Categorical Aperitif

I was all set to hunt up and read the text of the State of the Union Address this morning (I couldn't watch it last night and haven't perused the blogospheric reaction yet) and see what my reactions were, but almost the first thing I found out upon going online was that the great populist historian Howard Zinn died yesterday (h/t TMW). Damn. So there's one thing we know about the State of the Union this morning: It's immeasurably poorer.

Zinn appeared often on Democracy Now! (good luck finding people like him on Fox, CNN, MSNBC, etc.), and it's a safe bet that they'll have a good retrospective on him—if not today, then quite soon. They've already got up a great memorial page with a brief bio and links to his many DN! appearances stretching back to 1996. I'll be spending some time there myself when I can.

Class conflict was one of the main lenses through which Zinn looked at history, and I doubt that any modern-day big-name historian was better at paying attention to the people that official and school history often ignores, distorts, or outright lies about: the marginalized, the losers, the poor, the despised, the downtrodden. His A People's History of the United States is like a big Bible of the Ignored, a great compendium of American tales that the schoolbook histories generally breeze past. I had in my notes a link to his "Three Holy Wars" talk—a look at little-noticed class issues in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II—given for the 100th anniversary of The Progressive magazine; it's well worth a read and/or a listen.

"You should notice. You should take notice of these little things." Yes. But as of 7:13 this morning, Howard Zinn was nowhere to be found on the front page of Google News—though Jay Leno, Bradgelina, and the iPad were.

Sigh.