On History

"Howard Zinn was a radical American historian, most famous for writing a book called A People’s History of the United States . It first came out in 1980 and has been a million-copy bestseller. What Zinn did in that book was really important in that he retold the story of American history from Columbus to the present through four different lenses: the stories of working-class people, of women, of Native Americans and of African Americans. All the chapters rotate between those four different lenses. So you get a very different story than the American history of famous presidents or the robber baron tycoons of the 19th century, though they’re all in there. What Zinn was trying to do was really enact the idea of history from below. This was an important movement in historiography that emerged after the Second World War , the idea of telling the stories that hadn’t been told, of trade unions and social movements and marginalized groups in society. He wanted to put that at the center of the way we told our stories about history. In The People’s History of the United States, he writes: ‘Most histories understate revolt, overemphasize statesmanship, and thus encourage impotency among citizens.’ He was very much a historian-activist. He wanted this kind of history to empower people. “Can we learn not just from the cautionary tales, but from the more positive examples?” Earlier he had written a number of essays about the writing of history, and the book I’ve chosen On History , is a collection of these essays. In one of them, called “Historian as Citizen,” he talks explicitly about the way we need to think about history as full of possibilities for learning for the present, and learning from the inspirational moments, not just the warnings. He writes, ‘The leaps that man has made in social evolution come from those who acted as if.’ What he means is that they acted from the idea that change was possible. It might look like you can never change the system and that the odds are against you, but whether it was those who were fighting for independence in India or the civil rights movement in the US they acted as if they might be able to bring about change. And occasionally it actually does happen. That comes out very clearly in his work. So Zinn was a beacon for me when writing my book. I wanted to write about hope in apocalyptic times, but not in a naive, nostalgic, romanticized way. I’m well aware of the genocides, the wars, the greed. I wrote my PhD thesis on the legacies of Latin American colonial history and the genocide of indigenous Mayans in Guatemala. I’ve grown up with that kind of history, in a sense. But I wanted to try and bring out these other stories, which I think can inspire us today to take action on a whole range of issues—including the climate crisis, threats to democracy, risks from AI, genetic engineering, migration issues and a whole gamut of existential risks ."