I've always admired Howard Zinn, but it seems the radical historian wasn't all that popular with the FBI. Via Raw Story:

On Friday, the FBI released a 243-page file on Zinn, who died in January at age 87. The release describes the historian as "radical." The documents show the bureau taking an active interest in Zinn since the late 1940s, when he was a student at New York University. The interest continued through the 1950s, as Zinn worked on his PhD at Columbia University.

When the FBI again took an interest in Zinn in the 1960s, documents show the bureau evidently tried to have the historian fired from his job as professor at Boston University.In a document from the Boston FBI office (see PDF file here), an FBI "source," whose name was redacted from the publicly released documents, was quoted as being outraged over Zinn's comment at a protest that the US had become a "police state" and that prosecutions of Black Panther Party members were creating "political prisoners."

The bureau's Boston office then indicated it wanted to help the source in his or her campaign to unseat Zinn. "[The] Boston [office] proposes under captioned program with Bureau permission to furnish [name redacted] with public source data regarding Zinn's numerous anti-war activities ... in an effort to back [redacted] efforts for his removal."

The bureau's response to the request does not appear to have been included in the released documents.(Raw Story reporters will continue to mine through the documents for more details. If you want to help, you can view the FBI files here, here and here (PDF). Send us what you find to tips@rawstory.com.)

The FBI notes that its investigations of Zinn -- three in total, over 25 years -- "ended in 1974, and no further investigation into Zinn or his activities was made by the FBI."Zinn had harsh words for the FBI during his academic career. In a paper published not long before his death, Zinn said the best thing the public could do to curb the FBI's powers was to "continue exposing them."

Of the FBI, he said, "They don’t like social movements. They work for the establishment and the corporations and the politicos to keep things as they are. And they want to frighten and chill the people who are trying to change things. So the best defense against them and resistance against them is simply to keep on fighting back, to keep on exposing them."

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[Note: I'll be appearing on David Sirota's radio show Tuesday at 8:35 am PST to discuss Beck and his attacks on progressives.]

It's been pretty interesting watching Glenn Beck ratchet up the eliminationist rhetoric in his attacks on progressives in the past couple of months.

The storyline, as you may have gathered, is that the "progressive movement" is the root of all evil in American politics, a "cancer" and a "virus" and a "parasite" that has "infected" both parties. Beck has been doing a lot of fake "history" reporting when it comes to these attacks -- indeed, it tells you everything you need to know that he considers Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as the presidential wellsprings of this Great Evil.

Well, as we observed some time back, there's a great deal of real history that Beck has to omit from his narrative in order to make these claims stick -- particularly the reality that progressive politics created the great American middle class consumer society that he and other right-wingers take for granted now, not to mention the conditions for average Americans before the arrival of progressive politics.

But one of the most interesting omissions from Beck's parade of progressive evils is one of the real achievements of progressive politics in the past half-century -- namely, the advancement of civil rights for minorities, beginning with the civil-rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. These movements ended Jim Crow and made life better for millions of nonwhites, and created a more just and civil society along the way.

And you know, civil rights was a progressive cause. It still is. The opposition? It has always -- ALWAYS -- been conservatives.

Yet all the time Beck has been bashing progressives, he has simultaneously been hosting shows with audiences of black conservatives wherein they sit around and complain about how mean liberals are to them for being conservative and Beck gets to ask dumb white-guy questions like: "Why not identify yourself as Americans?"

Even more to the point, in both of these shows, Beck has glowingly quoted Martin Luther King -- who was, you know, a leader in the progressive movement.

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So here's our question for Glenn Beck: If the progressive movement, as you claim, has been so relentlessly evil and has consistently taken America down the wrong path, what about civil rights?

Was Martin Luther King secretly evil too?

Should we return to pre-progressive policies -- you know, the "separate but equal" status quo of Jim Crow and segregation?

Indeed, your hatred of the "progressive movement" and its effects on American life raise a whole host of similar questions about your views on civil rights.

And we're just wondering.

Get along home, Cindy.

Nick Reynolds, a founding member of the Kingston Trio who jump-started the revival folk scene of the late 1950s and paved the way for artists such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, has died. He was 75.

SJ Mercury News:

Ruth Brown's recordings of "Teardrops in My Eyes" and "(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean" dominated the rhythm-and-blues charts in the 1950s and earned her the nickname "Miss Rhythm."

But her other nickname might as well be "Miss Survivor" for sustaining through the highs and lows of a six decades-long career.

Brown died Friday at a Las Vegas-area hospital of complications from a stroke and heart attack, said Lindajo Loftus, a publicist for the Rhythm & Blues Foundation, which Brown helped found. Read on...

This is the only video on YouTube I could find of Ruth, singing "(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean"

via Direland: "In a hydra-headed propaganda attack, reminiscent of Joe McCarthy's wild charges in the 1950s that the Democrats were responsible for "twenty years of treason," Karl Rove and the Republican Party are engaged in a widespread smear campaign against MoveOn as" unpatriotic," hoping to hang the successful e-fundraising operation around the necks of Democratic candidates all across the country like a terror-tinged albatross...read on"

As usual Doug is ahead of the curve on how the game is being played. The blog-apologists have already fallen in line today on Moveon.org