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Lessons From the People’s Historian, Howard Zinn

His take on history arms youth with the courage to “transform the world.” It’s no wonder the right aims to erase it.

Nothing says more about the fear of history on the part of right-wing elites than the fact that Donald Trump used a presidential address—delivered in the summer that saw tens of millions of Americans take to the streets to protest the police murder of George Floyd—to attack Howard Zinn.

Despite the fact that the protests against structural violence and racism had been largely peaceful, with masses of demonstrators asserting their right to assemble and petition for the redress of grievances, Trump used his September 2020 address at the National Archives Museum to go after the radical historian who told the real story of America.

“[The] left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools. It’s gone on far too long,” our endlessly divisive and mendacious president griped. “Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.”

Trump’s attack on Zinn, however, revealed something that the president and his minions share with the historian they so decried: a fundamental belief that history written from the point of view of social movements holds the potential to empower the powerless. That’s why Zinn worked his entire life to popularize a fresh take on American history. And that’s why his critics aim to erase it. They have always feared, and they fear especially in this 250th year of “the American experiment,” something Zinn wrote about decades ago: “Our country is full of heroic people who are not Presidents or military leaders or Wall Street wizards, but who are doing something to keep alive the spirit of resistance to injustice and war. To ward off alienation and gloom, it is only necessary to remember the unremembered heroes of the past, and to look around us for the unnoticed heroes of the present.”

Trump and his trembling allies oppose an honest telling of the American story because their algorithms and their propagandists aim to foster alienation and gloom—conditions that are essential to making a populace feel defeated. And that strategy won’t work if the vast majority of Americans recognize that they have a shared history of racial, social, and economic oppression by oligarchs, both old and new.

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This explains why Trump’s regime is trying to ban books like Zinn’s best-selling classic A People’s History of the United States—even though it’s unlikely that Trump ever read the book, or bothered to learn anything about Zinn’s own life story before the historian’s death in 2010. One would be forgiven for wondering, especially given Trump’s stated belief that Frederick Douglass is “an example of somebody who’s done........

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