A quote for the Day — from Howard Zinn
News item: Howard Zinn, award winning author/historian, died this week.
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Howard Zinn: 1922-2010
Back when I was in graduate school, a textbook on rhetoric and public address (it was too many years ago, the book is in storage – I remember what it looked like, but not the title or the author) argued that the best place to learn history was not the “important” speeches, but the every-day speeches and sermons of an era. I don’t disagree.
Howard Zinn is most famous for his book A People’s History of the United States, which told our history through the eyes of the “every-day” people, the forgotten, those not always heard… It generated fierce passions, much controversy. He said this in a 1998 interview:
“There’s no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete,” Professor Zinn said. “My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times.”
Zinn was an unabashed progressive, a vocal critic of war. But, this much is sure – his was a voice to pay attention to.
Here is a quote from an essay by Zinn, Changing Minds, One at a Time, from 2005, worth pondering:
This would seem to lead to a simple conclusion: that we all have an enormous responsibility to bring to the attention of others information they do not have, which has the potential of causing them to rethink long-held ideas.
