Uncommon Sense: From the Writings of Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn · Dean Birkenkamp · Wanda Rhudy

ene 2016 · Routledge

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Why Howard Zinn has become one of the most important and influential American historians is perhaps nowhere more evident than in this new book. Few social critics have been as inspiring as the ever-hopeful Zinn and, unlike many historians, Zinn turns historical details toward deeper observations on the universal truths and struggles of humankind. His remarkable wisdom and insight can be found in his earliest writings through his latest essays, speeches, and plays. Uncommon Sense brings together his most poignant and profound quotations from decades of writing and speaking. The book reveals the philosophical side of Howard Zinn and a consistency of vision over 50 years on topics ranging from government to race, history, law, civil disobedience, and activism. Offering quotations of universal and timeless quality, the book shows why history will regard this historian as a political and moral philosopher in the company of Paine, Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr.

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A committed radical historian and activist, Howard Zinn approaches the study of the past from the point of view of those whom he feels have been exploited by the powerful. Zinn was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1922. After working in local shipyards during his teens, he joined the U.S. Army Air Force, where he saw combat as a bombardier in World War II. He received a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 1958 and was a postdoctoral fellow in East Asian studies at Harvard University. While teaching at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, Zinn joined the civil rights movement and wrote The Southern Mystique (1964) and SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964). He also became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, writing Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal (1967) and visiting Hanoi to receive the first American prisoners released by the North Vietnamese. Zinn's best-known and most-praised work, as well as his most controversial, is A People's History of the United States (1980). It explores American history under the thesis that most historians have favored those in power, leaving another story untold. Zinn discusses such topics as Native American views of Columbus and the socialist and anarchist opposition to World War I in examining his theory that historical change is most often due to "mass movements of ordinary people." Zinn's other books include You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times (1995) and Artists in Times of War (2004). He has also written the plays Emma (1976), Daughter of Venus (1985), and Marx in Soho (1999).