Howard Zinn, Some Truths Are Not Self-Evident

Book excerpt: Millions of Americans have read and been galvanized by A People's History of the United States. But many years before Howard Zinn published that epic saga of exploitation and resistance, he was organizing civil-rights protests and agitating for an end to the Vietnam War--and writing about those efforts in the pages of The Nation. From the Atlanta campus of Spelman College (where Zinn taught in the early 1960s) to North Vietnam (where he facilitated the release of American POWs), Zinn was not only an astute observer of history. As Frances Fox Piven writes in the introduction to Some Truths Are Not Self-Evident, "These Nation essays remind us that for nearly fifty years Zinn himself was deeply involved in the major twentieth-century struggles for social justice in the United States." The book also includes later Zinn articles on George W. Bush's wars--on terror, in Iraq, against the poor--as well as a selection of Nation articles about Zinn, concluding with Eric Foner's 2010 obituary for the historian who "was not afraid to speak out about the difference between right and wrong." Nowhere has Zinn's courage and commitment to speaking out been as evident as in Some Truths Are Not Self Evident: Essays in The Nation on Civil Rights, Vietnam and the "War on Terror."