Howard Zinn speaks on Emma Goldman, Anarchism and War Resistance

Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 29, 2002

I’ll start with Emma Goldman and then move into other things. Because I can never stay with history. I can never stay with the past. For me, I became a historian, and went into the past, really for the purpose of trying to understand and do something about what was going on in the present. So I never wanted to be a historian who goes into the archives and you never hear from him or her again. So my work on Emma Goldman was always connected with the things I was involved in, and active in, in the world. I had vaguely been aware of Emma Goldman. It was interesting—here I was a PhD in history, and what could be higher than that? Who could be better informed than a PhD in history? But here I was with a doctorate from Columbia, and Emma Goldman had never been mentioned in any of my classes, and none of her writings had ever appeared on my reading lists, and it’s just that I vaguely remembered reading a chapter about her in a old book called Critics and Crusaders. There’s a chapter on Emma Goldman. So I had this vague notion about Emma Goldman, but I didn’t know anything about her.

Then I was at some conference in Pennsylvania and sometimes at conferences you run into interesting people. I ran into this guy, Richard Drinnon, a remarkable historian. I recommend a book of his that is not well known—but it’s the not well-known books that you need to know about. He wrote a book called Facing West, a brilliant literary, political discussion of American expansionism into the far west, and the Philippines, and Vietnam. (You’re going to find a lot of digressions in my talk, a lot of parenthetical remarks. Occasionally I’ll come back to my topic.) But Drinnon told me he had written a biography of Emma Goldman: Rebel in Paradise. So I went to it, and read it, and it just astonished me. It made me angry about the fact that I had not been told anything about Emma Goldman in my long education.

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