Many young foreigners, including Americans like Fred Zinn, volunteered for the Foreign Legion when the war broke out in 1914.

" In The Politics of History, Zinn described how the bombing was ordered — three weeks before the war in Europe ended — by military officials who were, in part, motivated more by the desire for their own career advancement than in legitimate military objectives.

Zinn questioned the justifications for military operations that inflicted massive civilian casualties during the Allied bombing of cities such as Dresden, Royan, Tokyo, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, Hanoi during the War in Vietnam, and Baghdad during the war in Iraq and the civilian casualties during bombings in Afghanistan during the current and nearly decade-old war there.

Zinn wrote one of the earliest books calling for the U. S. withdrawal from its war in Vietnam.

Zinn compared the demand by a growing number of contemporary U. S. military families to end the war in Iraq to parallel demands " in the Confederacy in the Civil War, when the wives of soldiers rioted because their husbands were dying and the plantation owners were profiting from the sale of cotton, refusing to grow grains for civilians to eat.

He observed that it is not unusual for prominent professors such as Zinn to weigh in on current events, citing a resolution opposing the war in Iraq that was recently ratified by the American Historical Association.

Zinn argues that the Founding Fathers agitated for war to distract the people from their own economic problems and stop popular movements, a strategy that he claims the country's leaders would continue to use in the future.

Zinn writes that President James Polk agitated for war for the purpose of expansionism.

Zinn argues that the war was unpopular, but that newspapers of that era misrepresented the popular sentiment.

Zinn writes that the large-scale violence of the war was used to end slavery instead of the small-scale violence of the rebellions because the latter may have expanded beyond anti-slavery, resulting in a movement against the capitalist system.

Zinn argues that the United States entered the war in order to expand its foreign markets and economic influence.

Zinn also argues against the US ' true intention was not fighting against systematic racism such as the Jim Crow laws ( leading to opposition to the war from African-Americans ).

Here, Zinn writes that the US government used the Cold War to increase control over the American people ( for instance, eliminating such radical elements as the Communist Party ) and at the same time create a state of permanent war, which allowed for the creation of the modern military-industrial complex.

Zinn argues that America was fighting a war that it could not win, as the Vietnamese people were in favor of the government of Ho Chi Minh and opposed the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, thus allowing them to keep morale high.

Zinn also tries to dispel the popular belief that opposition to the war was mainly amongst college students and middle-class intellectuals, using statistics from the era to show higher opposition from the working class.

Zinn argues that the troops themselves also opposed the war, citing desertions and refusals to go to war, as well as movements such as Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

" Other topics covered include Ralph Nader, the War in Afghanistan, ( though notably absent is any mention of the Taliban government in control in Afghanistan at the time, the war being launched, according to Zinn, based merely on the belief that bin Laden was hiding in the country ) and the USA PATRIOT Act.

After the United States entered the war in 1917, Zinn entered the U. S. Army Air Service as a captain and was attached to American GHQ at Chaumont until the Armistice on November 11, 1918.

Zinn returned to the United States after the war and continued flying, including a trip to San Francisco where his biplane was required to fly only over the waters of San Francisco Bay due to a perceived danger to citizens if it traveled over land.

* Gino Strada, Howard Zinn Just war, 2005, ISBN 88-8158-572-3.

Zinn described himself as " something of an anarchist, something of a socialist.

Howard Zinn, for instance, identifies Jackson as a leading " exterminator of Indians ," and notes how the public commemoration of Jackson obscures this part of American history.

Howard Zinn, in his " A People's History of the United States " notes:

Writer Aaron Sarver notes that although Kazin " savaged " Zinn ’ s A People ’ s History of the United States, " one of the few concessions Kazin made was his approval of Zinn punctuating ' his narrative with hundreds of quotes from slaves and Populists, anonymous wage-earners and ... articulate radicals.

It was first proposed by Leonard Searle and Robert Zinn that galaxies form by the coalescence of smaller progenitors.

One of the first aircraft used for surveillance was the Rumpler Taube during World War I, when aviators like Fred Zinn evolved entirely new methods of reconnaissance and photography.

Howard Zinn ( August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010 ) was an American academic historian, author, playwright, and social activist.

Zinn was born to a Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn.

Eager to fight fascism, Zinn joined the Army Air Force during World War II and was assigned as a bombardier in the 490th Bombardment Group, bombing targets in Berlin, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.

The anti-war stance Zinn developed later was informed, in part, by his experiences.

On the ground, Zinn learned that the aerial bombing attacks in which he participated had killed more than 1000 French civilians as well as some German soldiers hiding near Royan to await the war's end, events that are described " in all accounts " he found as " une tragique erreur " that leveled a small but ancient city and " its population that was, at least officially, friend, not foe.

Zinn wrote, " I recalled flying on that mission, too, as deputy lead bombardier, and that we did not aim specifically at the ' Skoda works ' ( which I would have noted, because it was the one target in Czechoslovakia I had read about ) but dropped our bombs, without much precision, on the city of Pilsen.

" His specific legislative program ," Zinn wrote, " was an astonishingly accurate preview of the New Deal.

Zinn regularly included it in his lists of recommended readings, and after Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, Zinn wrote, " If Richard Hofstadter were adding to his book The American Political Tradition, in which he found both ' conservative ' and ' liberal ' presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, maintaining for dear life the two critical characteristics of the American system, nationalism and capitalism, Obama would fit the pattern.

In 1960 – 61, Zinn was a post-doctoral fellow in East Asian Studies at Harvard University.

Zinn was professor of history at Spelman College in Atlanta from 1956 to 1963, and visiting professor at both the University of Paris and University of Bologna.

Zinn came to believe that the point of view expressed in traditional history books was often limited.

In 2008, the Zinn Education Project was launched to support educators using A People's History of the United States as a source for middle and high school history.

The Project was started when a former student of Zinn, who wanted to bring Zinn's lessons to students around the country, provided the financial backing to allow two other organizations to coordinate the Project.

Although Zinn was a tenured professor, he was dismissed in June 1963 after siding with students in the struggle against segregation.

In 2005, forty-one years after his firing, Zinn returned to Spelman where he was given an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters and delivered the commencement address where he said in part, during his speech titled, " Against Discouragement ," that " the lesson of that history is that you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist, things will change.

In later years, Zinn was an adviser to the Disarm Education Fund.

But this was not the same as hurting the nation, the people ," Zinn wrote in his autobiography.

During the height of McCarthyism in 1949, the FBI first opened a domestic security investigation on Zinn ( FBI File # 100-360217 ), based on Zinn ’ s activities in what the agency considered to be communist front groups and informant reports that Zinn was an active member of the Communist Party of the United States ( CPUSA ).