Popular Lessons in 2025–2026

The right is doing all they can to suppress the teaching of history, but they are not succeeding. How do we know? Check out this list of lessons that were most frequently downloaded from the Zinn Education Project website during the 2025–2026 school year!

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	Teaching the Seeds of Violence in Palestine-Israel By Bill Bigelow This mixer/mystery activity helps students understand Zionism, anti-Zionism, peasant resistance, the Great War, the British Mandate, and more.
	Why Did the United States Invade Venezuela? Student Inquiry By Jesse Hagopian In this inquiry, students are invited to explore competing explanations for U.S. intervention in Venezuela and then develop their own hypothesis.
	“We the People”: Whose Rights Does the Constitution Protect? By Jesse Hagopian This lesson helps students consider not just what the Constitution says, but what it leaves out.
	Deportations on Trial: Mexican Americans During the Great Depression By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca In this lesson, students analyze who is to blame for the illegal, mass deportations of Mexican Americans and immigrants during the Great Depression.
	U.S. Mexico War: “We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God” Lesson by Bill Bigelow and student reading by Howard Zinn This interactive activity introduces students to the history and often untold story of the U.S.-Mexico War. Roles available in Spanish.
	Subversives: Stories from the Red Scare By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca In this mixer lesson, students meet 27 different targets of government harassment and repression to analyze why disparate individuals might have become targets of the same campaign, determining what kind of threat they posed in the view of the U.S. government.
	“Founding” Documents We Don’t Learn About By Mimi Eisen This set of primary source documents and teaching activities reveals a profound cast of voices from the era of the American Revolution. None of them are “Founding Fathers.”
	COINTELPRO: Teaching the FBI’s War on the Black Freedom Movement By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca Through examining FBI documents, students learn the scope of the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign to spy on, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt all corners of the Black Freedom Movement.
	Reconstructing the South By Bill Bigelow with companion lesson by Mimi Eisen and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca  This role play engages students in thinking about what freedpeople needed in order to achieve — and sustain — real freedom after the Civil War. In the follow-up lesson, students explore primary sources that reveal key outcomes of the Reconstruction era.
	How Red Lines Built White Wealth: A Lesson on Housing Segregation in the 20th Century By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca The mixer role play is based on Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, which shows in exacting detail how government policies segregated every major city in the United States with dire consequences for African Americans.

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