Historian Howard Zinn Is Comic Book Hero

One of our favorite movie moments of all time is when Good Will Hunting‘s Will (Matt Damon) pulls out a historiographical can of whoop-ass on a snide young scholar looking for a scuffle. (“You’re a first year grad student. You just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably….next year, you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about ya know, the Pre-Revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.”) Although the film may have sold a few books for Wood, we suspect it was better at moving copies of another tome mentioned in the film: A People’s History of the United States, written by Damon’s childhood neighbor, Howard Zinn.