A hero of peacemaking history

J.D. Salinger got more publicity, but to me the literary giant who died this week was Howard Zinn.

Best known for his A People’s History of the United States (1980), Zinn, who died Wednesday at age 87, was a hero to those who embraced his alternative to the usual triumphalist, militaristic view of American history.

In A People’s History, Zinn wrote about “the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves . . . the rise of industralism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills . . . the Second World War as seen by pacifists . . .”

Zinn modeled the study of history from a peacemakers’ perspective, taking the side of the oppressed and honoring those who worked for justice.

Zinn set the stage for further development of a peacemakers’ view of history by Anabaptist writers, such as The Missing Peace: The Search for Nonviolent Alternatives in United States History by James C. Juhnke and Carol Hunter (Pandora Press, 2001).

I read Zinn’s People’s History in Juhnke’s U.S. history course at Bethel College in 1982-83. I was a freshman, and to me it symbolized the transition from the conventional wisdom of high school to the challenging ideas of college.

The Associated Press obituary for Zinn quoted him as saying he wrote a new kind of history because “the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times.”

Zinn also wrote on current events. Some excellent essays are collected in A Power Governments Cannot Suppress (2007), including brilliant commentary on the “war on terror.”

Zinn was a soldier turned antiwar activist. In World War II, as an “enthusiastic bombardier” on a B-17, he dropped bombs on Berlin. Later he came to believe war itself is terrorism.

A People’s History is a classic that has sold more than a million copies. I’m going to reread parts of it this weekend and remember a brilliant historian and voice for peace. — Paul Schrag