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Americans Who Tell the Truth

My office decoration project is almost complete:

www.flickr.com

There’s one last space that I need to fill. I knew right away who I wanted to occupy it. Howard, of course. No, not Stern you Bababooie-head; Zinn. So off I went to be one of the 2.7 million Google questions this month and looked for “Howard Zinn poster”.

Zinn has had a large impact on me as a social studies teacher and as a person. I found him just before I went into my teaching program. He wasn’t on any of my class lists, but I did happen on to him while working on a research project. As I was sifting through piles of academia one of his books kept coming up. No, it wasn’t A People’s History of the United States, it was a book about the SNCC, SNCC: The New Abolitionists.

Now, if you can, think back to the year 1997. Amazon had launched in 1995, but resale books wasn’t their market. At that time Zinn’s SNCC book had been out of print for a while and I needed to find a book resaler who would go find it for me. There was a small book store in Reno that did such things. It took them about three weeks to find the book and $45 dollars later I had a beat-up paperback copy. This lead to much more reading of Zinn, including the auto-biography which has been a guiding light for me. (not to mention the subsequent attempts to read Chomsky. Yeah. Might as well try my hand a Russian Literature)

Anyhow, Zinn taught me about multiple points of view, and not being neutral as a teacher, and speaking up for those that are not able to speak up for themselves. All of these things have guided my personal and professional choices which leads to why I needed a poster of him in my newly decorated office.

The search landed me on American’s Who Tell the Truth website. There’s nothing more satisfying than doing a Google search and finding just what your looking for. Especially when that something is something that you want to buy. I saw the portrait of Zinn and knew right away that was the one that I wanted. I headed over to the shop to see what was there, saw the poster link (my heart jumped a little), and then realized that Zinn was not one of the available as a print. Crap! What’s a guy to do. Well, I took a shot and emailed the artist, and that for me is where things get interesting.

I sent Robert Shetterly an email early in the morning (it’s the only time that my building is empty and can go pursue these kinds of things). By mid-afternoon Mr. Shetterly had sent me back and email letting me know that we could work something out and that if I were willing he would send me a link to high-res versions of his art work. And this is why the internet rocks.

In about week I’m going to have framed portraits of Howard Zinn as well as Emma Goldman, Cezar Chavez, and Jonathan Kozol.