1922–2010 · American historian & antiwar activist · author of A People's History of the United States
Howard Zinn was a bombardier in the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War before becoming a historian whose A People’s History of the United States (1980) retold the American past from the bottom up. He is one of the named people on record saying the line in its declarative form — in a July 2002 interview he argued “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” — but he did not originate it, and never credited it to Jefferson. The phrasing was already circulating some forty years before he used it, and was a flat assertion in public speech by 1969.