"Readers of this volume are likely familiar with Zinn's opus, A people's history of the United States. The essays in this volume are somewhat different. A people's history documents the struggles of ordinary Americans for a measure of justice, but it does so at a remove of several decades, and even centuries, from the people and the events it describes. These Nation essays remind us that for nearly fifty years Zinn himself was deeply involved in the major twentieth-century struggles for social justice in the United States: the emancipatory movement of African-Americans for civil and political rights and the recurrent movements against America's imperial wars, first in Vietnam and then in Iraq and Afghanistan. These essays are reports and reflections on those struggles, on the courage and imagination of the young people who were the main participants, and on the abuses on the part of the political authorities, includingthe Democratic presidents who tried to resist or evade movement demands. And while the issues of today's protest movements are different, there are also remarkable continuities. The civil rights movement's most urgent demand was the right to vote, which had deep historical meaning for African-Americans, if only because deprivation of that right undergirded the Southern racial caste system. The movement scored remarkable victories with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But these kinds of victories are rarely for keeps, and voting rights are again in the cross-hairs. The Supreme Court has struck down part fot he Voting Rights Act, and Republican majorities in state legislatures are passing laws to make voter registration and voting more expensive and more difficult in ways that will especially affect black voters"--Page 8-9.

"Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922-January 27, 2010) was an American historian, playwright, and social activist. He was a political science professor at Boston University. Zinn wrote more than twenty books, including his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States. In 2007, he published a version of it for younger readers, A Young People's History of the United States. Zinn described himself as 'something of an anarchist, something of a socialist. Maybe a democratic socialist.' He wrote extensively about the civil rights and anti-war movements, and labor history of the United States"--Wikipedia.