Howard Zinn

WELLFLEET — Jeff Zinn, the artistic director of Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, has found a movingly appropriate way to honor the memory of his father, Howard Zinn: by giving the late author-activist-scholar’s play “Daughter of Venus’’ a production that makes its many virtues shine. Suffolk University and Boston Playwrights’ Theatre presented the play in January 2009 as part of a yearlong celebration of Howard Zinn’s life and work, but that production updated the action from its original 1980s setting to the present.

WELLFLEET — Jeff Zinn, the artistic director of Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, has found a movingly appropriate way to honor the memory of his father, Howard Zinn: by giving the late author-activist-scholar’s play “Daughter of Venus’’ a production that makes its many virtues shine. Suffolk University and Boston Playwrights’ Theatre presented the play in January 2009 as part of a yearlong celebration of Howard Zinn’s life and work, but that production updated the action from its original 1980s setting to the present.

The late Howard Zinn, no slouch when it came to delivering broadsides against the status quo, once lauded the “magic, beauty, and power’’ that Bread & Puppet Theater has brought to that same task for nearly half a century. Over the weekend, Bread & Puppet stopped in at the Cyclorama for its annual visit to Boston. With “Tear Open the Door of Heaven,’’ the troupe offered its trademark mixture of live performers, puppetry, politics and protest, but this time religion was added to the mix. When you hear “puppets,’’ you may think of Kermit, Miss Piggy, Bert and...

The late Howard Zinn, no slouch when it came to delivering broadsides against the status quo, once lauded the “magic, beauty, and power’’ that Bread & Puppet Theater has brought to that same task for nearly half a century. Over the weekend, Bread & Puppet stopped in at the Cyclorama for its annual visit to Boston. With “Tear Open the Door of Heaven,’’ the troupe offered its trademark mixture of live performers, puppetry, politics and protest, but this time religion was added to the mix. When you hear “puppets,’’ you may think of Kermit, Miss Piggy, Bert and...

In his books, historian Howard Zinn has helped honor and legitimize the power of the ordinary citizen. He has given us history through the words of “the people,’’ rather than from the perspective of government. It has been the people who’ve pushed our country out of war, out of slavery, out of genocide, out of legalized gender inequality. So many of America’s definitive freedoms have come from the bottom up, driven by grass-roots energy and individual heroism. I was anxious about seeing Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States’’ and “Voices of a People’s...

It's refreshing to see a play with an agenda. Of course, when a play is based on the writings of historian and activist Howard Zinn, it's practically impossible to avoid having an agenda. Written and directed by Boston's Wesley Savick, the new "Shouting Theatre in a Crowded Fire" weaves together Zinn's ideological notions and Savick's personal stories in a sort of theater-in-the-raw format. Six actors mill about a blank stage at Boston Playwrights' Theatre, pulling the props they need into the playing space and disposing of them casually, as they create scenes...

CAMBRIDGE — Decades before Howard Zinn published "A People's History of the United States," Woody Guthrie was writing that history in song. "The only story that I've tried to write down is you," David M. Lutken, as Guthrie, tells the audience near the beginning of "Woody Sez: The Life & Music of Woody Guthrie," a fine musical portrait of the groundbreaking folk singer now at the American Repertory Theater. Under the direction of Nick Corley, Lutken captures Guthrie's easy, matter-of-fact charm, his gift for storytelling with or without music, and, perhaps...

IT WAS silly enough to read about the so-called library at Occupy Boston - if the works of Howard Zinn and Che Guevara can be said to constitute a library ("Occupy Boston embraces its library," G section, Nov. 22). Now the Globe would have us believe that a gathering that is 50 percent unemployed, 75 percent male, and 100 percent revolutionary is "disparate" ("At Occupy, disparate group finds harmony in protest," Page A1, Nov. 25). This group of layabouts, malcontents, and outright criminals is dispiriting, not disparate.

"Profit motive and the whispering wind," a film that for much of its length is every bit as distinctive as its title, is dedicated to Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States," which John Gianvito, the director, also cites as inspiration. Yet what's best about the film - "documentary" is too blunt a word - has far less to do with radical history than with the one-of-a-kind visual essays of Chris Marker. There's a similar sense of cool, unhurried appraisal and a viewer's growing awareness that he or she is in the presence of an unconventional intelligence eager to make us see things afresh.

[Gandhi stands guard at the Peace Abbey. Globe Staff Photo by Yoon S. Byun] The Peace Abbey is a spiritual oasis that's tucked away in the wooded hamlet of Sherborn. The multi-faith retreat center is home to the Pacifist Living History Museum and Emily the Sacred Cow , and over the years has hosted well-known visitors like Mother Teresa, Howard Zinn, Muhammad Ali, Maya Angelou, and, most recently, Joan Baez . But the future of the Peace Abbey is up in the air. Faced with mounting bills, the...

In his books, historian Howard Zinn has helped honor and legitimize the power of the ordinary citizen. He has given us history through the words of “the people,’’ rather than from the perspective of government. It has been the people who’ve pushed our country out of war, out of slavery, out of genocide, out of legalized gender inequality. So many of America’s definitive freedoms have come from the bottom up, driven by grass-roots energy and individual heroism. I was anxious about seeing Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States’’ and “Voices of a People’s...

It's refreshing to see a play with an agenda. Of course, when a play is based on the writings of historian and activist Howard Zinn, it's practically impossible to avoid having an agenda. Written and directed by Boston's Wesley Savick, the new "Shouting Theatre in a Crowded Fire" weaves together Zinn's ideological notions and Savick's personal stories in a sort of theater-in-the-raw format. Six actors mill about a blank stage at Boston Playwrights' Theatre, pulling the props they need into the playing space and disposing of them casually, as they create scenes...

Jonathan Lee's "Paul Goodman Changed My Life" is an attempt to reclaim a lost counterculture mentor — a thinker/writer/activist who helped make possible the New Left of the 1960s before he was outrun by it and who died too early for his influence to be properly calibrated. As documentaries go, it's an able introduction that doesn't make its subject nearly as relevant to our current discontents as it could. Goodman is virtually forgotten in the new millennium, but he was to engaged youth of the early '60s what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky are today — one of the few people over...