Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian

by Howard Zinn

Book Overview

A selection of Howard Zinn's most popular and accessible essays on history and politics.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1567510124
• ISBN13: 9781567510126
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Common Courage Press
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Americans Need to Quit Accepting Media Nonsnese and Start Reading Good Books

Howard Zinn (1922-present) wrote an interesting collection of essays in a book titled FAILURE TO QUIT. The title is based in turn on a charge brought against Zinn for demonstrating at a government building. The book will hopefully inspire readers to quit believing media nonsense and apprehensively conventional historians who are too cowardly to carefully investigate or research anything that interferes with their phony agenda. This begins with an interview of Zinn re his life, career as a college history teacher, and impossible dissident. Zinn was not raised by a wealthy family, and his father worked hard to support his family. Zinn was raised in a poor Bronx neighborhood, and he had little chance to attend college. Zinn recounted his experience as an U.S. Army Airforce bombadier during W.W. II. Zinn related how he gradually thought about his military function on a U.S. bomber. He mentioned that he realized that his dropping bombs often included the death of innocent victims. His comment about a bombing mission in Hungary which was reported in the U.S. media as resulting in few if any casualties. When he later visited the area, he discovered the bombing mission resulted in considerable destruction, death,and tragedy. Zinn did not know exactly when he opposed war, but he knew that the mechanical and technical advances of warfare increased the terrible consequences of war which is too often ignored. The second section of this book dealt with Zinn's optimism which this reviewer does not share. However, the undersigned was impressed with the anecdotes in this chapter. Zinn mentioned that his job working in a ship yard attracted his interest in labor history which Zinn correctly chided U.S.historians for ignoring in spite of books and sources to the contrary. Zinn stated that the improvements in labor and working conditions since the end of the 19th. century were reasons for hope. Zinn alerted readers to the Ludlow Massacre(1914) which occured in Colorado. Zinn cited coal executives using company police and National Guard troops to intimidate coal miners and their families when they complained about excessively long hours, terrible living conditions in company towns, and dangerous working conditions. After one violent episode after another, mothers and small children were killed. Finally, the company executives relented on the status of the coal miners when these concessions could have been made without tragic violence. Zinn commented that current decent working conditions should not be taken for granted and that labor history gives readers a better appreciation of the sacrifices made by many men and women who would be so pleased with conditions as compared to the end of the 19th. and early 20th. century. Zinn' chapter titled "The Problem of Civil Obedience" should be carefully considered. When the "Law and Order" folks warn about anarchy, Zinn comments on the death and crime when there is law and order. Zinn had some interesting comments when Ame

Reflections of a People's Historian

Howard Zinn personifies the qualities that make a great historian; he is at once an activist and a chronicler, someone who knows that history is made out on the streets not behind the ivy covered walls of priviledge. This essays and interviews contained in this small book all stand as positive evidence that the common people--the dirty masses, as conservative historians would call them--are the true foundation of history.As enlightening as this book is, it is at the same time an alarming expose on the grossly prejudiced view of history--triumphalist history as it is sometimes referred--which is all too often constructed as a justification for and an apologetic to the injustice of the past and the crimes of the future. While some hold to the presumption that history, like the law, presides in some otherworldly state of objectivity, unassailable by mere human judgement, but as Zinn points out in the essay "The Problem is Civil Obedience","The Law is not made by God, it is made by Strom Thurmond" (50). Thus, like the law, history is only as fair and objective as the people who write it.Consequently, I would rather cast my lot with someone who worked their way through college, served in world war two and saw first hand the utter pointlessness and brutality of war, marched in the struggle for civil rights in the 60's alongside his students, and became a historian out of a desire to tell the true story of American History, warts and all, than accept the views of historians born into privilege, who never worked a day in their lives, avoided service in wars that they are all too quick to justify, and have lived their lives inside the protective walls of Harvard, Yale and Princeton. But that is precisely why so many hate Zinn and his writings, because he refuses to accept the safety of the status quo in historical inquiry, which leads to the exposure of what are often chapters in American history that many would rather forget or ignore.There are none more indispensable to the cause of freedom and justice than those dissident voices like Howard Zinn, who despite the threats, censorship, and repression continue to tell the history of the forgotten and question the authority of America's self-appointed defenders of culture, which is nothing more than a construct of history steeped in dogma, denial and lies.