NEW YORK — Howard Zinn, the leftist academic whose alternative history of the United States became required reading for millions of ordinary people, as well as a following of celebrities, has died. He was 87.
Zinn's death was confirmed by his website, www.howardzinn.org. The Boston Globe reported that the cause of death was heart attack and that he died Wednesday while traveling in Santa Monica, California.
An anti-Vietnam war activist and champion of the post-World War II civil rights movement for blacks in the United States, Zinn was at the forefront of the country's social upheaval between the 1950s and 1970s.
But he was most famous for his 1980 "A People's History of the United States," which sold millions of copies.
In this radical reordering of the familiar story, the heroes were not the US Founding Fathers but early trade union activists, feminists and leaders of other leftwing causes.
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