Teach Students to Question the President | Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

Teach Students to Question the President

On last Sunday’s CBS show “Face the Nation,” senior Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller defended Trump’s travel ban and said, “The powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.” We need to remind students that this country has been at its best when people have organized to question and challenge presidents.
Continue reading
Tacking the Headlines: Teaching Humanity and History | Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

Tackling the Headlines: Teaching Humanity and History

With each passing day, it's becoming more apparent that Trump's agenda can only be enacted if people are ignorant of the issues underlying his supposed solutions. Having trouble finding and keeping work? Build that wall. Fearful of terrorist attacks? Ban Muslims. Want energy security and infrastructure development? Build that pipeline. The best antidote to Trump's xenophobia, racism, misogyny, and fossil-fuel soaked future is critical thinking.
Continue reading

We the People, Resist

The environmental activist organization Greenpeace, USA posted a short video using the words of Howard Zinn from You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. This one-minute history lesson is a timely reminder of the power that resides outside the three branches of the U.S. government.
Continue reading
Standing with Standing Rock: A Role Play on the Dakota Access Pipeline | Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

New Lesson: Standing with Standing Rock

The Zinn Education Project has just posted "Standing with Standing Rock: A Role Play on the Dakota Access Pipeline" by Wolfe-Rocca, her colleague Andrew Duden, and Zinn Education Project co-director Bill Bigelow. The teaching activities help students grasp the issues at stake in the historic struggle of the Standing Rock Sioux for recognition of their treaty rights and for clean water for all.
Continue reading

New Lesson: Reconstructing the South

In popular culture, the most memorable depiction of Reconstruction was D.W. Griffith's film, Birth of a Nation. Missing from this racist portrait of Reconstruction — and from too many textbooks — was the extraordinary experiment in grassroots multiracial democracy this period represented — land reform, public schools, expanded voting rights, greater equality.
Continue reading
D.C. Student Protest, 2016 | Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

Teaching People’s History Is More Urgent

Dear friends, More than 65,000 teachers are helping students learn the truth, and teach outside the textbook. Their role has become all the more urgent. These teachers are often the only chance students have to learn a different story—one that looks honestly at this country’s long history of exploitation, but one that also features the social movements that have made it more just and equal.
Continue reading
Tell a different story—donate today! | Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

Students Tell a Different Story

Dear friends, Right wing media and politicians understand the importance of what children learn—or don't learn—about history in K-12 classrooms. That's why they went after the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson, Arizona. That's why they attacked the climate change education resolution in Portland, Oregon. They feared the spread of these good examples.
Continue reading
People's History Trivia Night - Winning Team | Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

People’s History Trivia a Roaring Success

On December 2, the Zinn Education Project hosted a packed house for the first-ever People’s History Trivia Night. Scheduled during the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference being held in Washington, D.C., this fundraising event brought together people’s history teachers and friends from around the country. It was a lively night of laughing and sharing as everyone enjoyed themselves while learning non-trivial people’s history.
Continue reading

Pitchfork Magazine on Education and the Election

Pitchfork magazine wrote about the 2016 elections in an article titled, "How to Get Involved in Politics Right Now: Take These Musicians’ Leads." They stressed the importance of teaching people's history, "...we must take seriously the ways in which public school resources represent our history. One easy way to do so it to look at the Zinn Education Project."
Continue reading
Teaching After the Election of Trump - Resource List | Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

Teaching After the Election of Trump

The Zinn Education Project stands in solidarity with those who have denounced Donald Trump’s racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and Islamophobia—as well his ignorant and deadly proposals about the environment and climate change. The role of teachers is crucial in this freedom struggle. Please check out the lessons and resources below.
Continue reading

Andrew Jackson Revisited

“One of the greatest victories for the people of America since Andrew Jackson,” Rudy Giuliani , former mayor of New York City, said of Donald Trump's success in the 2016 election. We agree that Trump and Jackson have a lot in common, but neither election can be accurately described as a victory for anyone other than the wealthy elite.
Continue reading
My Vote by Ricardo Levins Morales | Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

Racism, Xenophobia, and the Election

As teachers and students return to classrooms this fall, together we have to try to make sense of a tumultuous presidential campaign and a summer of racial violence that have forcefully surfaced the racism that plagues our nation.
Continue reading
The Voting Rights Act: Ten Things You Should Know | Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

The Voting Rights Act: Ten Things You Should Know

With the 2016 presidential election in the news, we share this article by Emilye Crosby and Judy Richardson, “The Voting Rights Act: Ten Things You Should Know.” Crosby and Richardson discuss key points in the history of the 1965 Voting Rights Act missing from most textbooks. We also share a segment from Democracy Now! on voting rights today.
Continue reading
Abolish Columbus Day - Facebook Profile Image | Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

Abolish Columbus Day Campaign

In solidarity with Indigenous peoples throughout the world, the Zinn Education Project has joined the campaign to Abolish Columbus Day. Celebrating Columbus means celebrating colonialism, celebrating racism, celebrating genocide. It’s time that instead we paid tribute to the people who were here first, who are still here, and who are leading the struggle for a sustainable planet.
Continue reading

A Letter to You from Myla Kabat-Zinn

Dear Friends: As Howard Zinn’s daughter, I want to share with you how excited I am to know that more and more students across the country are learning people’s history in school, thanks to their teachers and the Zinn Education Project.
Continue reading
The Voting Rights Act: Ten Things You Should Know | Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

The Voting Rights Act: Ten Things You Should Know

This month marks the 51st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act being signed into law. In this article, “The Voting Rights Act: Ten Things You Should Know,” Emilye Crosby and Judy Richardson, write: "Together with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act ended most legal forms of white supremacy. Although this was important, it did not end all forms of racial discrimination, many of which were—and are—embedded in the structures of our society."
Continue reading