{"id":383,"date":"2026-06-19T17:39:29","date_gmt":"2026-06-19T17:39:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=383"},"modified":"2026-06-19T17:39:29","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T17:39:29","slug":"lessons-from-the-peoples-historian-howard-zinn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=383","title":{"rendered":"Lessons From the People\u2019s Historian, Howard Zinn"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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\u2014delivered in the summer that saw tens of millions of Americans take to the streets to protest the police murder of George Floyd\u2014to attack Howard Zinn.<\/p>\n

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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 at the National Archives Museum to go after the radical historian who told the real story of America.<\/p>\n

\u201c[The] left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools. It\u2019s gone on far too long,\u201d our endlessly divisive and mendacious president griped. \u201cOur children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s why Zinn worked his entire life to popularize a fresh take on American history. And that\u2019s why his critics aim to erase it. They have always feared, and they fear especially in this 250th year of \u201cthe American experiment,\u201d something Zinn wrote about decades ago: \u201cOur 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2014conditions that are essential to making a populace feel defeated. And that strategy won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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250 Years of Searching for a More Perfect Union<\/h4>\n