TOW 13 (Written text)- "Howard Zinn, Historian, Is Dead at 87" by Michael Powell

This obituary reflects on the life of the late historian, Howard Zinn. Author Michael Powell describes Zinn's remarkable journey from a low-wage worker in a shipyard struggling to his family's pay bills to a famed and best-selling historian and author. As a young man, Zinn read about Karl Marx and the Communist regime, compelling him to join the US Army during World War II to fight the fascists. Upon returning home, Zinn decided to go back to school, getting his bachelor’s degree at New York University and his master’s and doctoral degrees at Columbia University. Shortly after, he began his career are a historian working in the history department at Spellman College. Zinn, who played a large role in the African American civil rights movement, later got into a conflict with his boss at Spellman over his involvement in the movement. This conflict led Zinn to take a job in the history department at Boston University. In 1980, Zinn published “A People’s History of the United States,” which miraculously has sold over two million copies. Essentially a US history textbook, “A People’s History of the United States” is unlike any American textbook that came before it. All previous textbooks were greatly biased and solely focused on the positive aspects of American history. Zinn recognized that over the course of US history many groups of people have suffered immensely, so throughout the textbook he explains events such as the Native American genocide, slavery, and the many revolutionary struggles.

Michael Powell directs this obituary to a broad range of people. His revolutionary writing has in some way influenced almost every American in today’s world as it set a precedent for historical writing and drastically changed American history classes. Through the obituary, Powell’s main purpose is to reflect and honor the life of Howard Zinn, a great American historian. In order to effectively achieve this purpose, Powell uses multiple anecdotes to highlight the major points of Zinn’s life. According to Powell, “He waged a war of attrition with Boston University’s president at the time, John Silber, a political conservative. Mr. Zinn twice organized faculty votes to oust Mr. Silber, and Mr. Silber returned the favor, saying the professor was a sterling example of those who would ‘poison the well of academe.’” As a reader, I found it very strange that twice in his career, Zinn has fought and argued with both the president at Boston University and Spellman College. Through such anecdotes, Powell is attempting to show readers that such conflicts reflect his revolutionary writing. Although, I feel that Powell did a poor job with his analysis because he does not connect the anecdotes to the larger idea, which is the overall affect of Zinn’s historical writing.