ROAM AGENCY

PASSIONATE DECLARATIONS
Essays on War and Justice

Howard Zinn

Revised edition with a new introduction

HarperCollins / Perennial (June 2003)

Paper • ISBN-13: 9780060557676 • US $13.95 • 368 pgs.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

From the bestselling author of A People’s History of the United States comes this selection of passionate, honest, and piercing essays looking at American political ideology.

Howard Zinn brings to Passionate Declarations the same astringent style and provocative point of view that led more than two million people to buy his book A People’s History of the United States. He directs his critique here to what he calls “American orthodoxies”—that set of beliefs guardians of our culture consider sacrosanct: justifications for war, cynicism about human nature and violence, pride in our economic system, certainty of our freedom of speech, romanticization of representative government, confidence in our system of justice. Those orthodoxies, he believes, have a chilling effect on our capacity to think independently and to become active citizens in the long struggle for peace and justice. 

PRAISE:

“A shotgun blast of revisionism that aims to shatter all the comfortable myths of American political discourse.”

Los Angeles Times

“It has been Zinn’s life’s work to illuminate the subjectivities others have ignored…. It joins his pioneering … People’s History of the United States to form what could be called the essential Zinn.”

Boston Phoenix

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”

Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.

OTHER TITLES BY THIS AUTHOR:

A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present

A People’s History of the United States: Abridged Teaching Edition (with Kathy Emery and Ellen Reeves)

A People’s History of the United States: The Wall Charts (with George Kirschner)

A Power Governments Cannot Suppress

Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies of Law and Order

Emma

Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian

Howard Zinn On Democratic Education (with Donaldo Macedo)

Howard Zinn Speaks: Collected Speeches, 1963–2009 (ed. Anthony Arnove)

Indispensable Zinn: The Essential Writings of the “People’s Historian”  (ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy)

Justice in Everyday Life: The Way It Really Works

LaGuardia in Congress

Marx in Soho: A Play on History

New Deal Thought

Original Zinn: Conversations on History and Politics (with David Barsamian)

Postwar America: 1945–1971

SNCC: The New Abolitionists

The Bomb: Essays

The Historic Unfulfilled Promise

The People Speak: American Voices, Some Famous, Some Little Known

The Politics of History

The Southern Mystique

The Twentieth Century: A People’s History

Three Plays – The Political Theater of Howard Zinn: Emma / Marx in Soho / The Daughter of Venus

Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (with Dana Frank and Robin D. G. Kelley)

Uncommon Sense: From the writings of Howard Zinn (eds. Dean Birkenkamp and Wanda Rhudy)

Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal

You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

RIGHTS INFORMATION:

For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.

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