A People's History of American Empire: A Graphic Adaptation, and: Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History (review)

You likely return to favorite books on the teaching shelf for the value of a single chapter, page, even an exemplary instructive paragraph or long sentence. I don't teach history or political science—not so that you'd notice anyway—but in my extreme civics-oriented composition classes I find myself regularly going back to Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. In particular, I use over and over the infinitely useful and teachable chapter, "A Word About Words," which establishes in a few pages the value and utility of straight talk about "self-interest," "compromise," and "conflict," arguing that "life without power is death."

Lately, I've added to my file of photocopied favorites Robert Hass's "A Poem" from Time and Materials—"Of course, God is not the cause of aerial bombardment"—and bookmarked on my laptop an excerpt from a singular Noam Chomsky "YouTube" lecture on the American political system. With typical precision and concision (seven minutes), Chomsky offers a careful premise, teaches some vocabulary, quotes and cites an important scholar, makes and defends an argument, and invites questions, all behaviors I want students to embrace. There's director Gus van Sant's video of Allen Ginsburg's song "Ballad of the Skeletons," a montage critiquing sociological forces—church, business, state, resistance—that make up what Chomsky calls our "polyarchy." And, always, there are radio journalist Amy Goodman's archived "Democracy Now!" interviews of almost everybody.

But a handout I use most is the first few pages of Howard Zinn's classic A People's History of the United States, on European-Native American first contact, written from the perspective of the Arawak. Many undergrads have read it, but it is still a mind-blower for perspective, revisionist history and implications about how we read, research, and write.

In his comic book adaptation of parts of People's History (and parts of Zinn's autobiography, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train), writer/editor Paul Buhle writes that "None of the scholars charting [U.S.] empire epitomized the truth teller and political visionary better" than Zinn. Buhle knows whereof he speaks, yet speaks modestly. The former SDS leader, Brown University history professor, researcher, writer and editor of dozens of books is Zinn's obvious heir.

In fact you cannot swing a dead radical (or live one) without hitting Paul Buhle. He's the hardest-working man in Leftbiz, a popularizer, archivist, cultural polemicist, and revisionist historian whose own experience as editor of SDS's Radical America magazine and Movement activist seems to motivate his unceasing work telling stories of lives overlooked. If you are reading this magazine, you already know his credits. New books are out soon (on Che, the Beats, and Jews in American comics) and Buhle, a C.L.R. James scholar, is working on yet another graphic adaptation, this of Studs Terkel's Working. At last count, Buhle has written or edited thirty-three books, on Hollywood and the blacklist, American Jews and communists, labor, comics, feminism and women's rights, and the Wobblies, many in oral history or comic book form. My experience reading and teaching from these is that they introduce a sometimes unfamiliar analysis and establish the significance of Left artists and popular movements for non-activists while reminding and reassuring activists of their—our—existence.

In A People's History of American Empire, (from Metropolitan Books' "American Empire Project") Buhle uses the author-as-narrator device, an obvious and successful strategy considering the affable and empathetic character of Howard Zinn the Legend. If students know one historian, it is Zinn, who often pops up in pop culture. (A celebrated episode of "The Simpsons" features Marge reading People's History.) Buhle and veteran cartoonist/designer Mike Konopacki make Zinn our guide for this...