Historian Howard Zinn, for decades a leading critic of the American Empire, has died at age 87. See his obit from the Boston paper here.

I first heard of Zinn twenty-two years ago when my anarchist punk-rocker roommate loaned me a copy of “A People’s History of the United States“. A short time later I discovered Noam Chomksy’s “The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism“. This was really the beginning of my ongoing critique of American imperialism and opposition to the same. Over the years, I would come to disagree with Chomsky and Zinn on many domestic issues, but on the question of the empire, these two have been among its foremost critics. R.I.P., Howard.