Teaching Materials Archive - Zinn Education Project

On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance

Digital collection. Collections as data and machine learning project examining Jim Crow and racially-based legislation signed into law in North Carolina between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement.

Freedmen and Southern Society Project

Digital collection. Documents that help explain how Black people traversed the bloody ground from slavery to freedom between the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 and the beginning of Reconstruction in 1867.

The Freedmen’s Bureau Online

Digital collection. Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedman and Abandoned Lands, including new and unpublished records that document the formerly enslaved, freedpersons and their descendants.

Teaching With Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. 25 pages.
Students engage in an interactive activity with short excerpts from Martha Jones’ book to learn about the leading role of Black women in the fight for voting rights throughout U.S. history.

Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands

Book — Non-fiction. By Kelly Lytle Hernández. 2022. 384 pages.
Taking readers to the frontlines of the magonista uprising and the counterinsurgency campaign that failed to stop them, Kelly Lytle Hernández puts the magonista revolt at the heart of U.S. history.

Teaching With Seizing Freedom

To facilitate bringing the Seizing Freedom podcast to the classroom, we are sharing teaching ideas for selected episodes, beginning with "A Powerful Black Hand."

La Operación (documentary)

Film. Directed by Ana María García. 1982. 40 minutes.
La Operación is a 1982 documentary that shows the widespread sterilization operation led by the U.S. during the 1950s and 60s in Puerto Rico.

Takeover: How We Occupied a Hospital and Changed Public Health Care

Film. By Emma Francis-Snyder. 2021. 38 minutes.
Takeover tells the story of the Young Lords’ 12-hour occupation of Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx in 1970.

Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century

Book — Non-fiction. By Howard Zinn, Dana Frank, and Robin D. G. Kelley. 2002. 184 pages.
Three renowned historians present stirring tales of labor and the effectiveness of strikes and organized labor.

Colin in Black and White: The Kaepernick Curriculum

Teaching Guide. Presented by Ra Vision Media & Know Your Rights Camp. 2022. 85 pages.
In conjunction with the Netflix series of the same name, this teaching guide provides students with resources and activities to understand and address systemic and institutional racism.

The Young Lords: A Radical History

Book — Non-fiction. By Johanna Fernández. 2020. 480 pages.
Fernandez demonstrates how the Young Lords redefined the character of protest, the color of politics, and the cadence of popular urban culture in the age of great dreams.

Teaching Activity by Johanna Fernández

Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

Book — Non-fiction. By Nick Estes. 2019. 320 pages.
In Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance that led to the #NoDAPL movement.

Teaching Activity by Nick Estes

Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement

Book — Non-fiction. Edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon. 2019. 448 pages.
Through poetry and prose, essays, photography, interviews, and polemical interventions, the contributors, including leaders of the Standing Rock movement, reflect on Indigenous history and politics and on the movement's significance.

Teaching Activity by Nick Estes (editor)

The Young Crusaders: The Untold Story of the Children and Teenagers Who Galvanized the Civil Rights Movement

Book — Non-fiction. By V. P. Franklin. 2021. 328 pages.
This books tells the story of the hundreds of thousands of children and teenagers who engaged in sit-ins, school strikes, boycotts, marches, and demonstrations in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other national civil rights leaders played little or no part.

Teaching Activity by V. P. Franklin

No Kids in Prison

Website. NoKidsinPrison uses art to model, imagine and advocate for alternatives to youth incarceration by lifting up the voices of youth most impacted by the criminal justice system through art and culture.

We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration

Book — Non-fiction. By Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura; illustrated by Ross Ishikawa. 2021. 160 pages.
This graphic novel tells the story of Japanese American imprisonment during World War II, and the resistance and defiance that existed in these internment camps.

More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing

Book - Non-fiction. Edited by Jesse Hagopian. 2014. 336 pages.
A collection of essays, poems, speeches, and interviews from frontline fighters who are defying the corporate education reformers and fueling a national movement to reclaim and transform public education.

Teaching Activity by Edited by Jesse Hagopian

“Prisons Make Us Safer”: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration

Book — Non-fiction. By Victoria Law. 2021. 240 pages
An accessible guide for activists, educators, and all who are interested in understanding how the prison system oppresses communities and harms individuals.

Teaching Activity by Victoria Law

Who Killed Reconstruction? A Trial Role Play

Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. 2022. Rethinking Schools
A role play about the demise of Reconstruction that helps students get beyond the question “Was Reconstruction a success or failure?”

Teaching Activity by By Adam Sanchez, Illustrator: Nate Kitch

Seizing Freedom: The Role of the Black Press

Podcast episode. Seizing Freedom. 2022.
Kidada E. Williams speaks with Adam Serwer about the role of the Black press in the United States.

Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America (YA Edition)

Book — Non-fiction. By Candacy Taylor. 2022. 272 pages.
This book chronicles the history of the Green Book, which was published from 1936 to 1966 and was the “Black travel guide to America.”

Teaching Activity by Candacy Taylor

Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire

Book - Non-fiction. By Jonathan M. Katz. 2022. 432 pages.
This book traces a path from the first wave of U.S. overseas expansionism to the rise of fascism in the 1930s to the crises of democracy in our own time.

Teaching Activity by Jonathan M. Katz