RIP Howard Zinn

Depending on your political take, Howard Zinn was either an excellent historian covering issues of how the people rose up to confront civil rights issues and other personal struggles in society or a controversial figure advocating radical change.

Either way, the author of The People's History of the United States has died at 87.

As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train” (1994), “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.”