Thinkers Timeline

Howard Zinn (1922-2010) was an American historian, playwright, and activist. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents who worked in factories, and grew up in poverty during the Great Depression. He served as a bombardier in the United States Army Air Forces during the Second World War, an experience that turned him against the use of mass violence in war. After the war he studied history at Columbia University under the GI Bill and became a professor. He taught at Spelman College, a historically Black women's college in Atlanta, where he became deeply involved in the civil rights movement, before moving to Boston University. In 1980 he published A People's History of the United States, which retold American history from the perspectives of indigenous people, enslaved Africans, women, immigrants, and working people rather than from the perspective of political and military leaders. The book has sold over two million copies and has been continuously in print. He was also a prominent anti-war activist, opposing American involvement in Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Iraq War. He died in 2010 at the age of eighty-seven.

Natalie Zemon Davis (born 1928) is an American-Canadian historian. She was born in Detroit, Michigan, into a Jewish family, and studied history at Smith College, Radcliffe, and Michigan. She spent most of her academic career at Princeton University and the University of Toronto. In the 1950s she and her husband were investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era, and she was unable to get an academic job for some years because of this. This experience of political persecution, and its arbitrariness, shaped her sensitivity to the experience of ordinary people navigating systems of power they could not control. She is best known for her books The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) and Women on the Margins (1995), but her broader contribution to historiography, how historians should do history, has been equally important. She brought together history and anthropology, paying close attention to how people at different times and places understood and narrated their own experiences, attending to the lives of women, artisans, Jews, and other marginal people who rarely appeared in conventional histories, and using close reading of documents to reconstruct the inner lives and cultural worlds of people who left few records. She has continued to work and teach into her nineties.

Walter Rodney (1942-1980) was a Guyanese historian, political thinker, and activist. He was born in Georgetown, Guyana, then a British colony in South America, and showed exceptional academic ability from childhood. He studied history at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and then completed a doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He taught at universities in Tanzania and Jamaica and became one of the most important historians of Africa and the African diaspora of his generation. He is best known for his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, published in 1972, which showed systematically how African countries were made poor through centuries of colonial exploitation, not left poor through a lack of development. He was deeply committed to organising alongside working people and poor communities, not only writing about them. He was banned from Jamaica in 1968 for his political activities. He returned to Guyana in 1974 to work for political change there and was assassinated in 1980 at the age of thirty-eight. He died just months before elections that might have changed Guyanese politics.

Tony Judt was a British-American historian. He was one of the most important historians of postwar Europe and a sharp public intellectual. His massive 2005 book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 is widely considered one of the great works of modern historical writing. He was born in 1948 in London. He died in 2010 in New York, aged 62, from complications of motor neurone disease. He came from a Jewish family with roots in Eastern Europe. His parents were secular socialists. He grew up in north London. He studied history at King's College Cambridge from 1966. He spent time in Israel as a young man, where he worked on a kibbutz and briefly served in the Israeli army during the 1967 Six-Day War. The experience shaped him deeply. He returned home increasingly critical of Israeli policies, while remaining deeply engaged with Jewish history and identity. He earned his PhD in 1972. He taught at Cambridge and Oxford, then moved to the United States in 1987. He became professor of European history at New York University, where he taught for the rest of his career. In 1995 he founded the Remarque Institute at NYU for the study of Europe. He wrote across many fields: French intellectual history, postwar European history, contemporary politics, and questions of social democracy and political memory. He was politically a social democrat. He criticised both the radical left and the contemporary right. Some of his views, especially his strong criticism of Israeli policies and his 2003 essay calling for a binational state in Israel-Palestine, made him controversial. In 2008 he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, also called ALS. The disease gradually paralysed him while leaving his mind intact. He continued writing through dictation. His final books, written as he was dying, are some of his most powerful. He died in 2010.