Hollywood Left Turns Out to Celebrate Howard Zinn’s Legacy

[niyad]

Hollywood Left Turns Out to Celebrate Howard Zinn’s Legacy

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Rocker Tom Morello brought the house down––and the crowd of 800 to their feet ––with rollicking renditions of Bruce Springsteen and Woody Guthrie songs at a Los Angeles event celebrating the publication of the 10th anniversary edition of Voices of a People’s History of the United States (Seven Stories Press). Co-edited by the late Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, the hefty volume contains quotes by indigenous people, slaves, abolitionists, suffragettes, labor organizers, agitators, anarchists, communists, feminists, and dissidents of many stripes representing the marginalized.

This updated version of Voices adds passages from whistleblower Chelsea Manning, anti-surveillance Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gleen Greenwald, anti-globalization activist/author Naomi Klein, and other resistance figures. A host of Hollywood heavyweights, including Kerry Washington (Scandal, Django Unchained), Oscar-winner Marisa Tomei (My Cousin Vinny) and Benjamin Bratt (Traffic), read various quotations from Voices during the Nov. 13 show at Downtown L.A.’s Japanese Cultural & Community Center.

Introducing the talents participating in the sold-out performance, Arnove noted sadly that the occasion was “bittersweet” as this was the first edition since 2004 of Voices––a companion book to Zinn’s classic text A People’s History of the United States––to be released after the historian’s 2010 death at age 87. But Arnove, who co-produced the Oscar-nominated documentary Dirty Wars and compiled the additions for this third edition of Voices, asserted, “I am very confident that Howard is very much with us in spirit… and I also feel that Howard is with the strikers who are striking at the docks at L.A.’s port and with the Walmart workers who are sitting in today––and at Ferguson, Missouri.”

Singer/songwriter Joe Henry then kicked off the event with a moving performance of a 1971 Bob Dylan song about prison guards killing Black Panther and so-called “Soledad Brother” George Jackson.

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- See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/11/187913/hollywood-left-turns-out-celebrate-howard-zinn%E2%80%99s-legacy#sthash.vtzdU2yL.dpuf

[Starry Messenger]

1. k&r

[PatrickforO]

2. One of my all time favorite books is Zinn's

People's History of the United States. I try to read it once each year. He was a great man because he told the TRUTH.

[RufusTFirefly]

3. The other day I heard Chris Hedges praise another Zinn book I didn't recognize

I believe it may have been The Politics of History.
Assuming I've got the right book, Hedges said it was "brilliant."

[rhett o rick]

4. I love Howard Zinn but I can handle truth in small doses. I've only read about half of that book.

I can't read "The Shock Doctrine", I know it'd do a number on my psyche.

[Iwillnevergiveup]

5. I know what you mean

I read "The Shock Doctrine" a couple of years ago, and it's stayed with me ever since. Decided to tear into Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland" because he's written a fantastic sequel to it. What I forgot and what I didn't know in the first place is mind-boggling. The 60's were something else.

Howard Zinn - well what else can one say except

[rhett o rick]

6. Once during jury selection I was asked who, other than family members, did I admire most.

I said Howard Zinn and didn't get chosen and the nitwit that said his father got chosen. That's the world.

[PatrickforO]

8. Our 'justice' system doesn't want any Zinn admirers on juries...

They might know enough to negate the verdict.

[rhett o rick]

15. Exactly, they chose a guy that disregarded the instructions. It was a dumb case

anywayz.

[2banon]

12. Just listening to Naomi Kline's talks in reference to content in Shock Doctrine

illuminating, brilliant and depressing as hell.. I do thoroughly enjoy listening to her talks though.

Howard Zinn. yes, agree..

[deutsey]

9. I got half way through it before I had to put it aside

I intend to finish it, but while it's highly informative and well written, it was so depressing I had to focus on other things for a while.

It was like: You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you sick.

[2banon]

13. that happens to me reading so many books on our history..

even reading: The Tiger Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall was so utterly depressing, as it revealed the corrupt political machinations beginning in the period JUST AFTER the Revolutionary War ended! vis a vis Aaron Burr (and all who came before him in the prior century)aims to engineer the presidential election of 1800.

Engineering elections results by way of massive fraud is essentially a key component of our so called democracy. Just this aspect alone, is enough to send my psyche into downward spiral.

And people here wonder why the voter turn out is so low.

Indeed!

the ye show know the truth, and the truth shall make you sick.

[rhett o rick]

14. That describes my feeling exactly. nm

[burrowowl]

7. K&R a million times!

And if you have not read "A People's History of the United States" hie thee hither and lay your hands on a copy and READ IT!

[niyad]

11. I have one worn, old paperback copy--just got the expanded, updated version from the library.

[niyad]

10. . . .