As a young newspaper reporter in Texas, I covered my fair share of speeches. The thrill of hearing an important person give carefully prepared remarks wore off quickly. So I got in the habit of turning away from the speaker and watching the crowd.
And I suppose that explains why I’ve always liked Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. The main stage of history was never his focus. He was more curious about ordinary people, and he tried to tell their story.
Zinn helped cast light on long-ignored bits of America’s past. But more importantly, he changed the way many people look at history and at the world around them. According to The Boston Globe, Zinn wrote in his 1994 autobiography:
From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.
Every country needs a historian like Zinn—someone who can make people see their story in a different light. So it was a shame to hear that he died Wednesday at age 87. He will be missed.