Howard Zinn passed away on 27th Jan

Image from Wikipedia


I read a couple of his books including "A Peoples History of the United States". The books were a great way of relooking at history, from the point of view of what was going on with common people rather than with the power holders, hence "Peoples History". They were pretty cool reads and recounted lots of unknown stories of resistance and courage of the common people. He was a pretty cool personally, he followed through on the theoritical understanding of racism as a bad thing, by actually walking the walk at a very early stage when it was difficult to do so and when there were no examples or role models for what could be done. He was a teacher at a school and hung out with the black kids and encouraged them to resist and fight discrimination, stuff like that, and lost job in the process.

I had the opportunity of listening to him talk in Berkeley once. Extremely warm and gentle person, he came across as.

Noam Chomsky spoke warmly about him to the press after his death: "He's made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture. He's changed the conscience of America in a highly constructive way. I really can't think of anyone I can compare him to in this respect".

Read the Hindu's piece here: http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article96513.ece
On Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn

His books are well worth a read (and for me a re-read). Unfortuntely I don't have my copy with me.

There's lots of his stuff on YouTube, here's a random one :




Bye "Howie" and thanks.