Howard Zinn: On History by Howard Zinn (2011) is a collection of previously published essays ranging from Freedom Schools in the 1960s, to issues of scholarship , to the American Empire. Although the essays were written over several decades, there is a constant theme throughout the work: the activist scholar. Zinn believes that scholars should not be passive citizens interested only in their research, but active citizens who use their research to change society. Zinn, unlike other historians, is not afraid to incorporate what he considers right and wrong into his scholarly work. In fact he sees nothing immoral in inserting his opinion or politics into his writings. The higher education society teaches historians to be objective by removing the person from reading, removing opinion from writing. Zinn believes this is a fruitless venture, because ultimately opinion and politics will enter the writing. In Howard Zinn: On History we talk about a different kind of historian. Zinn challenges the traditional notion of the historian as a more passive scholar who ceaselessly seeks to distance himself from his own research. Zinn sees this as an impossibility and instead argues for a more active scholar. This is the central theme that runs through Zinn's book, a theme that should be present throughout the scholarship itself. In “The Historian as Citizen (1966)” Howard Zinn codifies for the first time his views as an opinion-based activist scholar in terms of the historian. The first type of historian he introduces is the traditional version of the historian, “traditionally, he is a passive observer, one who seeks sequential patterns in the past as a guide to the future (…) but without himself participating in attempts to change the pattern or l he order of the center of the card......disrupts the traditional notion of objectivity by claiming that it is impossible. People cannot remove their own biases and therefore they are subjective in nature. Therefore, that objectivity is lost because the historian is no longer a “disinterested scholar”; however, this does not mean that the final result, i.e. the research, cannot be truthful, and therefore objective. Just because people are subjective doesn't mean the truth is unattainable. The idea that “specialization” harms scholarship by making “scholar-activist” impossible is simply not pragmatic. It is impossible for a single person to be a true holistic scholar and, therefore, a group of “scholar-activists” is a more practical solution to the problem of “specialization”. Howard Zinn's book is his attempt to become a “scholar-activist” as he uses his research to try to change society for the better.