News

After attending a Zinn Education Project workshop on Reconstruction at the National Council of Social Studies annual conference in the fall of 2017, Esther Honda, a San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) librarian, was excited about the possibility of bringing a people's history workshop back to her district.

We express our profound appreciation to Lauren Cooper for her pivotal role as founding coordinator for the Zinn Education Project.

Although it has not received nearly enough mainstream media attention, a National Prison Strike was launched on Aug. 21 and ends on September 9. The 10 demands of the strike are a rich text for discussion in our classrooms, and raise important questions about history, citizenship, and human rights.

On this 10th anniversary of the Zinn Education Project, we seek to hire a communications coordinator. The communications role is varied, including press, social media, conferences, materials production, website management, and internal communications.

The world would be a better place if many more students engaged in debates of justice and retribution, radicalism and realism, equity and equality. Please help us reach our goal of signing up 100,000 teachers to bring people's history to the classroom in this new school year.

Thanks to the generous support of a longtime Zinn Education Project (ZEP) supporter and those of you who donated to our campaign, we have hired a new teacher organizer for the 2018-2019 school year! We are excited to announce that Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, a ZEP teacher leader, will take on this position.

From the streets to the classroom, the resurgence of far-right racism unleashed by Trump's election must be confronted. To help teachers in this endeavor, the Zinn Education Project will continue to post new lessons throughout the year on the impact of racism and popular movements to combat it.

On this 10th anniversary year of the Zinn Education Project, our website is getting a complete overhaul to make it easier for educators to find the lessons and resources they need to ensure students have a more accurate, complex, and engaging understanding of U.S. history than is found in traditional textbooks and curricula.

We are honored that Milestone Films is donating $1 to the Zinn Education Project for each DVD and Blu-ray they sell. Milestone Films founders Amy Heller and Dennis Doros made this commitment, “because to change history, you first need to know it!” They realize that the Zinn Education Project needs donations so that we can continue to provide free resources for teaching people’s history, outside the textbook.

At the heart of our environmental crisis is the idea that nature is a thing to be used for profit. That’s the bad news. The good news is that social movements across the world are challenging this profit-first orientation, and proposing alternatives. And educators are a part of these movements.

We are inspired by educators from West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado, and beyond, who are standing up for the schools teachers and students deserve. These historic struggles are part of a wave of teacher rebellions sweeping the country — especially in "red states," where years of tax cuts have decimated public school funding.

J. J. Cornelius and his classmates at Franklin Middle School in Thief River Falls, Minnesota, researched the history of Reconstruction that gets short shrift in their state history textbook. They found lots of stories of note and drafted text for markers to place at significant sites.

In the midst of an unprecedented wave of teacher walkouts and strikes, the Washington Education Association invited the Zinn Education Project to offer a labor history workshop.

Educators in Charlottesville invited Adam Sanchez to facilitate a full-day workshop focused on teaching the Black freedom struggle from the resistance of the enslaved and abolitionists during the Civil War, to the heroic efforts to reshape society during Reconstruction, and finally with an exploration of the powerful organizing of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

To encourage more teaching about the history of prison uprisings and implications for today, the Zinn Education Project is collecting stories of how teachers introduce Attica in the classroom. If you have a lesson or teaching story about the Attica Prison Uprising, please share your story.

Five years after former governor Mitch Daniels tried to ban Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States from Indiana schools, the Zinn Education project was able to offer three workshops to dozens of educators throughout the state

Last month, West Virginia teachers inspired us with your victorious nine-day statewide strike. From the national media coverage, one of the things that struck us at the Zinn Education Project was the power of teacher stories. From Oklahoma to Kentucky and across the country teachers everywhere are eager to learn from the recent struggle in West Virginia, and we want to help amplify those stories.

The Make Reconstruction History Visible project is an opportunity for students and teachers to identify and advocate for public recognition of Reconstruction history in their community and the significant accomplishments made by newly freed people and their white allies. As part of the Teach Reconstruction campaign, this project helps students learn about this vital era in U.S. history while also playing an active role in giving visibility to an era that has been hidden or misrepresented for too long.

From #MeToo to the Movement for Black Lives to the victorious West Virginia teachers’ strike, women continue to be on the front lines fighting for justice.