milestone

Howard Zinn, the tireless advocate for the world's dispossessed and socialist historian has died. He was 87.

Zinn was the author of the celebrated "People's History of the United States," which made the old, familiar stories seem unfamiliar by looking at them from an underdog's perspective. It was published in 1980 with no fanfare and had an initial press run of 5,000 copies, but it caught on mainly through word of mouth, and by 2003 its sales topped a million.

Howard Zinn's Associated Press obit says that At a time when few politicians dared even call themselves liberal, "A People's History" told an openly left-wing story. Zinn charged Christopher Columbus and other explorers with genocide, picked apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and celebrated workers, feminists and war resisters.

Even liberal historians were uneasy with Zinn. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once said: "I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don't take him very seriously. He's a polemicist, not a historian."

In a 1998 interview with The Associated Press, Zinn acknowledged he was not trying to write an objective history, or a complete one. He called his book a response to traditional works, the first chapter — not the last — of a new kind of history.

Zinn never denied that everything he wrote and said was informed by the causes to which he dedicated his life. He filed his last column for The Progressive magazine this past July, a provocative and challenging examination of whether the three wars in our history most of us usually consider sacrosanct -- the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II, were really necessary, and in that essay he concludes that:

We’ve got to rethink this question of war and come to the conclusion that war cannot be accepted, no matter what. No matter what the reasons given, or the excuse: liberty, democracy; this, that. War is by definition the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people for ends that are uncertain. Think about means and ends, and apply it to war. The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate.

Well said, Howard Zinn, as always. We're going to miss you.