I remember vividly the first time I met Howard Zinn. It was 2005 and the height of the murder and mayhem overtaking Iraq after the US/UK attack. I was studying history for a year at UCLA and had gone over to the East Coast for a week to interview three of the great dissidents in the country – Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Edward S Herman – for the Leeds Student newspaper.

Though a good publication, Leeds Student isn’t exactly the New Yorker, but Zinn agreed to the interview straight away, no questions asked. His only request was that we meet at the Harvard Trade Union Program, so I trundled along there on a cold November morning. His personal warmth was – as Victoria Brittain mentioned – renowned, but the strength of its radiation still struck me when I met him. He smiled and bantered and encouraged. I told him I had just watched the documentary about his life, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, the night before in my hostel. “I bet you got it free off the internet didn’t you! Everyone does that nowadays,” he joked in the lift (it was true).

Towards the end of the interview our roles reversed and he started to ask me what I thought of the war and the political situation in the UK, something the majority of careerist, conceited academics are rarely wont to do. But this was what made Zinn sui generis: a voracious intellect but, crucially, one deeply immersed in the world around him. He saw everyone as a source from which to learn, and it was this quality that made him such a brilliant historian. He was, in the truest sense of an overused phrase, a man of the people.

It is no surprise, then, that he singlehandedly turned American historiography on its head by adducing the forgotten histories of the marginalised, colonised and abused to weave a work of true brilliance. Published in 1980, A People’s History of the United States, was, for me as an undergraduate history student, a complete revelation. I was growing bored with the stale tutorials on the Annalist school, discussions so abstract as to be dispiritingly divorced from the increasingly mad world we were living in. Then there were the fatuous forums on “What is history?” where we debated objectivity and truth and managed to miss the point of it all.

Zinn’s work saved me though. He provided many of the answers, subverting the “received wisdom” with ease and piercing simplicity. I still remember reading the first chapter of People’s History on Columbus Day in the US after a friend had recommended it. Zinn had carefully laid out the barbarity of the first Spanish colonists led by Columbus in their own words. The history he told made the celebrations for this “great explorer” seem truly sick.

Zinn was also saying explicitly something I had been thinking but never had the confidence to say: “My work, like everyone else’s, is subjective”. He wasn’t afraid to admit it. At university we were taught to revere the great historians who provided the “truthful” account of the past. But, said Zinn, everything was and is subjective, and not benignly subjective either. History had since its inception been skewed in the service of power, status and money. This was explicit in the days of the court historians, paid by the Crown to write their hagiographies, but it continues to this days with elite universities such as Harvard giving their most prestigious history chairs to people such as Niall Ferguson, who has put his mind in the service of entrenched power since the start of his career, while spurning the excavators of real truth such as Zinn.

But while it’s obvious that people will focus on his greatest work, Zinn’s life was indistinguishable from the great struggles that overtook America in the 20th century (at 87, he lived for about a quarter of the entire life of the American Republic). He was a lecturer at Spelman College, the most famous black university in the South, when he joined his students in civil disobedience actions during the civil rights movement and was eventually kicked out. He was one of the leaders of the anti-Vietnam war movement that mobilised a generation, and spoke out against the trophy cabinet of fascist security states the administrations from Nixon to Reagan established and nurtured in Latin America through the back end of the cold war.

Where the American liberal elite were wavering and equivocating in the face of these barbarisms, Zinn could be relied upon to speak up and provide the historical context to the contemporary atrocities. His last article for the Nation last month on Obama’s first year is a good example and should be read by anyone interested in the latest liberal hysteria.

Zinn’s many detractors in the history profession accused him of “propaganda” and “bias”. It is true that his aversion to war was emotional as well as intellectual. But why is that considered a negative?

He had been a bombardier during the Second World War and dropped bombs over France. He was wracked with guilt that he would never know who those munitions had killed. He knew what many pro-war commentators and academics seemingly don’t: War is hell, and there should be an impossibly high burden of proof to unleash this terror.

His closest British analogue was the activist-historian, E.P. Thompson, the author of the seminal The Making of the English Working Class, a man who was similarly involved in contemporary struggles while revolutionizing how we see our past, two pursuits that are inextricably linked.

The intellectual experience I had with Zinn’s ideas is one I know millions of American kids will continue to have. For making us see that history is ours and that its abuse is the first stage along the road to war and injustice he lived a truly valuable life.  Milan Kundera wrote, “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of truth against forgetting”. Zinn made sure we won’t, and they can’t, forget.

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