political significance” and that 9/11 truth activists are “fanatics” who are wasting their time.

During a lecture at UQAM university in Montréal, Zinn was once again asked if he would support a new 9/11 investigation.

Zinn responded:

“I have said that what happened on 9/11 deserves to be investigated more than it has been because I don’t accept and believe official investigations and official reports.

But having said that, and I want to say that this has really annoyed a lot of people, but why not, and I will annoy more people by saying that I think there are many people who have become fanatics about 9/11. By fanatics I mean, they think we should drop everything and just concentrate our energies on finding out what happened on 9/11.

I don’t think the question of what really happened on 9/11 is the most important question we can ask.”

Zinn then took a direct swipe at the 9/11 truth movement by stating:

“To tell a movement of citizens in the United States that this is something that we really have to make an issue of, I don’t believe it because we don’t need what happened on 9/11, we don’t need that to tell us about the crimes of the Bush administration.

I believe there are certain things that happen in history and certainly questions that are asked that divert us from the important things that we have to do at hand.

The truth is I don’t think anyone will ever really know what happened on 9/11 just as I don’t think anyone will really know who killed John F. Kennedy, and there are a lot of people who wasted a huge amount of time working on something that did not have any practical political significance.”

Zinn then asserted that his previous comments at a lecture in Colorado has been distorted and that he never said he did not care about 9/11 or the fact that it was in the past.

Zinn’s exact words that day were “I don’t know enough about it (the 9/11 conspiracy) and the truth is I don’t much care, that’s past.”

In our previous article we analysed how other leftist luminaries such as Noam Chomsky have belittled the efforts of 9/11 truth activists and attempted to dismiss the political significance of asking questions and highlighting evidence of government complicity in the attacks, while at the same time clearly acknowledging that the truth remains covered up and withheld.

This cements commentators such as Zinn and Chomsky as intellectual cowards and allows them to be used as leftist gatekeepers by an establishment that even they admit has used 9/11 as a means to facilitate aggressive and monstrous foreign and domestic agendas.

What really happened on 9/11 is not a distraction, it is the key to everything:

Without 9/11 there would be no “war on terror”.

Without 9/11 there would be no “clash of civilizations”

Without 9/11 there would be no war in Afghanistan.

Without 9/11 there would be no war in Iraq.

Without 9/11 there would be no war in Iran.

Without 9/11 there would be no war in… (insert any country classified as part of the “axis of evil” or defined as being “with the terrorists”)

Without 9/11 thousands of U.S. troops would not have been sent to their deaths.

Without 9/11 hundreds of thousands of citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan would not have been sentenced to their deaths.

Without 9/11 there would be no inaction on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Without 9/11 there would be no civilian contractors in Iraq and the scandal that has followed them would have been averted.

Without 9/11 there would be no false military reporting (Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch), and no crack down on the freedom of the press (banning photographing the returning coffins).

Without 9/11 there would be no Patriot Act.

Without 9/11 there would be no NSA warrantless wiretapping program.

Without 9/11 there would be no Camp Delta and no Camp X-ray at Guantanamo Bay.

Without 9/11 there would be no Military Commissions Act and no coordinated program of extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention and torture of those defined as “enemy combatants”.

Without 9/11 there would be no vast increase in secrecy and complete militarization of intelligence under the newly created office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Without 9/11 there would not be thousands of dead and dying emergency workers who are suffering crippling and fatal respiratory illnesses.

Without 9/11 there would be no vast increase in military and security spending that goes arm in arm with huge cutbacks in other key social programs (such as levees in New Orleans).

Without 9/11 there would have been no total abandonment of fiscal restraint, which has contributed to plunging the nation into an abyss of debt and looks likely to tip the world into a deep recession if not a complete depression.

And on and on and on.

Perhaps most importantly, without 9/11 there would be no “post 9/11 society/mentality”.

The ongoing ignorance of official 9/11 lies will continue to feed the fear and hostility that this post 9/11 environment is founded upon. If it is “fanatical” to attempt to pay attention to the man behind the curtain, so to speak, then every member of the 9/11 truth movement should plead guilty.

The definition of a “fanatic” is, in this writer’s humble opinion, much closer to the actions of the fawning audience at both of Howard Zinn’s afore mentioned lectures, who proceeded to inanely cheer their hero no matter what came out of his mouth.

Much more fanatical are the kind of pocket radicals who latch on to one way of thinking, stick steadfastly to one political paradigm, completely close their minds to the wider picture, proceeding to repeat adfinum to their friends in the “coffee revolution” shops what Zinn, Chomsky, Vidal and their ilk have said, in between conversations about the finer points of Jack Kerouac’s stream of consciousness prose, their understanding of the term ‘multiculturalism’ and the origins of Che Guevara’s seminal manual on the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare.

Such people can groan all they like when questions over 9/11 are raised, it doesn’t change the fact that every single significant action the Bush administration has taken over the last seven years, every attack on freedom and crime against humanity that they have committed stems from the events of 9/11.

Yes Mr Zinn, you have angered a great many politically minded people with your comments, but what do you expect when you state that you do not care about what really happened on the most historically significant day in our recent history, and in the lifetimes of many of us?

Indeed, this is the key to Zinn’s comments. To him, what really happened on 9/11 is not significant because it is HE who represents the past, it is HE who is wasting his time and it is HE who is politically insignificant.

News Flash: Obama hypnotizes Zinn

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4017.shtml

News Flash: Obama hypnotizes Zinn
By Mickey Z.
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Nov 18, 2008

Let’s say the New York Times hired a charismatic black man in his late 40s to run the newspaper and this popular man promised change. And let’s say I wrote an article that talked about what this man should do, what I hoped he’d do. For example, reduce the business section to a page, add a labor section, start covering people’s movements and protests, refuse advertising dollars from corporations that pollute, and hire me to run the op-ed page. Justifiably, I’d be called delusional and I’d be ridiculed for even suggesting such insane expectations.

Let’s say Perdue hired a charismatic black man in his late 40s to run the company and this popular man promised change. And let’s say I wrote an article that talked about what this man should do, what I hoped he’d do. For example: renounce the chicken slaughter business, shift operations to selling organic, locally-grown vegan food, and donate vast amounts of money to farm sanctuaries. Justifiably, I’d be called delusional and I’d be ridiculed for even suggesting such insane expectations.

Let’s say America elected a charismatic black man in his late 40s to run the country and this popular man promised change. And let’s say Howard Zinn wrote an article that talked about what this man should do, what he hoped he’d do. For example, “announce the withdrawal of our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan” and “renounce the Bush doctrine of preventive war as well as the Carter doctrine of military action to control Mideast oil.” Also, “radically change the direction of U.S. foreign policy, declare that the U.S. is a peace loving country which will not intervene militarily in other parts of the world, and start dismantling the military bases we have in over a hundred countries. Also, he must begin meeting with Medvedev, the Russian leader, to reach agreement on the dismantling of the nuclear arsenals, in keeping with the Nuclear Anti-Proliferation Treaty.” Then raise taxes on the rich and combine that windfall with the hundreds of billions of dollars freed from the military budget to “give free health care to everyone (and) put millions of people to work” and thus “transform” the United States and “make it a good neighbor to the world.”

Well, Howard Zinn has written such an article (“Obama’s Historic Victory,” Nov. 12, 2008) but is anyone calling him delusional and ridiculing him for even suggesting such insane expectations? The tens of thousands of readers who look to Zinn as a trusted voice of wisdom and reason are being dangerously misled by an article that omits the reality that every indication points to Barack Obama doing the exact opposite of what Zinn writes. Zinn knows as well as anyone that not an iota of evidence exists that Obama would do anything approaching what is described above. For a man of Zinn’s stature on the Left to even hint of such a possibility is a shockingly irresponsible act and one that only contributes to the misguided perception that Obama’s election is somehow a victory for the progressive Left.

Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at www.mickeyz.net.

Zinn: “I Don’t Care” If 9/11 Was An Inside Job

http://www.prisonplanet.com/howard-zinn-i-dont-care-if-911-was-an-inside-job.html

Howard Zinn: “I Don’t Care” If 9/11 Was An Inside Job
Another gatekeeper illustrates the intellectual cowardice of the establishment left
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, November 18, 2008

World renowned peace activist and left-wing anti-war icon Howard Zinn recently told an audience that he didn’t care if 9/11 was an inside job, echoing the disdainful and apathetic rhetoric of fellow liberal gatekeepers Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn in dismissing the efforts of the 9/11 truth movement.

Buddy Moore, Independent Candidate for US Senate in Colorado, asked Zinn if he would join him in voicing doubts about the official 9/11 story and in particular the demolition of the twin towers and Building 7.

Zinn said he was skeptical of the official story but then stated, “I don’t know much about the situation and the truth is, I don’t care that much about it, that’s passed….that’s a diversion from what we really have to do,” adding that debating who was behind 9/11, “gets in the way of dealing with the immediate situation”.

Moore attempted to ask Zinn a follow up question about allowing the perpetrators to go free but was largely shouted down by Zinn’s fawning army of left-wing sycophants.

Zinn’s comments echo similar sentiments expressed by fellow left-wing luminary, Noam Chomsky, who has repeatedly expressed arrogance and contempt towards the 9/11 truth movement while invoking apathy towards the contention that there was government complicity in the attacks, despite the fact that the 9/11 attacks happening exactly as the government maintains was key to launching the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the massive rollback in civil liberties that has occurred over the last seven years.

During a 2006 Internet forum event, Chomsky claimed that the 9/11 truth movement peddled “arcane and dubious theories” and had distracted activists from pursuing “crimes that are far more serious than blowing up the WTC,” presumably belittling the deaths of around 2,000 Americans, along with hundreds of thousands of Afghanis and Iraqis, as well as thousands of U.S. troops in the wars that followed that could not have been launched without the pretext of 9/11.

When a critic asked Chomsky why he was so dismissive of the supposition that 9/11 was a false flag event, pointing out numerous other examples throughout history including the bombing of the Maine, the Gulf of Tonkin incident and Pearl Harbor, Chomsky merely reiterated his insolence, stating, “The concept of “false flag operation” is not a very serious one, in my opinion. None of the examples you describe, or any other in history, has even a remote resemblance to the alleged 9/11 conspiracy. I’d suggest that you look at each of them carefully.”

Chomsky actually dismissed U.S. government complicity in 9/11 a mere four months after the event, and over a year before it was again invoked as a reason to invade Iraq, when he told an audience at a FAIR event at New York’s Town Hall, 22 January 2002, “That’s an internet theory and it’s hopelessly implausible. Hopelessly implausible. So hopelessly implausible I don’t see any point in talking about it,” in response to a question about U.S. government foreknowledge.

Note that Professor Chomsky also vehemently maintains that Lee Harvey Oswald was the long gunman in the JFK assassination, even despite polls showing that around 80 per cent of the American public believe otherwise.

Chomsky was presented with convincing evidence for a wider plot by JFK assassination experts as far back as 1969 and according to Selwyn Bromberger, an MIT philosophy professor who had sit in on the discussion, Chomsky indicated that he believed there was a conspiracy, but has failed to voice his conclusion for nearly 40 years.

It’s painfully clear that the likes of Zinn and Chomsky are intellectual cowards who, despite being abundantly aware of the fact that both 9/11 and the JFK assassination represent far wider conspiracies than the official version of events dictates, they are afraid of using their prominent soapboxes to bring either subject to wider attention for fear of whatever reprisals might ensue. As Vincent Salandria enunciates, this makes them worse than disinformation agents.

“I agree that Professor Chomsky is not a CIA agent,” states Salandria, “But with respect to his pronouncements on the JFK assassination he is worse than a CIA agent. Without being an agent, with his enormous prestige as a thinker, as an independent radical, as a courageous man, he does the work of the agency.”

Indeed, at the time of the release of Oliver Stone’s JFK movie, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and another liberal luminary, Alexander Cockburn, went on a seemingly orchestrated media campaign in an attempt to convince the public that the JFK assassination was not a wider conspiracy and also that it didn’t matter even if it was.

“When cornered themselves, Chomsky and Cockburn resort to rhetorical devices like exaggeration, sarcasm, and ridicule. In other words, they resort to propaganda and evasion,” notes one blogger.

The same rhetoric was utilized when questions about 9/11 reached a crescendo. Cockburn, Zinn and Chomsky not only dismiss clear evidence that the official story is demonstrably false, but in addition attempt to generate apathy around the whole issue, classic gatekeeper behavior in preventing the left from becoming active in pursuing the truth about 9/11.

WAR MADE EASY

WAR MADE EASY: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
Disinfo.com

In the critically-acclaimed and highly compelling film, WAR MADE EASY, a disturbing 50-year pattern of government deception is uncovered. Narrated by actor and activist Sean Penn, and based on the book by nationally-renowned media columnist Norman Solomon, this documentary is a scathing indictment of five decades of U.S. media coverage of American-led military interventions, and the pro-war spoon-feeding by both journalists and politicans to the American public. Marking the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, this film hailed by critics — called “a superb form of visual investigation” by noted author Howard Zinn — is more timely than ever for its release on DVD from The Disinformation Company.

How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death

Giving special attention to parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, WAR MADE EASY sets government spin and media collusion from the present, alongside virtually identical patterns from the past, guided by Solomon’s meticulous research and tough-minded analysis. Rare footage of political leaders and journalists from the past includes Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and news correspondents Walter Cronkite and Morley Safer. According to Solomon, whose work has been praised by The Los Angeles Times as “brutally persuasive,” the positive attention the film has received may indicate a new willingness to counter years of pro-war media spin and government deception. “These deep patterns of ongoing ‘perception management’ must be demystified and decoded if we're going to move beyond the horrors of perpetual war,” he said. “The way War Made Easy is being embraced could be an important step in that direction.”

An Official Selection of 2007’s International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam and the 2007 Montreal and Vancouver International Film Festivals, WAR MADE EASY, directed by Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp, is an invaluable introduction to war propaganda and public relations that transcends partisan politics, and raises serious questions about the role of journalism and political communication in our society.

Available for interview: Norman Solomon

Solomon is a nationally syndicated columnist on media and politics, as well as the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a national consortium of policy researchers and analysts. He has been writing the weekly “Media Beat” column since 1992. The book on which the film was based, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, was published in 2005 and The Los Angeles Times called it “a must-read for those who would like greater context with their bitter morning coffee, or to arm themselves for the debates about Iraq that are still to come.” His latest book is Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State (October 2007).

About The Disinformation Company

The Disinformation Company Ltd is active in documentary production, book publishing and home entertainment. It is most widely recognized for its publishing and distribution efforts on subjects not usually covered by the traditional media. Recent DVD exclusives from The Disinformation Company include the best-selling Robert Greenwald documentaries Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War, and Unconstitutional: The War on our Civil Liberties, as well as Robert Baer’s The Cult of the Suicide Bomber, and Greg Palast’s Bush Family Fortunes.

Zinn's "A People's History of American Empire"

http://www.buzzflash.com/store/reviews/1030

Howard Zinn's "A People's History of American Empire" Illustrated Edition -- Just Released (Large Format Paperback)
Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, and Paul Buhle

From the epilogue:

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of a cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness."

-- Howard Zinn

And you'll need hope after this new fasicnating cartoon/graphic adaptation of Howard Zinn's bestselling history of America, as adapted to the growth of American Empire. Could it be more timely?

From the publisher:

Adapted from the bestselling grassroots history of the United States, the story of America in the world, told in comics form

Since its landmark publication in 1980, A People’s History of the United States has had six new editions, sold more than 1.7 million copies, become required classroom reading throughout the country, and been turned into an acclaimed play. More than a successful book, A People’s History triggered a revolution in the way history is told, displacing the official versions with their emphasis on great men in high places to chronicle events as they were lived, from the bottom up.

Now Howard Zinn, historian Paul Buhle, and cartoonist Mike Konopacki have collaborated to retell, in vibrant comics form, a most immediate and relevant chapter of A People’s History: the centuries-long story of America’s actions in the world. Narrated by Zinn, this version opens with the events of 9/11 and then jumps back to explore the cycles of U.S. expansionism from Wounded Knee to Iraq, stopping along the way at World War I, Central America, Vietnam, and the Iranian revolution. The book also follows the story of Zinn, the son of poor Jewish immigrants, from his childhood in the Brooklyn slums to his role as one of America’s leading historians.

Shifting from world-shattering events to one family’s small revolutions, A People’s History of American Empire presents the classic ground-level history of America in a dazzling new form.

About the collaborators for the book:

Howard Zinn, author of numerous acclaimed histories, taught history at Spelman College and Boston University, and has received the Lannan Literary Award, among many others. A People's History of the United States was a finalist for the 1980 National Book Award. He lives in Massachusetts.

Mike Konopacki has collaborated on five collections of cartoons, and his work is regularly syndicated. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Paul Buhle is a senior lecturer in history at Brown University and the editor of the Encyclopedia of the American Left, among other books. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.