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Introduction

Introducing a bunch of writings (the word anthology, originally meaning a collection of flowers, would be going too far) requires a certain amount of ingenuity, finding a common thread in pieces that were written at different times, in response to different situations.

The difficulty is compounded in this case, where some of the pieces are transcripts of talks: ranging from a Vietnam-era debate at Johns Hopkins University to more recent lectures at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Minnesota, a talk for the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, and a lecture at the Wellfleet Public Library broadcast on WOMR, Cape Cod, organized by those super-organizers, Robert and Ethel Levy.

Others are essays, written for the now-defunct (am I responsible?) Civil Liberties Review, or the (also defunct; my record is getting worse by the minute) Gannett Center Journal. Five of the shorter pieces were written for Z Magazine. One was written for the Open Magazine Pamphlet Series.

One entry is an unpublished Op-Ed piece. And one is an interview with the extraordinary radio persona David Barsamian.

The closest I can come to finding a common thread is that all the pieces represent the thinking of someone who wants to address urgent issues of peace and justice with the perspective (presumably long-range and very wise) of a historian.

The stimulus for putting these together came from Greg Bates, who claims to run Common Courage Press from someplace in Maine, but I have never laid eyes on him or his locus of operations in Maine, so I am only assuming they exist. All I can say is that he is very engaging on the telephone, good-humored, easy to work with. Add those qualities to invisibility and you have the perfect editor-publisher. The question now is whether we have matched such a publisher with a proper writer. I leave that judgment to the reader.

Howard Zinn

March 1993