BOSTON, Jan. 28 (UPI) -- Howard Zinn, whose book "A People's History of the United States" was a best-selling challenge to mainstream texts, died at age 87, his daughter said.
Zinn, who taught history at Boston University for many years, died of a heart attack Wednesday while traveling in Santa Monica, Calif., Myla Kabat-Zinn said. He lived in Auburndale, Mass.
"He's made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture," activist and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Noam Chomsky told The Boston Globe.
Zinn "changed perspective and understanding for a whole generation," Chomsky said.
By contrast, American historian and social critic Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was quoted in The New York Times as once saying he considered Zinn "a polemicist, not a historian."
Activism against injustice was a logical extension of the revisionist history he taught, Zinn said in his 1994 autobiography, "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train."
The heroes of his 1980 "People's History" were not the political leaders who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 -- men who Zinn asserted supported the status quo, including slavery -- but rather the poor farmers of Massachusetts' 1786 and 1787 Shays' Rebellion, angered by what they felt were crushing debt and taxes, and union organizers of the 1930s, the Globe observed.
Born in New York in 1922, Zinn served as a bombardier in World War II, earning an Air Medal for meritorious achievement in aerial flight and attaining the rank of second lieutenant.
After the war, Zinn studied at New York University, working nights loading trucks in a warehouse to support his studies. He received a bachelor's degree from NYU, and master's and doctoral degrees in history from Columbia University.
His wife and longtime collaborator Roslyn died in 2008. They had two children, Myla and Jeff.
