Howard Zinn helped me discover our history

When I was in school I was never very interested in history. It appeared to me to be a dry and boring collection of dates, places and names that never really engaged me. The only history that I was interested in was what Shakespeare, Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote in their plays. They made it dramatic, tragic and often ironic. Where, I often thought, was the drama, tragedy and irony in American history? And, most importantly, where were the characters, the people behind the dry facts? It made it all the more curious that having come of age in the late sixties, I knew for a fact that there certainly were characters who impacted our history.

And then I discovered Howard Zinn’s book, “A People’s History of the United States.” There they were, all of the engaging stories. I sat down and read the almost 700-page book over a rainy weekend. Here were all of the characters I had wondered about – Lucy Stone, the early suffragette and marriage critic, who was the first woman to keep her own name after marrying; the Lynn, Massachusetts mill workers who worked for pennies and were some of our first and greatest organizers; Joel Spring who first noted that the development of a factory-like system in the schoolroom was no accident; Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, the Wobblies, and on and on, right up to the folks I remember from television, rather than a history book, like the Berrigan brothers and Leonard Pelletier, and some I knew personally, like Karen Nussbaum, founder of the 9-5 National Association of Working Women.

Howard Zinn was 87 when he died this week. He kept working until the day he died. He was a storyteller extraordinaire, and brought to life the most important events in American history. He showed us that history was not about facts, date and names, but rather about drama, tragedy and irony and, most importantly, about the people – many unknown to all but a few – that made this country what it is today.

He will be sorely missed.

Thankfully, his book will live on for future generations to discover.