Bill Bigelow

Bill Bigelow is curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine and co-director of the Zinn Education Project. He is the author or co-editor of many Rethinking Schools publications, including A People’s History for the Classroom, The Line Between Us: Teaching About the Border and Mexican Immigration, Rethinking Globalization: Teaching for Justice in an Unjust World, Rethinking Our Classrooms — Volumes 1 and 2, Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, and A People’s Curriculum for the Earth: Teaching Climate Change and the Environmental Crisis. Bigelow lives in Portland, Oregon, and has taught high school social studies since 1978.

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The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

Article. By Bill Bigelow. 2012. If We Knew Our History Series. Textbooks fail to look at the social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish—and that are starving and uprooting people today.
Fireworks over New York | Zinn Education Project

Rethinking the 4th of July

Article. By Bill Bigelow. 2012. If We Knew Our History Series. The pretend war of celebratory fireworks inures us—especially the children among us—to the real wars half a world away.
Coal Kills by Paul Anderson | Zinn Education Project

The Poison We Never Talk About in School

Article. By Bill Bigelow. 2013. If We Knew Our History Series. Textbooks portray coal purely as a relic of the past, and fail to discuss its central role in today’s climate crisis.
Abolition/Earth Day | Zinn Education Project

An Earth Day Message: Take Heart from the Abolition Movement

Resource Types: Articles
By Bill Bigelow
Imagine for a moment that it is 1858 and you are an abolitionist. Talk about discouragement: The previous year, in its Dred Scott decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that no Black person — whether enslaved or free — was entitled to become a U.S. citizen. A few years before, Congress had passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which vastly expanded the U.S. government’s authority to seize and return to slavery individuals who had fled to freedom — or even those Blacks born free in the North. Many Northern Blacks crossed into Canada rather than live in constant fear.

And abolitionists were waging not just a moral struggle against the enslavement of human beings. Slavery was the largest industry in the United States, worth more than all the factories, banks, and railroads combined. In effect, the abolition movement aimed to expropriate without compensation the wealth of the most powerful social class in the country.

Ten Years After: How Not to Teach About the Iraq War

Resource Types: Articles
By Bill Bigelow
In 2006, with U.S. troops occupying Iraq, the great historian and humanitarian Howard Zinn expressed his desire for the end of the war: “My hope is that the memory of death and disgrace will be so intense that the people of the United States will be able to listen to a message that the rest of the world, sobered by wars without end, can also understand: that war itself is the enemy of the human race.”

At least in a formal sense, our country’s memories of war are to be found in school history textbooks. Exactly a decade after the U.S. invasion, those texts are indeed sending “messages” to young people about the meaning of the U.S. war in Iraq. But they are not the messages of peace that Howard Zinn proposed. Not even close.
Coal Kills by Paul Anderson | Zinn Education Project

The Poison We Never Talk About in School

Resource Types: Articles
By Bill Bigelow
The most dangerous substance in the world is barely mentioned in the school curriculum. Coal.

According to the International Energy Agency, burning coal creates more greenhouse gases than any other source — including oil. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and arguably the world’s foremost climatologist, has called coal “the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on the planet.”

And, as 350.org founder Bill McKibben pointed out recently in a remarkable article in Rolling Stone magazine, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” from a mathematical standpoint, it is demonstrably impossible to prevent the climate from spinning out of control with unimaginably horrible consequences, if we burn the fossil fuels that energy corporations are in the process of exploiting and selling.
Collage of anti-slavery efforts | Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

Rethinkin’ Lincoln on the 150th Birthday of the Emancipation Proclamation

Resource Types: Articles
By Bill Bigelow
Here’s a history quiz to use with people you run into today: Ask them who ended slavery.

I taught high school U.S. history for almost 30 years, and as we began our study, students knew the obvious answer: Abraham Lincoln. But by the time our study ended, several weeks later, their “Who ended slavery?” essays were more diverse, more complex — and more accurate. In coming months and years, teachers’ jobs will be made harder by Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln, in which Daniel Day-Lewis gives a brilliant performance as, well, Lincoln-the-abolitionist. The only problem is that Lincoln was not an abolitionist.
Columbus resources | Zinn Education Project

It’s Columbus Day . . . Time to Break the Silence

Resource Types: Articles
By Bill Bigelow
This past January, almost exactly 20 years after its publication, Tucson schools banned the book I co-edited with Bob Peterson, Rethinking Columbus. It was one of a number of books adopted by Tucson’s celebrated Mexican American Studies program — a program long targeted by conservative Arizona politicians.

The school district sought to crush the Mexican American Studies program; our book itself was not the target, it just got caught in the crushing. Nonetheless, Tucson’s — and Arizona’s — attack on Mexican American Studies and Rethinking Columbus shares a common root: the attempt to silence stories that unsettle today’s unequal power arrangements.