Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are flexing their newfound Hollywood muscle by bringing the work of one of their favorite leftist historians to the small screen. Fox has announced that the Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting scribes will produce a 10-hour miniseries based on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. The book, which was released in 1980 and won a National Book Award the following year, traces an alternative history of America, as told from the point of view of blacks, women, war protesters, Native Americans, and the poor.

What’s the connection? Fans of Good Will Hunting will remember that Zinn’s book was featured prominently in the flick. Take that scene in the bar where Damon’s character quotes Zinn to cut a Harvard student down to size-and impress Minnie Driver at the same time. Later, when Will is interviewing for a job at a defense agency and spouts off about the military industrial complex, and how his genius will be exploited to bomb poor people in other countries, that’s also Zinn. He even tells Robin Williams’ psychiatrist character that A People’s History “will knock you on your ass.” Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the author is also a friend of the Damon family, and has known the now red-hot actor since he was a child.

According to the New York Times, a Fox exec caught the Zinn references in Good Will Hunting and approached Damon and Affleck about bringing the historian’s unique perspective to the couch potatoes of the nation. But don’t look for this project to be an all-out documentary. Instead, Fox is describing it as “youth-oriented” take on U.S. history.

“We’re not doing the book,” David Grant, president of Fox Television Studio, tells the Times. “It’s a dramatic work. It’s not a political piece. The book is really the inspiration for Matt and Ben to tell stories.”

The miniseries is expected to air in 1999.