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LESSONS FROM THE PEOPLE’S HISTORIAN, HOWARD ZINN  
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Dave Zirin
June 19, 2026
The Nation
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_ His take on history arms youth with the courage to “transform the
world.” It’s no wonder the right aims to erase it. _

Howard Zinn, Robert Shetterly

 

_This article appears in the __July/August 2026 issue_
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headline “Lessons From the People’s Historian, Howard Zinn.”_

_This article is adapted from Dave Zirin’s __The People’s
Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn_
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available in August from Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing
Group. Copyright 2026 by Dave Zirin._

Nothing says more about the fear of history on the part of right-wing
elites than the fact that Donald Trump used a presidential
address—delivered in the summer that saw tens of millions of
Americans take to the streets to protest the police murder of George
Floyd—to attack Howard Zinn.

Despite the fact that the protests against structural violence and
racism had been largely peaceful, with masses of demonstrators
asserting their right to assemble and petition for the redress of
grievances, Trump used his September 2020 address
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at the National Archives Museum to go after the radical historian who
told the real story of America.

“[The] left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades
of left-wing indoctrination in our schools. It’s gone on far too
long,” our endlessly divisive and mendacious president griped.
“Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of
Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own
history.”

Trump’s attack on Zinn, however, revealed something that the
president and his minions share with the historian they so decried: a
fundamental belief that history written from the point of view of
social movements holds the potential to empower the powerless.
That’s why Zinn worked his entire life to popularize a fresh take on
American history. And that’s why his critics aim to erase it. They
have always feared, and they fear especially in this 250th year of
“the American experiment,” something Zinn wrote about
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ago: “Our country is full of heroic people who are not Presidents or
military leaders or Wall Street wizards, but who are doing something
to keep alive the spirit of resistance to injustice and war. To ward
off alienation and gloom, it is only necessary to remember the
unremembered heroes of the past, and to look around us for the
unnoticed heroes of the present.”

Trump and his trembling allies oppose an honest telling of the
American story because their algorithms and their propagandists aim to
foster alienation and gloom—conditions that are essential to making
a populace feel defeated. And that strategy won’t work if the vast
majority of Americans recognize that they have a shared history of
racial, social, and economic oppression by oligarchs, both old and
new.

This explains why Trump’s regime is trying to ban books like
Zinn’s best-selling classic _A People’s History of the United
States_
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though it’s unlikely that Trump ever read the book, or bothered to
learn anything about Zinn’s own life story before the historian’s
death in 2010. One would be forgiven for wondering, especially given
Trump’s stated belief
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that Frederick Douglass is “an example of somebody who’s done an
amazing job and is being recognized more and more” and not an
abolitionist who died in 1895.

But while Trump may not know US history or understand basic civics,
his instincts for demonization and division are unparalleled. This
explains why, in the summer of 2020, as the Covid pandemic was killing
thousands of people a day, the president had Zinn on the brain. His
starting point was the mass demonstrations against police violence and
in memory of George Floyd, the 46-year-old Black man who was murdered
by a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin. Trump wasn’t
trying to end this type of brutality, calm racial tensions, or explain
why such extreme discontent had spread across the country. Instead, he
dismissed the protests as the illegitimate actions of young people
who, he imagined, had been brainwashed by Zinn—employing the kind of
conspiratorial, which-lie-do-you-correct-first speech that his base
eats up with a spoon.

His outlandish claim that Zinn’s highly regarded and widely taught
history books are mere “propaganda tracts”
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gave a stamp of approval and open encouragement to the broader,
well-funded astroturfed moves by school boards and city councils to
ban books that have inspired kids to ask questions and avoid blind
obedience.

The irony here is that Trump’s cabal has decried the Zinns of the
world for refusing to acknowledge the “progress America has made.”
Yet it is Trump and his team who are currently unraveling everything
progressive that has been accomplished since the 1890s, a time of
communicable disease, child labor, economic crisis, racial terrorism,
and profiteering oligarchs. Factor in that women were banned from the
ballot box, and this bizarre longing for an awful past also seems like
a vision board for an even worse future.

The right must keep burying Zinn, but not because _A People’s
History of the United States_ is an evil tome written with the
devil’s pen. It’s because generations of students have found
Zinn’s approach to history inviting and even exhilarating. In
learning that their ancestors weren’t passive spectators to the
American project, they become an active part of the story themselves.
Instead of history being a narrative of the triumph of the wealthy and
powerful, it becomes something written by underdogs armed with
courage. Instead of being objects, young people become subjects and
potential changemakers.

Zinn believed that where one stood in society determined how one
understood history. The Civil War looked quite different to a slaver
than it did to an enslaved person; a grunt in the trenches thousands
of miles from home probably has a different understanding of a war
than the four-star general sitting behind a desk. As for teachers,
even if they don’t share Zinn’s politics, seeing students alert
and awake in history class makes his books worth assigning.

Zinn expressed the source of his motivations. “I’m worried that
students will take their obedient place in society and look to become
successful cogs in the wheel—let the wheel spin them around as it
wants without taking a look at what they’re doing,” he said
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“I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the
official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House,
the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.”

It’s not Zinn the person or his remarkably outsized life that
provokes the ire of the president and his MAGA book-banners on school
boards, but rather the history that he was popularizing. This is
instructive, because their focus should be our focus: less on the man
than on the central lesson of the history he brought to life—the
idea that ordinary people can wrest control of their own lives and do
extraordinary things. “We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic
actions to participate in the process of change,” Zinn said
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“Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform
the world.”

But this is why Zinn’s own history matters: because his life is rich
with examples that back his belief in the value of small acts. In my
biography of Zinn, we follow his time as a teenage shipyard worker and
union organizer during the Great Depression; his years as a bombardier
during World War II; his risks as a dedicated fighter for civil rights
and Black freedom; his travels to Hanoi as part of the movement
against the war in Vietnam; and his sadly prescient understanding in
the 1970s about how the growth of the corporate university could come
to throttle academic freedom. These “small acts” of struggle were
inextricable from his life as a husband, a father, and a teacher.

While Zinn would certainly resist any impression of himself as an
affable optimist seeing the bright side in every defeat, it is also
true that one reason he is remembered is that Howard Zinn was always
the happy warrior. His lectures and public talks were
funny—historical insight mixed with great humor. “I wanted to
change the world,” he’d say
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“and I thought history might be helpful.”

Zinn’s decidedly nonacademic public-speaking style set him apart
from his peers. As a result, his fan base grew as he became older. I
was of a particular generation who came of age reading Zinn but had no
knowledge or memory of him before his 70s. It seemed as if he had
arrived fully formed from another planet—a thick head of gray hair,
a broad, mischievous smile, and a call to struggle in his remarks. He
taught us how to tough it out during the worst of times and why we can
never let the bastards steal our hope—which is, of course, why the
bastards still fear Zinn.

_DAVE ZIRIN is the sports editor at THE NATION. He is the author of
11 books on the politics of sports. He is also the coproducer and
writer of the new documentary __Behind the Shield: The Power and
Politics of the NFL_ [[link removed]]_._

_Copyright c 2026 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without__ permission_
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Distributed by__ PARS International Corp_
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* U.S. history
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* Donald Trump
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* Social Movements
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* resistance
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* war
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* injustice
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* Racism
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* Howard Zinn
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