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This page includes, in addition to news about historians, news about political scientists, economists, law professors, and others who write about history.

Monday, February 8, 2010

Victorian historian tells what we can learn from Victorian ideas on thrift

Source: BBC History Magazine (2-1-10)

One of the most fascinating questions raised by the economic downturn is whether it will permanently change our economic and personal behaviour. And it is a question with plenty of historical echoes. An old fashioned word – thrift – has been heard once again as the binge spending of recent years is followed by a painful consumer hangover. And thrift is often associated, as it always was, not only with saving money but also with leading a morally improved life....

Historian Katy Pettit has been researching the consumption habits of better-off working-class families in the East End of London from 1880 to 1914. She has discovered ideals that emerged from those communities themselves. They were a matter of pragmatic response to changing circumstances and personal preferences about consumption, rather than a moral or religious ideal of thrift. Women’s skill in managing family budgets was at the centre of this. “Such a highly valued skill was a crucial component of working-class respectability,” she argues.

Pettit notes the example of one woman from Wapping who “was highly proficient at keeping the family accounts and would have liked to have been an accountant if born a man”. Such skills were not just about the routine, but also involved “learning to adapt quickly to uncontrollable situations” – caused not only by unemployment but also by, for instance, a bereavement.

Much has been made in today’s economic crisis about how far people are changing their shopping habits, perhaps trading down from more expensive food stores. Katy Pettit’s research shows how shrewd shopping was not an exceptional response but a way of life for many East Enders. This involved cultivating good relationships with shopkeepers, and knowing when to find bargains – for example, at the end of the day. Children were also a well-informed part of the family economy, running errands in return for edible rewards. “Although today child labour is sometimes considered to be exploitative”, she argues, “the late-Victorian and Edwardian version in east London was complex, and the work was not necessarily harmful”....

What emerges from Pettit’s research is a sophisticated sense of consumer choice extending well below those with middle-class incomes. Individuals or families would trade economising in one area against the enjoyment of a particular luxury. The local press contained sophisticated recipes, and shops in poorer areas would stock foods such as pâté de foie gras....

So ‘thrift’ in such communities was not so much the self-denial with which the well-to-do sought to advertise their virtue. It was about families constantly managing resources in the hope of maintaining a lifestyle – including some more expensive consumption – whatever the circumstances. Today’s hard-pressed consumers will know the feeling.

Posted on Monday, February 8, 2010 at 4:05 PM | Comments (0) | Top

New ways to write the story of the world

Source: Boston Globe (2-7-10)

Zinn was not the first to upend the traditional historical narrative in this way; his bottom-up vision of history drew heavily on the work of previous generations of revisionist historians. What Zinn did in his “People’s History” was stitch that work together into an overarching narrative and give it a polemical edge.

Yet Zinn’s work remains a testament to the power of vantage point, an example of how coming at a familiar set of historical facts from a different angle can completely change what we know about them. And today, historians of all stripes are applying that lesson in new and fascinating ways. These scholars are not the heirs of Zinn, politically or intellectually, but their work shares his conviction that we can and should see the past anew.

Environmental historians, for example, are looking not just at society but its interaction with the natural world, exploring the ways that man has altered and been altered by it. Proponents of so-called neurohistory are looking at the human brain, arguing that it is not solely the product of evolution, but of culture and technological advances - of history, in other words, rather than just biology. Other historians are rearranging the boundaries their colleagues use to partition the past into useful categories, creating fields like “Pacific history” that focus on the ways that navigable bodies of water have linked and shaped societies as much as national borders have. Still others are using the tools of science to answer longstanding historical questions - melding history, archeology, and sciences ranging from genetics to computer programming to climatology into a sprawling new field called “archeoscience.”

Posted on Monday, February 8, 2010 at 1:25 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Niall Ferguson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali: a new power couple

Source: The Daily Mail (UK) (2-7-10)

With their close ties to David Cameron and illustrious careers in academia and publishing, they were a formidable couple.

But last night it appeared that the 16-year marriage of celebrated historian Niall Ferguson and former newspaper editor Sue Douglas has ended.

The Harvard professor has left his wife for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a glamorous Somali lawyer threatened with death for scripting a film critical of Islam.

A friend of Miss Douglas, 52, said: 'Despite all the lessons of history, Niall has set himself off in pursuit of some liberal idea of individual freedom and appears hellbent on breaking up his family....

Neither Ferguson nor Miss Hirsi Ali were available for comment....

Posted on Sunday, February 7, 2010 at 5:50 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, February 5, 2010

Activist Historian Howard Zinn's Obit on NPR Causes a Firestorm

Source: NPR.org (2-4-10)

There's a taboo not to speak ill of the dead. Or if you are going to, then at least be nuanced and even-handed about it.

And that's what hundreds said about a Jan. 28 remembrance of Howard Zinn, the activist historian who died Jan. 27....

Zinn, 87, died of a heart attack last Wednesday while on a speaking tour in California. NPR scrambled to get something on the air for All Things Considered (ATC) the next night.

The four-minute piece by Allison Keyes quoted three sources: two who praised Zinn and one, David Horowitz, who was harshly critical. It was the commentary by Horowitz that led Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a left-leaning media watchdog group, to initiate a campaign that resulted in over 1,600 emails, over 100 phone calls and 108 comments on npr.org. Others complained on air....

Not surprisingly, he was no fan of Zinn's.

"There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn's intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect," Horowitz declared in the NPR story. "Zinn represents a fringe mentality which has unfortunately seduced millions of people at this point in time. So he did certainly alter the consciousness of millions of younger people for the worse."...

Adam Bernstein, the Washington Post's obituaries editor, also heard the Zinn obit.

"I think the Zinn story misses the mark for two reasons," said Bernstein. "It quotes people with a vested interest in celebrating the man and then quotes a man who vividly despises what Zinn represents."

Neither works well....

I also asked Alana Baranick, author of "Life on the Death Beat: A Handbook for Obituary Writers," to listen to the story. She wrote obits for the Cleveland Plain Dealer for 16 years. She thought it was fair to use Horowitz to balance out leftist academic Noam Chomsky, who said "Zinn had changed the conscience of a generation."

"If I had been doing that NPR obit, I would not have cited Horowitz or Chomsky," said Baranick. "I would have looked to less controversial figures for comments. [Quoting] historians, who are not considered political activists, would have been more appropriate."...

Posted on Friday, February 5, 2010 at 5:07 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Peter Calvocoressi, codebreaker and historian, dies at 97

Source: Telegraph (UK) (2-5-10)

Peter Calvocoressi, who died on February 5 aged 97, had a distinguished and varied career as a wartime codebreaker, historian, publisher and author; he published books about the Second World War and world politics since 1945, as well as studies of Africa, the Middle East, Britain and Europe.

As head of air intelligence at Station X — the top secret headquarters at Bletchley Park of the codebreakers who cracked Germany’s Enigma cipher during the Second World War — Calvocoressi played a critical role in the operation to intercept high-level German orders. This intelligence, known as Ultra, and provided by his team of mathematicians, linguists and other experts, not only helped win the Battle of Britain but also furnished details of Hitler’s proposed invasion in Operation Sea Lion, eventually abandoned as too risky....

His account of his wartime work at Bletchley Park, Top Secret Ultra, appeared in 1980. In it Calvocoressi emphasised the decisive role played by Ultra in intercepting communications: “Ultra took the blindfold off our eyes so that we could see the enemy in detail in a way in which he could not see us.”...

Peter John Ambrose Calvocoressi was born on November 17 1912 in Karachi, then part of British India, now Pakistan, into one of the great Greek mercantile families which could trace its roots back to Byzantium and which had flourished in a much intermarried enclave in late 19th-century London. Of these families, the most prosperous and successful were the Rallis, of whose bank his father was a director.

Moving to England at the age of three months, Peter was brought up at Holme Hey, a substantial house on the fringe of Sefton Park, Liverpool, and was dismayed to be called a “greasy Greek” at prep school in Kent. Largely on the strength of his Latin translation of Abide With Me, he won a scholarship to Eton (where he discarded God and identified himself as a political radical) and in 1934 took a first in History at Balliol. His parents wanted him to try for the Foreign Office but he was warned off by Anthony Eden, who said that with a name like Calvocoressi he would never get anywhere in the service — even if he succeeded in entering it....

After standing unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate in the 1945 general election, Calvocoressi spent five years between 1949 and 1954 with the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House under Arnold Toynbee. He was later offered the post of director-general, but by then he had joined the board of the publishers, Chatto & Windus, which he was unwilling to leave, and where he spent the next 11 years....

He wrote a number of books on history and international affairs, including The British Experience 1945-75 (1978), Independent Africa and the World (1985) and Who’s Who in the Bible (1987). He published his brief autobiography, Threading My Way, in 1994.

Posted on Friday, February 5, 2010 at 2:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Eric Foner: Zinn's Critical History

Source: The Nation (2-4-10)

[Eric Foner, a member of The Nation's editorial board, is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and editor of Our Lincoln, a collection of essays recently published by W. W. Norton and author of Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction.]

Friedrich Nietzsche once identified three approaches to the writing of history: the monumental, the antiquarian and the critical, the last being history "that judges and condemns." Howard Zinn, who died on January 27 at 87, wrote the third kind. Unlike many historians, he was not afraid to speak out about the difference between right and wrong....

I have long been struck by how many excellent students of history first had their passion for the past sparked by reading Howard Zinn. Sometimes, to be sure, his account tended toward the Manichaean, an oversimplified narrative of the battle between the forces of light and darkness. But A People's History taught an inspiring and salutary lesson--that despite all too frequent repression, if America has a history to celebrate it lies in the social movements that have made this a better country. As for past heroes, Zinn insisted, one should look not to presidents or captains of industry but to radicals such as Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony and Eugene V. Debs....

A few years ago, I lectured at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota (the hometown of the late, lamented Senator Paul Wellstone). Zinn had been there a few days before, and across the top of the student newspaper was emblazoned the headline Zinn Attacks State. I sent Howard a copy. We laughingly agreed that he could not have a more appropriate epitaph.

Posted on Friday, February 5, 2010 at 11:28 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

American historians weigh in on the Illinois senate election

Source: RealClearPolitics (2-2-10)

The Senate Democratic primary in Illinois today carries more weight than a single election. The winner will be running to salvage a piece of the Obama presidential legacy -- if a Republican wins the seat in November, Barack Obama would become the first senator-turned-president to lose his former seat to the opposite party.

Of course, there isn't much precedent for this. In 2008, Obama became just the third sitting senator elected president, following John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Warren G. Harding in 1920. Kennedy was replaced by the appointed Benjamin Smith, a Democrat, who safeguarded the seat until Edward M. Kennedy came of age in 1962 and won a special election. Harding's first term in the Senate was up in 1920, and Republican Frank B. Willis successfully ran to replace him....

"I don't know if it will affect his legacy, but it certainly will have an effect on his presidency," said Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University. "Symbolically, it will be read as another sign of his weakness."

"The bottom line is that Obama needs to retake the political initiative," said Stephen J. Wayne, a presidential scholar at Georgetown University. "He needs a Democratic nominee who can win and will support his policy priorities; he needs to return to the policy and political offensive. The election of a sympathetic Democratic Senator from Illinois will help."...

"I doubt whether the President's legacy will stand or fall on that election," said Wayne.

However, Zelizer noted, Obama's agenda took a hit with the Massachusetts loss, and the loss of his Senate seat "would certainly fall into that story."

Posted on Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at 1:12 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, February 1, 2010

Louis R. Harlan, Historian of Booker T. Washington, Dies at 87

Source: NYT (1-29-10)

Louis R. Harlan, whose definitive two-volume biography of Booker T. Washington convincingly embraced its subject’s daunting complexities and ambiguities and won both the Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, died on Jan. 22 in Lexington, Va. He was 87....

Mr. Harlan, a white Southerner, made race relations and Southern history his field of inquiry after attending a guest lecture by John Hope Franklin at Johns Hopkins University in the 1940s. When the historian Marquis James died in 1955 before he could embark on a planned biography of Washington, Mr. Harlan took up the task.

It took him nearly three decades to finish it, largely because at the same time he was editing, with Raymond L. Smock, a 14-volume edition of Washington’s papers, published between 1972 and 1988.

“Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901” was published by Oxford University Press in 1972 and won the Bancroft Prize the following year. “Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915,” published by Oxford in 1983, won both the Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1984. “It was the first really three-dimensional work that went into the secret life, the private world, of the most famous black man of his time,” said Mr. Smock, the author of “Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the Age of Jim Crow” (Ivan R. Dee, 2009)....

Posted on Monday, February 1, 2010 at 11:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

A Historian for Everyday People

Source: Forbes (2-1-10)

[Laura Dean is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.]

Howard Zinn, historian, author and lifelong activist, spent his life writing about and remembering the lives of ordinary people. After his death this past Wednesday we begin to go about remembering him.

A native Brooklynite, Zinn attended New York City public schools and worked in shipyards until he joined the Army Air Force during World War II. He entered college on the GI Bill as a 27-year-old freshman and went on to receive his Ph.D. from Columbia University....

An activist-academic, Zinn didn't quite sit comfortably in either realm. In 1956 he joined the history department at Spelman College, a historically all-black women's college in Atlanta but was eventually dismissed for encouraging Spelman's young women to picket and engage in other "unladylike" activities. Later, as a professor at Boston University, Zinn got into many public spats with John Silbur, then-president of the school, for becoming too involved in protests....

As a historian he has been accused of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in rejecting all prevailing historical narratives. In a later work, entitled The Politics of History, Zinn decried the historian's role as a neutral documentarian of human events. Zinn's methods were lambasted by some historians who accused him of sacrificing historical detail and nuance to an ideology that painted all elites as villains and privileged the voices of the oppressed. Nevertheless, in the face of vociferous criticism, Zinn entered the canon of American historical teaching and is one of the most widely read historians of his time....

Posted on Monday, February 1, 2010 at 5:19 PM | Comments (0) | Top

National Humanities Alliance issues call to March meeting in Washington DC

Source: National Humanities Alliance (2-1-10)

In The Audacity of Hope, author Barack Obama recounts a conversation he had with MIT scientist Robert Langer at Northwestern University’s 2006 commencement in which they discuss a declining federal investment in research and development through the nation’s higher education institutions. The passage is important because it lays the intellectual groundwork for the soon-to-be Presidential candidate’s innovation agenda, including a $42 billion proposal to spur America’s competitiveness through increased federal R&D spending. It also provides an excellent example of effective advocacy outside of Washington. But it is to the following remark that I would like to call your attention:

“Dr. Langer’s observation isn’t unique. Each month, it seems, scientists and engineers visit my office to discuss the federal government’s diminished commitment to funding basic scientific research. Over the last three decades federal funding for the physical, mathematical, and engineering sciences has declined as a percentage of GDP- just at the time when other countries are substantially increasing their own R &D budgets....”

Since taking office, President Obama has maintained his commitment to increase research funding and on February 17, 2009 one of his first acts as President was to sign into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a $780 stimulus bill with more than $14 billion in funding for science and health R&D, including $3 billion to the National Science Foundation for grants to advance research and education in science and math.

I know this isn’t news to most of you, but my point is this: President Obama’s R&D agenda did not develop in a vacuum. It was informed to a great extent (and by the President’s own account) by the advocacy of scientists and engineers who came to Washington to make the case for increased federal investment, throughout Obama’s tenure as a member of the United States Senate.

We need your help in Washington, DC on March 8–9 to make the case for the humanities. Your Representatives and Senators need to hear directly from you, as a leader in your field, on the importance of federal investment in the humanities. Please register today to attend the National Humanities Alliance’s Annual Meeting and Humanities Advocacy Day. The 2010 program will include:

Panel discussions on current developments in humanities policy
Luncheon and keynote address with NEH Chairman Jim Leach
Briefings on federal funding and legislative priorities
Capitol Hill reception
New advocate training
Congressional visits

Success of this year’s event depends upon participation from our member organizations and institutions. If you are unable to attend, as a voting Member Representative, please make sure your organization or institution is represented by designating another staff person, a board member, campus colleague, or other representative.

Help maintain our momentum. Together we can raise the profile of the humanities research and education community in Washington, and build an infrastructure for advocacy in the humanities for the long-term. I ask that you let us know as soon as possible how your organization will be represented.

Thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely,
Jessica Jones Irons
Executive Director

Posted on Monday, February 1, 2010 at 4:35 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Roger Crowley: Bernard Lewis, the Ottoman Empire, and Modern Turkey

Source: History Today (2-1-10)

[Roger Crowley was born in 1951 and spent part of his childhood in Malta. He read English at Cambridge University and taught English in Istanbul, where he developed a strong interest in the history of Turkey. He has traveled widely throughout the Mediterranean basin over many years and has a wide-ranging knowledge of its history and culture. He lives in Gloucestershire, England. He is also the author of 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West.]

In October 1953 the historian Bernard Lewis wrote an article for History Today about the Ottoman Empire and its relations with Europe. The occasion was the 500th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople; his purpose was to plead for a more balanced assessment of the empire and to accord it an honourable place in world history, to see the fall of Constantinople not as a ‘victory of barbarism, but rather of another and not undistinguished civilization’...

Lewis laid out the historiography that has informed European views of the Ottomans. The events of 1453 happened on the cusp of the printing revolution; one of its first uses was to disseminate virulent accounts of ‘the damnable menace of the Grand Turk of the infidels’; particularly influential was the 17th-century bestseller, Richard Knolles’ The General History of the Turks, about ‘the present terror of the world’.Out of these antecedents has come a complex set of emotional associations about the Turks, coloured by racial memory, admiration for classical Greece and the development of modern nationalisms which have skewed an objective assessment of a great world civilisation:‘for most Europeans,’ Lewis argued,‘the loss of Constantinople is a great historical disaster, a defeat for Christendom which has never been repaired.’ While drawing a distinction between the heyday of the empire in its pomp and its ramshackle exodus in the 19th and 20th centuries, he sketched the achievements of the mature empire – its comparative tolerance, its efficient governance, its creation of peace and security within the Arab lands and the Balkans, its stability, its regeneration of an ossified Byzantine Constantinople, the beauty of its art and architecture. Above all, Lewis pleaded for a study of the Turks through their own eyes and their own words rather than through the prejudices of western travellers....

The Ottomans remain a conundrum, both distant and very near. The last subjects of the Ottoman Empire are still alive, yet its language is so dead that Turkish people cannot read their grandparents’gravestones. Its life was so long that it encompassed both the golden age of Suleiman the Magnificent and the decline of the Sick Man of Europe; the open-armed welcome to the Jews after their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the fate of the Armenians in 1915. Lewis was inviting us to salute the majesty of the former but has been accused of airbrushing the latter. The Ottomans puzzle the Turks almost as much as they do outsiders. Ataturk encouraged his new republic to jump over the decadent Ottoman centuries and claim connection with the ‘purer’Turkishness of their central Asian origins. In the process the Turks too have been left with a soul-searching debate about ethnicity, history and identity. A clear perspective on the multiple faces of the Ottoman Empire remains a work in progress.

Posted on Monday, February 1, 2010 at 4:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Joseph Massad at UCLA: Gay-Bashing 101

Source: Front Page Mag (2-1-10)

A lecture last week at the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES) offered a mixture of intellectually deficient material mixed with a dash of bigotry. It was delivered by Joseph Massad, associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University.

The topic of Massad’s lecture was “Pre-Positional Conjunctions: Sexuality and/in Islam.” While past CNES lectures resulted in Israel-bashing and anti-Semitism, UCLA finally decided to honor its commitment to diversity by attacking another minority group. This time, homosexuals had their turn in the multicultural bile wheel.

From inception to completion, Massad’s lecture was nothing more than gay-bashing. This was on par with the thesis of Massad’s 2007 book, Desiring Arabs, which posits that gay sexuality among Muslims does not exist. Rather, it is a Western plot designed to undermine the Muslim world....

Massad also used the occasion to present a novel – and decidedly homophobic – conspiracy theory. “Queer is an imperialist term,” he announced. “It is part of the Anglo-American gay agenda.” Indeed, according to Massad, “queer is an example of cultural imperialism.” It followed, by his perverse logic, that the “use of ‘gay’ in Iran is imperial politics.” The claim called to mind Mahmoud Ahmadinejad notorious speech at Columbia University, in which he assured the audience that there are no gay people in his country. It’s notable that the views of a theocratic despot should find such staunch backing in the hear of supposedly progressive academia....

Posted on Monday, February 1, 2010 at 12:21 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Business historian Richard Tedlow talks about denial

Source: Newark Star-Ledger (1-28-10)

As a business historian, Richard Tedlow has studied just about every big business disaster in America....

"It’s hard to beat denial, because it’s comfortable. It’s everywhere, just everywhere," said Tedlow, a Harvard University Business School professor and the author of several business-related books.

His newest book — "Denial: Why Business Leaders Fail to Look Facts in the Face — And What to Do About It" — is to be released in March. In it, Tedlow explores the consequences of ignoring realities in an increasingly competitive and global marketplace.

"Today, we live in a much less-forgiving world," he said. "You can’t afford denial. You don’t have the cushion of days gone by."...

["]The most recent example is General Motors. Here is a company that for years was losing share point by share point. Finally, they went bankrupt. In the 1950s, when GM’s CEO was Time Magazine’s "Man of the Year," that would have been inconceivable.["]

["]But they lost sight of the customer. In the old days, people kept a car for three years. After the oil shock of the 1970s and stagflation, people kept their cars longer. It means the quality of the car you’re buying becomes far more important, so if Toyota is building quality automobiles that last longer, you’re going to migrate to that.["]

["]The dot-com implosion is another example, where companies were valued not by rock-solid metrics, like return-on-equity or profit, but rather share of eyeballs, with no sense of how to monetize it and convert it into profits. People weren’t asking those questions. And then, as if to show how little we learned, we fell right from that into a housing bubble. It crashed the whole economy. We’re still trying to work our way out of it["]....

Posted on Monday, February 1, 2010 at 9:28 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Obama's Presidency Draws Comparisons to Jimmy Carter by historians

Source: FOX News (1-30-10)

The similarities between Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter are undeniable.

Carter studied nuclear physics and taught Sunday School. Obama edited the Harvard Law Review and taught constitutional law. Both can flash a million-dollar smile. And both won the Nobel Peace Prize....

Historian Walter Russell Mead argues both men came to power after exceptionally turbulent times. The Vietnam-Watergate era for Carter. The post-9/11 "war on terror" period for Obama.

And both sought to reduce tensions between the U.S. and its adversaries. But that goal, Mead said, conflicts with another held by both presidents.

"Both Obama and Carter were in some ways visionary idealists," he said. "And they're worried about issues like genocide, like poverty, tyranny around the world. And so it becomes very hard: How do you balance a human rights agenda with a kind of live-and-let live agenda?

"You reach out to Iran and you ask Russia for help, that means that now Putin and Ahmadinejad have the power to either make you look good or look bad. So when you set out to try to reduce tensions with adversaries, you can sometime give hostages to fortune."

Posted on Monday, February 1, 2010 at 9:22 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Bob Herbert: Howard Zinn was "a radical treasure"

Source: NYT (1-30-10)

I had lunch with Howard Zinn just a few weeks ago, and I’ve seldom had more fun while talking about so many matters that were unreservedly unpleasant: the sorry state of government and politics in the U.S., the tragic futility of our escalation in Afghanistan, the plight of working people in an economy rigged to benefit the rich and powerful.

Mr. Zinn could talk about all of that and more without losing his sense of humor. He was a historian with a big, engaging smile that seemed ever-present. His death this week at the age of 87 was a loss that should have drawn much more attention from a press corps that spends an inordinate amount of its time obsessing idiotically over the likes of Tiger Woods and John Edwards....

Think of what this country would have been like if those ordinary people had never bothered to fight and sometimes die for what they believed in. Mr. Zinn refers to them as “the people who have given this country whatever liberty and democracy we have.”...

Mr. Zinn would protest peacefully for important issues he believed in — against racial segregation, for example, or against the war in Vietnam — and at times he was beaten and arrested for doing so. He was a man of exceptionally strong character who worked hard as a boy growing up in Brooklyn during the Depression. He was a bomber pilot in World War II, and his experience of the unmitigated horror of warfare served as the foundation for his lifelong quest for peaceful solutions to conflict.

He had a wonderful family, and he cherished it. He and his wife, Roslyn, known to all as Roz, were married in 1944 and were inseparable for more than six decades until her death in 2008. She was an activist, too, and Howard’s editor. “I never showed my work to anyone except her,” he said.

They had two children and five grandchildren.

Mr. Zinn was in Santa Monica this week, resting up after a grueling year of work and travel, when he suffered a heart attack and died on Wednesday. He was a treasure and an inspiration. That he was considered radical says way more about this society than it does about him.

Posted on Saturday, January 30, 2010 at 1:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

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