The life of the hugely influential ‘people’s historian’ is explored in a wide-ranging new book that brings in everything from wars to civil rights to Matt Damon
When times got tough for Zinn: “… he was able to live through these times when he was also able to lecture in the classroom, about all sorts of topics from the history of civil liberties to the Gilded Age. He taught social sciences at different points, and then saw his students be able to go out and apply it, then come back to the classroom. He lived through times when people were living history. He was able to teach that history, and then see history being made.”
The People’s Historian, by Dave Zirin
Matt Damon may play a great hero in The Odyssey, but one of the star’s own heroes is also set for his time in the spotlight. In Massachusetts in the 1970s and 80s, Damon grew up close to Howard Zinn, now the subject of The People’s Historian, a biography by Dave Zirin.
“Frankly,” Zirin said, “the fact that he’s Matt Damon and oh by the way is now in the biggest movie perhaps since Titanic, it makes it a nice little bauble for the book that I got to interview him.
“But honestly, I would have interviewed anybody who had Matt Damon’s perspective of being young and knowing Howard Zinn as this kind of elder, because the dynamics of their relationship to me really say something about Zinn, from him being willing to go to little Mattie’s public high school to do a talk, as a favor to the family, to being a friend and a sounding board, not behaving like some unapproachable elder, but at the same time it being pretty clear that other adults really respected this guy.”
Many did, worldwide. After an epic career in academia and progressive politics, Zinn died in 2010, aged 87. Damon has carried lessons from him through his own career. Good Will Hunting, his breakthrough hit from 1997, contains mention of Zinn’s seminal work, A People’s History of the United States: “That book’ll fuckin’ knock you on your ass.” Damon has sought to bring Zinn to the screen, including via the documentary The People Speak, from 2009.
But despite such adult endeavors, Zirin said the star’s “child’s perspective on Howard Zinn” was most useful when it came to writing his book. After all, plenty of American schoolchildren continue to come to know Zinn through A People’s History, first published in 1980, often updated, now with more than 4m copies sold. The story of America from “1492-Present”, it is explicitly not the story of the great white men of tradition, from Christopher Columbus to the founders and on through the civil war, the Gilded Age and the long 20th century. Inevitably, it has long been a target for angry rightwingers….
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/aug/06/howard-zinn-the-peoples-historian-book
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