By Jelani Cobb

Among Professor Howard Zinn’s numerous accomplishments, none rank higher than his work to breathe life into history. Often when I mention to people that I’m a historian I hear mumbled comments about how the subject put students to sleep or seems like a dry collection of dates, wars and speeches. Not so with Howard Zinn.

He fashioned a dynamic, useful vision of the past and delivered it to the public. His work as a teacher and author reminded us the history is also the repository of the dreams, struggles, losses and, most importantly, victories of bygone generations. No one who encountered his People’s History of the United States could doubt the relevance of history to the present. I entered graduate school with a clear idea that history was not to be static, dry and remote but that it was a vital to people in a democratic society (and those who spent their lives struggling to create one.) Zinn was largely responsible for that understanding.

He wore his own history on his sleeve. At its worst history (or, more accurately, historians) offer a kind of voice-of-God authority, as if they are narrating from a distant mount, far removed from bias and the shadings of personal experience. Zinn made no pretense of objectivity, he openly stated that his perspective was shaped by his experiences growing up in a working class family, serving in the military and his time as a bombardier in World War II. He was deeply affected by his time in the military, making frequent reference to it even in his later years. It shaped his pacifist views for decades to come. (Even his name was an apt homophone for a peace activist.)

Wars of interpretation are waged among historians with scarcely a notice among the lay public. But within the ranks battles have raged over whether slavery was a profitable cornerstone of capitalism or an outmoded drag on the capitalist system, over whether the progressive movement was forward-thinking or reactionary, over the causes of the Great Depression and the Civil War. Careers are made or broken with the tides of interpretation but even the most pitched footnote fights are little noticed by the general public.

Howard Zinn achieved something rare in that he brought history out of the rarified air of academia and introduced it into the lives of everyday people. In professional circles selling out a print run of 5,000 books is considered a modest success. Zinn sold over a million copies of People’s History. Equally important, he synthesized a broad current of historical thinking and ensured that it would remain accessible to future generations. During the 1960s and 70s progressive historians began overturning the old approaches to American history, ones that focused to a great extent upon the actions of powerful individuals, large institutions, presidents and generals. In their place came a bottom-up analysis; a view of history that recognized that for decades if not centuries what we called “history” were actually just the stories of a tiny, non-representative fragment of society.

The real storylines were below the radar: enslaved blacks finding ways to define themselves despite the brutality of bondage; disfranchised women finding remarkable, creative ways to engage their allegedly democratic society, labor unionists on the frontlines of the fight for workplace safety and living wages.

Zinn wove all these threads into an elegant tapestry and presented it as almost an instructional manual for budding activists or anyone who took the Constitution seriously. Not that his candor and belief in active citizenship was always appreciated. Predictably some read his work on working class everyday citizens and naively shouted red-baiting clichés. But some opposition came from unexpected quarters. In the early 1960s Zinn was chair of the history department at Spelman College (the position I currently hold.)

From that perch he encountered and influenced activist students like Alice Walker and Marian Wright (later Edelman). His outspoken advocacy for the civil rights movement would seem to be appropriate at a historically black college but these institutions existed in a delicate political balance in the Jim Crow world. Zinn’s politics ran afoul of President Albert Manley and were likely the reason he was unceremoniously fired from the college.

He settled at Boston University and set about building a career that artfully fused activism and scholarship. Over the years he won other battles of interpretation. In 2005 Professor Zinn was invited to give the commencement keynote at Spelman and awarded an honorary doctorate. By that point his book was being assigned as reading for American history classes at the college. I had the good fortune of sitting directly behind him when he delivered the speech, talking passionately about the immorality of the Iraq War, the futility of war in general and a particularly noteworthy statement on the corrupting ways in which national boundaries prevent us from recognizing our common humanity.

When I was elected chair of history in April 2009, I outlined my goals for department. At the top of my priorities was the creation of an annual lecture to be named after Howard Zinn. I emailed him with the subject line “Greetings from Spelman College,” and asked his availability for a visit in January 2010. He replied that he would be in California through March, had a slight opening in April and then would be busy more or less until October. I marveled at his schedule and that, at age 87, he had not lost a step or an iota of his passion for history and activism.

In a sad irony, the initial date I proposed for the visit was the week he died of a heart attack. His passing represents a monumental loss not just to historians but to American civic life in general. If there is any small flower of consolation to be found it is in the fact that his work and his example will continue to inspire and inform for many, many years to come.

William Jelani Cobb is Associate Professor and Chair of History at Spelman College. His book The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress will be published by Walker & Co in May 2010.