By June Fink, age 10 and IndyKids Staff
- I was born on August 24, 1922, in New York City.
- When I was growing up, my family couldn’t afford books, so my parents sent a coupon and a dime to the New York Post each month and we ended up owning 20 volumes of Charles Dickens’ works.
- I graduated from Thomas Jefferson High school then later joined the U.S. Air Force in 1943.
- My experiences in World War II exposed the horrors of war and developed my belief that understanding history is extremely important.
- After graduating from college, I taught in Spelman College in Georgia in an African-American women’s school.
- After witnessing the violence directed at the Black people in my community, I became involved with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
- As an anti-war activist and author, I wrote many books including Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal in 1967.
- I became disenchanted with the way history is taught in this country and wrote a collection of essays titled, The Politics of History in 1970, where I argued that all historical writing was political and that historians and teachers should instead understand and teach human values.
- I published A People’s History of the United States in 1980, which viewed all of U.S. history through the lens of the working class people and minority groups.
- In 2008, William Holtzman and I founded the Zinn Education Project which aims to introduce students to an accurate and honest understanding of U.S. history.
- I died on January 7th, 2010.
Answer: Howard Zinn
