Quiz: Who Am I?

By June Fink, age 10 and IndyKids Staff

  1. I was born on August 24, 1922, in New York City.
  2. 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.
  3. I graduated from Thomas Jefferson High school then later joined the U.S. Air Force in 1943.
  4. My experiences in World War II exposed the horrors of war and developed my belief that understanding history is extremely important.
  5. After graduating from college, I taught in Spelman College in Georgia in an African-American women’s school.
  6. After witnessing the violence directed at the Black people in my community, I became involved with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
  7. As an anti-war activist and author, I wrote many books including Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal in 1967.
  8. 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. 
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. I died on January 7th, 2010.

Answer: Howard Zinn

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