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Monday 22 March 2010

Like other cultural icons, the very figure of Howard Zinn has already in the weeks after his death begun to assume almost mythic proportions. One of Zinn’s former students, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Alice Walker, went so far as to admit to Democracy Now that she somehow “felt he would live forever.” In some ways Walker was right. Even as the followers of Jesus, Elvis, and Tupac often doubt their respective guru’s death and claim to ‘see’ them after their reported passing, so too will Howard Zinn be seen, heard, and felt throughout the halls of academia as his memory reverberates within the hearts and minds of every brave soul who dares to take up a pen to write the history of everyday people. Indeed, the very parts of himself that Zinn valued most will almost certainly escape the grave. Although Zinn will likely forever be remembered as the man who wrote A People’s History of the United States he perhaps more significantly, and in spite of his detractors, may have written THE people’s history of the United States. At least for now. Zinn Lives: Scholars Remember the Person Behind A People’s History

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