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February 3, 2010 4:00 A.M. Professor of ContemptThe legacy of Howard Zinn.   With Howard Zinn, contemporary American academia found its court historian. Zinn, who died January 27 at 87, was like a gigantic echo chamber, accurately reproducing — and actively reinforcing — every left-wing cliché with which the academy has abetted its sense of election these past several decades. “You see how smart he is,” saith the tribe, “he thinks exactly as we do.” Zinn’s biography tells us that he was the author of “more than 20 books.” But only one matters: A People’s History of the United States. Published...

The other day a reporter from NPR called me and asked me for my comments on the death of the lifelong Stalinist and propagandist Howard Zinn. I was a little reluctant because I knew that whatever I said, legions of unscrupulous myrmidons on the left would jump on it and say I had spit on Zinn’s grave. I also knew that while I was interviewed for ten minutes, out of what I said only a 20 second sound-bite would make it onto the air. I don’t begrudge NPR this selection. That’s what their obit was and would have to be,...

They come in threes - celebrity deaths: Will we have a trinity of nilhilists? Howard Zinn dies Jan 27. JD Salinger dies Jan 29. Who is next?

Mr.DAVID HOROWITZ (Author): There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn’s intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect. KEYES: Conservative pundit and author David Horowitz is among critics who fiercely disagree with Zinn’s politics. Horowitz calls “A People’s History of the United States” a travesty. More at NewsRealblog (where you can also listen to the audio).

  A People’s History of Howard Zinn by Benjamin Kerstein      One of the unwritten laws of opinion journalism is to never kick a man when he’s dead, at least, not until an appreciable amount of time has passed. The question is whether this can or should hold true for those who make their living by doing precisely that. The death at the age of 87 of pseudo-historian Howard Zinn raises this issue all over again, since very few academics have made a better living defaming the dead, with everyone from Columbus to Ronald Reagan, and thousands in...

The hatefulness of the Left knows no bounds when a conservative passes away, but when one of their own dies the hallowed halls of heaven are awaiting their savior as they glorify the beloved path he walked. And woe to him who dares question the idol of their worship. Bits of gray matter are clinging to the shards of leftist skulls as they bemoan the passing of Howard Zinn, the Marxist anarchist known for his revisionist history. Progressive fans are flocking to twitter and leftist media lamenting Zinn’s demise. “This world has certainly lost one of it’s most profound voices...

From the archives: A brief look at the author of A People's History of the United States and the pernicious popularity of his fractured fairy tales. Notes & Comments February 2008 Howard Zinn's fairy tale On the upcoming television adaptation of "A People's History of the United States." Some projects are born fatuous, some achieve fatuousness, some have fatuousness thrust upon them. Which melancholy comedy best fits the news that A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn’s anti-American fantasy masquerading as history, is—finally, at last, after so many failed attempts—going to be turned into a television show? Somehow...

Activist, historian Howard Zinn dies at 87 Reuters By Ros Krasny BOSTON (Reuters) – Historian and activist Howard Zinn, whose 1980 book "A People's History of the United States" was a rallying cry for the American left in a conservative era, has died aged 87. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100128/us_nm/us_zinn_1

Howard Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose leftist "A People's History of the United States" became a million-selling alternative to mainstream texts and a favorite of such celebrities as Bruce Springsteen and Ben Affleck, died Wednesday. He was 87. Zinn died of a heart attack in Santa Monica, Calif., daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn said. The historian was a resident of Auburndale, Mass. (snip) At a time when few politicians dared even call themselves liberal, "A People's History" told an openly left-wing story. Zinn charged Christopher Columbus and other explorers with genocide, picked apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin...

Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and a leading faculty critic of BU president John Silber, died of a heart attack today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling, his family said. He was 87. "His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives," Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, once wrote of Dr. Zinn. "When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be...

WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP! The History Channel has gone to the dark side! It's now airing unvarnished COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA by the anti-American POS Howard Zinn! Have you seen that "The People Speak" crap? I am calling my cable company and demanding that it drop the History Channel from our basic service. If others want to pay for communist indoctrination, that's fine. But I DO NOT want this stuff!

This is my latest post for NewsReal. I thought I'd post it here, because I'm pretty sure you guys will enjoy it. You would think that someone who writes a book called A People’s History of the United States would at the very least believe there is such an entity as the “United States,” wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be mistaken in historian and radical leftist Howard Zinn’s case. In his most famous work, he writes: The pretense is that there really is such a thing as “the United States,” subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of...

Howard Zinn (left) with the very serious-looking actor Viggo Mortensen The small-screen version of Marxist historian Howard Zinn’s leftward-slanted history of America, The People Speak, aired Sunday night on the History Channel. The film, based on Zinn’s influential book, A People’s History of the United States, is chock full of useful idiot celebrities including Matt Damon, Marisa Tomei, Morgan Freeman, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Penn, Bruce Springsteen, and its executive producer Josh Brolin, all parroting the radical platitudes written for them. One scene in the shlockumentary tells the story of an organizer-agitator who rallied tenants against landlords during the Great Depression....

<p>In 1997, Matt Damon played the part of a janitor who turned out to be not only a math wizard, but one of the most brilliant men you could find anywhere. Trying to impress an arrogant Harvard student, who thought he knew everything, Damon’s character quotes from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. He tells the Harvard kid and a psychiatrist at the hospital he works at that “you’re surrounding yourself with all the wrong fuckin’ books. You wanna read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll [explitive deleted] you on your [explative].”</p>

Sorry for the vanity, but the few minutes that I have seen is disgusting!

Hollywood & Howard Zinn’s Marxist education project by Michelle Malkin Creators Syndicate Copyright 2009 The two most important questions for society, according to the Greek philosopher Plato, are these: What will we teach our children? And who will teach them? Left-wing celebrities have teamed up with one of America’s most radical historians to take control of the classroom in the name of “social justice.” Parents, beware: This Hollywood-backed Marxist education project may be coming to a school near you. On Sunday, December 13, the History Channel will air “The People Speak” – a documentary based on Marxist academic Howard Zinn’s...

History serving “a social aim,” rather than chronicling the past in a detached manner, is what readers get in A People’s History of the United States. With any luck, “The People Speak,” the History Channel documentary based on the book that premieres this Sunday, will be, like so many Hollywood productions, unfaithful to the original. Given A People’s History of the United States’ infidelity to facts, this might be the only chance viewers have of seeing anything resembling an accurate retelling of history.Through Zinn’s looking-glass, Maoist China, site of history’s bloodiest state-sponsored killings, transforms into “the closest thing, in the...

The first time Howard Zinn's now-classic book "A People's History of the United States" appeared on TV was in "The Sopranos" on HBO, when Tony's teenage son A.J. came home from school with a copy of the book and told his parents that, according to Zinn, Columbus was a slaveowner and murderer. Tony got mad, and replied, "In this house Columbus is a hero. End of story!" That was 1999. This Sunday, Dec. 13, Zinn's "The People Speak" – the documentary inspired by his books "A People's History" and "Voices of a People's History," will be broadcast on the History...

Twelve years ago in his breakout performance as an arrogant young genius in Good Will Hunting, struggling fresh-faced actor Matt Damon sneered at his Boston psychiatrist for “surrounding yourself with all the wrong f__kin’ books. You wanna read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll f__kin’ knock you on your ass.” The political left loves shout-outs, and this was a direct one to Zinn himself, whom Damon actually lived next-door to as a child, and whose book apparently knocked the actor on his own behind. “Ben (co-screenwriter Affleck) and I were laughing...

Children are uniquely malleable beings, readily convinced of magically colorful tales – Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are the first that come to mind. This innocence is beautiful, but it is a quality that can easily fall victim to radically foreign ideas if taught consistently and pervasively at an early age. One need only look at the birth of fascism or socialism to see a recipe for how radical ideas become ubiquitous among a nation’s youth. Enter Howard Zinn – an author, professor and American historian – who, with the help of Hollywood and the History Channel, intends to...