Philadelphia Embraces People’s History

Philadelphia City Councilman James Kenney authored a resolution, calling upon the Philadelphia School District “to make Howard Zinn’s best-selling book A People’s History of the United States a required part of the high school U.S. history curriculum.”
Continue reading

The Zinn Education Project Responds to Mitch Daniels’ Attacks on Howard Zinn

On July 17, 2013 the Associated Press (AP) revealed that former Indiana Governor and current Purdue University President Mitch Daniels had tried to ban Howard Zinn’s writing, including A People’s History of the United States, in K-12 public schools. In a public statement on July 18, Purdue University stood by their president, stating that it is not an issue of censorship because it did not impact higher education, only K-12 public schools. In other words, academic freedom and censorship do not apply to K-12 teachers and students.
Continue reading

Daniels Looked to Censor More Than Just Howard Zinn

By Mike Leonard, The Herald Times Columnist In July 2006, I wrote a column about sociologist James Loewen’s research on “sundown towns”----places where blacks were warned to leave before the sun went down. A native of Illinois who for many years taught at the University of Vermont, Loewen was stunned to discover that his home state had nearly 500 such towns, and neighboring Indiana was just as bad.
Continue reading

A People’s History: Supplement or Textbook?

Essay by Staughton Lynd in response to one of the recent media attacks on Howard Zinn and A People’s History. These attacks include Sam Wineburg’s “Undue Certainty: Where Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Falls Short” in the American Federation of Teachers' American Educator magazine and “Agit-Prof: Howard Zinn's influential mutilations of American history” by David Greenberg in The New Republic.
Continue reading

Women’s Labor Newspaper Digitized

For Women's History Month, we are pleased to share the digitized collection of the Voice of Industry newspaper. The Voice of Industry was a worker-run newspaper, published by young women from 1845-1848, who came to work in the factories in Lowell, Mass. Under the influence of the young labor leader Sarah Bagley, the paper was an uncompromising advocate for women’s rights, publishing pieces about marriage, suffrage, and equality.
Continue reading