Howard Zinn: The "People's" Historian

Howard Zinn, the "people's" historianand social activist, was born on August 24, 1922 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of immigrant Jewish parents. His father Edward Zinn had emigrated to the U.S. from his native Austria-Hungary along with his brother, while his mother Jenny emigrated from Irkutsk, Siberia in what was then the Russian Empire. Both parents reached the United States before the First World War, an apocalyptic event that remapped the face of Europe and brought the communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into being, as well as sowing the seeds of "National Socialism", i.e,, fascism. Handicapped by limited educational backgrounds, both of Zinn's parents worked in factories when they courted and married, and the city apartments in which they raised their children were devoid of books until they subscribed, via "The New York Post", to a 20-volume library of Charles Dickens' collected works for 25 cents each. Thus, the young Howard was introduced to the realm of the imagination and the world of letters under the sympathetic conscience of Dickens, the chronicler of the aspirations and desperation of the lower middle class.

During the early years of World War Two, Zinn worked as a defense industry worker in the Brooklyn shipyards and became a labor union organizer. He subsequently enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force, was commissioned an officer, and was attached to a B-17 crew as a bombardier with the 490th Bomb Group that conducted bombing missions in
Europe. Zinn came to question the "strategic" bombing of France and Germany, which caused millions of civilian casualties, and his repulsion with his role in the deaths of civilians as well as German soldiers who were ready to surrender but had been marked as targets by the U.S. military brass made him come to question the morality of modern warfare.