Howard Zinn and actor Viggo Mortensen take part in a 2008 panel discussion about The People Speak at Emerson College in Boston. (Michael Dwyer/AP)
One name I never expected to hear come from Donald Trump’s mouth during the last election was that of Howard Zinn. Had the former president really ever heard of the radical historian who died in 2010 even as he excoriated the late Boston University icon for trying to make “students ashamed of their own history”? Or had one of his speechwriters summoned Zinn’s name from the dead to drive terror into the souls of suburban women?