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- [00:02]
Don Dumas
Without Zen, I don't know what I would be doing right now.
- [00:05]
Adjwa Adouseh
This is Don Dumas. He lives in San Diego, California. And when he first came across Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, he was working in the mailroom of a law firm.
- [00:17]
Don Dumas
I was in my early 20s, and that job had a lot of downtime. One of my co workers, he brought the book to work and he just, you know, dropped it on the counter. And I just picked it up and started reading it. And I was just absolutely enthralled with the book, and I just couldn't put it down. And having experienced poverty and violence and incarceration and all these things in my household, I just knew that the society in which we lived was fundamentally unjust. And in this book, A People's History, what it revealed to me was that there are powerful interest groups that keep people poor or keep the system operating as it does. And it showed me that working class folks have an interest in working in solidarity to help one another change this system. It really changed the trajectory of my life because I realized then that I wanted to be a history teacher. And my friend never got that book back. I just read it all, you know, right there.
- [01:54]
Adjwa Adouseh
Don Dumas did, in fact, become a history teacher in San Diego County. He's been teaching for 16 years now. In 2020, he was honored as the San Diego County Teacher of the Year.
- [02:06]
Virginia Marshall
Dumas says that he still uses a people's history of the United States in his classroom. It's a book that tells the story of the United States from the perspective of the people, from the workers, the women, and those with marginalized identities.
- [02:18]
Nick Witham
Okay.
- [02:18]
Don Dumas
The first few years in the classroom, we used a whole book as I taught for a few more years. You know, there's other great resources and books that I wanted to bring in, but I always stuck to a few chapters year after year after year.
- [02:35]
Virginia Marshall
And over those 16 years that Mr. Dumas has been teaching history, the profession has changed.
- [02:41]
Adjwa Adouseh
The Republican governor's administration is blocking an advanced placement African American history course. School districts deal with a slow slew of scrutiny on how students are taught.
- [02:52]
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
Race, racism, and America's dark past.
- [02:56]
Don Dumas
We see a lot of people fighting to control what is taught in our history classes. And that's because if done properly, right, history has the power to teach people, to teach students how to resist, how to fight for. For their rights. And that's one of the beautiful things about Zinn's book, is that it teaches us about those moments where people worked in solidarity to better their condition.
- [03:32]
Virginia Marshall
Howard Zinn knew all too well how powerful history can be and how controversial. Before he passed away in 2010, Zinn delivered the keynote address at the National Council for Social studies in in 2008 to a room full of history teachers. He said that the idea that we have been hearing a lot these days that America is the greatest, is one that should be challenged by students and history teachers alike.
- [03:56]
Don Dumas
Because when you begin to think that arrogantly that somehow the United States is an exception to the things that plague other countries and other governments in the world, that kind of arrogance leads to trouble. I think that we need to have an honest view of our country. That's where history comes in handy.
- [04:19]
Adjwa Adouseh
From Brooklyn Public Library, this is borrowed and Returned Revisiting the books that changed us and changed America too. I'm Adjwa Adouseh, Librarian at BPL's Library for Arts and Culture.
- [04:31]
Virginia Marshall
And I'm Virginia Marshall, audio producer at Brooklyn Public Library. Today's episode How Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States changed the way we teach, talk and write about our history. In order to understand where Howard Zinn was coming from when he wrote A People's History of the United States, we wanted to go back to the beginning. And the beginning for this story is fun for us because it starts in Brooklyn.
- [05:02]
Adjwa Adouseh
Howard Zinn was born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents in 1922. His family struggled to make ends meet during the Depression. And after graduating from Thomas Jefferson High School in East New York, young Howard Zinn went to work at Brooklyn's Navy Yard.
- [05:18]
Nick Witham
He grew up seeing communists talking on street corners, and he had a left wing and radical view of American politics.
- [05:25]
Virginia Marshall
This is Nick Witham, a history professor at University College, London, whose latest book, Popularizing the Past, tells the story of how Howard Zinn, as well as several other popular historians of the mid 20th century. Witham said that Zinn's experience in the war really influenced his perspective on America.
- [05:43]
Nick Witham
He then served as an airman in World War II, was really committed to the fight against fascism, and that was the thing that motivated him to go and fight, but became quite disillusioned with what the war stood for. And I think he was particularly upset after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So he became all the more politicized and a kind of an opponent of American war and American power.
- [06:09]
Adjwa Adouseh
After the war, Zinn decided to study history. He went to college and then graduate school on the GI Bill. Then he decided to become a teacher.
- [06:19]
Virginia Marshall
He was hired to teach at Spelman College, a historically black university for women in Atlanta. There he became involved in the civil rights movement. Alongside his students, he taught a few women who would go on to change the world in their own ways, like the writer Alice Walker and the activist Marian Wright Edelman.
- [06:36]
Adjwa Adouseh
At Spelman, Zinn got into some good trouble, as the late representative John Lewis would say. He helped his students organize sit ins and other protests in the segregated south. In 1963, Zinn moved to Boston with his family.
- [06:51]
Virginia Marshall
It was while he was teaching at Boston University that the publishing company Harper and Rowe approached him about writing a history book.
- [06:58]
Nick Witham
They are looking for what they think of as like a new voice to write a new American history for the generation of people who have had their mind changed about American history by the 1960s, by the Civil rights movement in particular, and by the anti war movement. And they think Howard Zinn is the person to write that book.
- [07:18]
Adjwa Adouseh
It was a monumental project to tell the story of the United States for a general audience from the beginning to end. Howard Zinn jumped at the challenge, and what he wrote made quite an impact on readers.
- [07:31]
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
I have been teaching for about four years and really there weren't that many good texts.
- [07:36]
Virginia Marshall
This is Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz. She's a renowned scholar of Native American history.
- [07:41]
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
I come from rural Oklahoma. Originally about 12 books published, working on another one. I'm also 86 years old.
- [07:51]
Virginia Marshall
Ortiz had finished her PhD at UCLA and was teaching in the newly established Native Studies program at California State when A People's History came out. She said a lot of her colleagues were shocked by the book.
- [08:03]
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
The other faculty, they thought it was too radical. I mean, they weren't that conservative, but they thought it was too radical. And they hadn't even read it.
- [08:18]
Virginia Marshall
From the very first chapter. A People's history literally rocks the boat. Instead of starting where many histories of the Americas start, with Christopher Columbus's crew standing on the deck of the Nina, the Pinta or the Santa Maria and spotting land, this book flipped the script.
- [08:33]
Adjwa Adouseh
The first chapter of A People's history begins like Arawak. Men and women, naked, tawny and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat.
- [08:49]
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
The students loved it so much. Young people hate history because it's so boring, you know, and Howard is such a good writer. And it was so challenging to historians in general.
- [09:05]
Virginia Marshall
What was challenging about the book, Ortiz said, was that Zinn didn't shy away from America's office. Violent History starting in that first chapter. Here's a bit more from the opening, read by BPL's chief librarian, Nick Higgins.
- [09:18]
Nick Higgins
The treatment of heroes, Columbus and their victims, the Arawaks. The quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress is only one aspect of a certain approach to history in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. To emphasize the heroism of culture, Columbus and its successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de emphasize their genocide is not a technical necessity, but an ideological choice. I prefer to tell the story of the discovery of America from the point of view of the Arawaks, of the Constitution, from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson, as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War, as seen by the New York Irish, and so on. To the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can see history from the standpoint of others.
- [10:10]
Nick Witham
I mean, one of the most famous parts of the book is its first chapter, Nick Witham again, which is quite a dramatic telling of European contact. And you know, it's been one of the most controversial parts of the book.
- [10:23]
Adjwa Adouseh
Howard Zinn wasn't the first historian to call European conquest of the Americas a genocide. He was building on the work of other native historians before him, scholars like Vine Deloria and Jack Forbes and others.
- [10:37]
Virginia Marshall
But Zinn was the first historian to write a critical bottom up history of the United States and have it sell millions of copies. The book entered the popular imagination in a way that few other history books ever have. The Sopranos rift on Zinn, it came up in a Simpsons episode, and Matt Damon famously name dropped the book in Good Will Hunting.
- [10:57]
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
You want to read a real history book?
- [10:59]
Don Dumas
Read Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. That book will fucking knock you on your ass.
- [11:03]
Nick Witham
Better than Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent.
- [11:05]
Don Dumas
You think that's a good book that can people bear for me?
- [11:08]
Nick Witham
And so it gets quite a lot of attention from conservative commentators, but also from conservative campus activists and who, right from the word go, saw this book as a kind of threat to their approach to American politics.
- [11:21]
Adjwa Adouseh
Whitham referenced an article that came out in 1987 that got a lot of attention. Thomas Sowell, a conservative intellectual, wrote about liberal bias on college campuses.
- [11:32]
Nick Witham
He basically says, if you're taking your kids to a college campus, what you really need to do is try and go to the campus bookstore and see if Howard Zinn's book's in that bookstore. And if it is, you need to think seriously. About whether you want your child to go to that university because it's clearly a bastion of kind of left wing thought. Those examples of, of right wing campus activism trying to undermine confidence in universities is a contemporary conservative project, and it's one that has its roots in that 1980s moment.
- [12:02]
Virginia Marshall
The conservative backlash didn't stop there. Following Howard Zinn's passing, then Governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels said the book should be banned in schools and universities throughout the state. He wrote emails to his colleagues about a ban and later dug in his heels when the emails came to light.
- [12:18]
Nick Witham
And so I think one of the unfair ways in which Zinn gets attacked, and he does get attacked because he's a controversial figure, is that people think that he thought people's history should be a kind of new bible for how we think about American history. But that's not the case. I think really what he was doing was just kind of lobbing a different perspective in there and saying, if we're going to have a truly kind of educated group of young people, they need to understand that history is about the multiple different perspectives we can take on the past. And that's where the kind of the Mitch Daniels point misses the point, I think, because Mitch Daniels thought, if this book is being used, it is being used to teach un American history, whereas actually usually it's being used to teach exactly what historical knowledge is all about, which is understanding different people's perspectives and understandings of the past.
- [13:11]
Adjwa Adouseh
Howard Zinn believed that the work of telling American history shouldn't be done by just one person. He said that his telling of history is just that one person's telling. A history shaped by his experiences in Brooklyn and World War II and the activism of the 1960s. Those who knew him said that he always encouraged younger historians to make their own marks on history too.
- [13:33]
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
You know, he was a very such a giving person.
- [13:37]
Virginia Marshall
This is Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz again.
- [13:40]
Adjwa Adouseh
She and Howard Zinn ran in similar academic and activist circles. And at some point she spoke to him about his characterization of Native history in A People's History of the United States.
- [13:51]
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
He had a fantastic long chapter on Native Americans, but not really on the history. It's in the contemporary period, you know, the Long March and the Alcatraz.
- [14:05]
Adjwa Adouseh
There was a disconnect, she told him, between the first chapter, which is about the sobering genocide of Native people during the European incursion, and the modern story of Native activism in the 1960s and 70s.
- [14:18]
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
I said, well, then they killed them all off and then they popped up. But Alcatraz what were they doing in between? And he said, you have to write that book, Crocus, because I don't know.
- [14:35]
Virginia Marshall
The opportunity to write her own book on Native American history would come decades later when Beacon Press approached Ortiz about writing a book for a series they were working on called Revisioning History. Here's Gayathri Patnaik, the director of Beacon Press.
- [14:50]
Gayathri Patnaik
We began the series quite a while ago, in 2007 or 2008. You know, I wanted people from historically marginalized groups, whether they were queer or indigenous or black or Latinx, to find themselves in this history, which is to say, a great deal of history depicts marginalized communities as passive. But I wanted these books to show the incredible resistance that they showed historically and still do.
- [15:14]
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
It wasn't supposed to be an academic kind of book. It was supposed to be well written to make it come alive more, you know, and it seemed like it was really easy. I have no problem writing literary style now. I've been practicing that for 15 years. I said, you know, I'll write this in success. Five years later, I finally got it written.
- [15:41]
Virginia Marshall
It was hard to wrestle an entire history of indigenous North America into one book. But Ortiz said it all started to come together when she found a central theme.
- [15:51]
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
And it came to me one day. It was a light bulb going on war. So really it's a book about very militantly warlike United States. And I could not find a day in that history when the US Wasn't somewhere at war.
- [16:12]
Adjwa Adouseh
Ortiz's book for Beacon Press came out in 2015. It was called An Indigenous People's History of the United States. And it's been a resounding success.
- [16:22]
Gayathri Patnaik
The book just kept increasing in popularity as time went by. People found it, Roxanne continued to do events, et cetera. You know, it continues to be, every week, one of our best selling titles at Beacon. We're well over half a million copies at this point.
- [16:38]
Adjwa Adouseh
Pattanayuk said that one of the biggest markets for the book is young people and their teachers.
- [16:43]
Gayathri Patnaik
We did a YA adaptation of indigenous people's history as well as the queer history of the US and those books have really just taken off in a remarkable way. Young people would go to their teachers, for example, young indigenous people, and say, we want to learn this history.
- [17:00]
Adjwa Adouseh
The Revisioning History series now includes nearly a dozen titles like A Queer History of the United States, A Disability History, An African American and Latinx History, and more.
- [17:12]
Gayathri Patnaik
Our next book in the series is by Gloria Brown Marshall. It's called A Protest History of the United States. Which is very timely. I think Howard Zinn's book was absolutely an inspiration. These books kind of are next in line in terms of that vision of Howard's kind of moving it forward, if that makes sense.
- [17:32]
Adjwa Adouseh
One of the most significant impacts of this book and a reason why it really did change America, is that it paved the way for other historians and writers to add to our story.
- [17:42]
Virginia Marshall
These days there are a lot of writers telling our history from different perspectives, like Nicole Hannah Jones, 1619 Project, Keanga Yamada Taylor's From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation, Nick Estes, Our History is the Future, and Ibram X Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning. It's no coincidence that these books are also ones that you'll see at the top of most frequently banned and challenged book lists. These writers and their work challenge the status quo, and that's something that's under scrutiny at the moment.
- [18:12]
Adjwa Adouseh
Don Dumas, the San Diego history teacher, said he still teaches with a people's history and he always puts the book in conversation with other history books. He said he thinks a lot about the power that books and their teachers have, especially in this political climate. He coaches other history teachers to stand by what they have their students read.
- [18:34]
Don Dumas
We are so ready to talk about the resistors, all of these people, right? Oh, you know, the Benjamin Lays, the John Browns, the White Rose, all these folks that did all these things. Okay, we are in a moment now where we have to decide, right, Are we going to capitulate? Are we going to just bow down without any sort of resistance because of our personal, you know, interest? And that's one of the things that makes the people so heroic, right? Like what makes John Brown so heroic is he was never personally at risk of becoming enslaved. He was white. Yet he took it upon himself to say, I cannot live in a society in which this particular evil is allowed to go unchallenged and I'm willing to say sacrifice my life. All we're asking you to do is share a book. We should be able to do that.
- [19:40]
Adjwa Adouseh
Special thanks to the Zinn Education Project for connecting us to Don Dumas. They also have a ton of resources for teachers on their website, zynedproject.org Nick.
- [19:51]
Virginia Marshall
Witham wrote a whole book about American historians who popularized history in the post war era. It's called Popularizing the Past and we'll put a link to it in our show Notes, as well as Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz's book An Indigenous People's History of the United States and the whole Revisioning History series. From Beacon Press.
- [20:09]
Adjwa Adouseh
Our next episode comes out in two weeks. We're talking about the beloved children's book the Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats.
- [20:16]
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
It wasn't just that this book was about a child of color, it was also about class.
- [20:25]
Virginia Marshall
Borrowed and Returned is a production of Brooklyn Public Library. It's written and produced by me, Virginia Marshall and co hosted with Adra Iduceh. You can read a transcript of this episode and our show notes with all of our Great links@bklynlibrary.org Podcasts Brooklyn Public.
- [20:41]
Adjwa Adouseh
Library relies on the support of individuals for many of its most critical programs and services. To make a gift, please go to bklyn library.org donate our borrowed advisory Team is made up of Fritzi Boatenheimer, Nick Higgins, Robin Lester Kenton and Damaris Olivo. Our marketing and design team for this series includes Lori Elve, Ashley Gill, Jennifer Profitt, Lauren Rockford and Leila Taylor.
- [21:11]
Virginia Marshall
That's it for this episode. Until next time. Time Keep rereading.