Lessons From the People’s Historian, Howard Zinn

This article appears in the July/August 2026 issue, with the headline “Lessons From the People’s Historian, Howard Zinn.”

This article is adapted from Dave Zirin’s The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, available in August from Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group. Copyright 2026 by Dave Zirin.

Nothing says more about the fear of history on the part of right-wing elites than the fact that Donald Trump used a presidential address—delivered in the summer that saw tens of millions of Americans take to the streets to protest the police murder of George Floyd—to attack Howard Zinn.

Despite the fact that the protests against structural violence and racism had been largely peaceful, with masses of demonstrators asserting their right to assemble and petition for the redress of grievances, Trump used his September 2020 address at the National Archives Museum to go after the radical historian who told the real story of America.

“[The] left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools. It’s gone on far too long,” our endlessly divisive and mendacious president griped. “Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.” Read more here.