- Zinn Education Project

The Color Line

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 6 pages.
A lesson on the countless colonial laws enacted to create division and inequality based on race. This helps students understand the origins of racism in the United States and who benefits.

Teaching Activity by Bill Bigelow

Constitution Role Play: Whose “More Perfect Union”? and The Constitutional Convention: Who Really Won?

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 24 pages.
The U.S. Constitution endorsed slavery and favored the interests of the owning classes. What kind of Constitution would have resulted from founders who were representative of the entire country? That is the question addressed in this role play activity.

Teaching Activity by Bill Bigelow

Poetry of Defiance: How the Enslaved Resisted

Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez.
Through a mixer activity, students encounter how enslaved people resisted the brutal exploitation of slavery. The lesson culminates in a collective class poem highlighting the defiance of the enslaved.

Reading Between the Lines: An Art Contest Helps Students Imagine the Lives of Runaway Slaves

Teaching Activity. By Thom Thacker and Michael A. Lord. Rethinking Schools. 4 pages.
An art contest is used as the basis from which students can examine primary historical documents (advertisements for runaway slaves) to gain a deeper understanding of the institution of slavery in the North.

Reclaiming Hidden History: Students Create a Slavery Walking Tour in Manhattan

Teaching Activity. By Alan J. Singer. Rethinking Schools. 7 pages.
How a teacher and his students organized a tour of the hidden history of slavery in New York.

Rethinking the U.S. Constitutional Convention: A Role Play

Teaching Activity. By Bob Peterson. Rethinking Schools. 14 pages.
A role play on the Constitutional Convention which brings to life the social forces active during and immediately following the American Revolution with focus on two key topics: suffrage and slavery. An elementary school adaptation of the Constitution Role Play by Bill Bigelow. Roles available in Spanish.

Teaching Activity by Bob Peterson

Mumbet’s Declaration of Independence

Picture book. By Gretchen Woelfle. Illustrated by Alix Delinois. 2014. 32 pages.
Picture book about true story of Elizabeth Freeman, a woman who challenged the legality of her enslavement.

The American Revolutionaries: A History in Their Own Words, 1750-1800

Book — Non-fiction. Edited by Milton Meltzer. 1987. 224 pages.
First hand accounts and primary documents on the American Revolution.

Answering the Cry for Freedom: Stories of African Americans and the American Revolution

Book — Non-fiction. By Gretchen Woelfle. Illustrated by R. Gregory Christie. 2016. 238 pages.
Profiles of African American, free and enslaved, during the American Revolution for upper elementary to middle school.

Chains

Book — Historical fiction. By Laurie Halse Anderson. 2010. 336 pages.
Historical fiction based on the life of an enslaved teenager during the Revolutionary War.

Teaching Activity by Laurie Halse Anderson

The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord

Book — Non-fiction. By Ray Raphael. 2003. 288 pages.
The events leading up to the American Revolution.

Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past

Book — Non-fiction. By Ray Raphael. 2014. 420 pages.
Myths and the reasons that they have come to replace the real stories of the Revolutionary period.

A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

Book — Non-fiction. By Ray Raphael. Series editor: Howard Zinn. 2002. 528 pages.
Using hundreds of primary sources, this book tells the more accurate, populist, complicated, and interesting story of the American Revolution.

A Peoples History of the United States Book | Zinn Education Project

A People’s History of the United States: 1492 – Present

Book — Non-fiction. By Howard Zinn. 2005, with a new introduction by Anthony Arnove in 2015. 784 pages.
Howard Zinn's groundbreaking work on U.S. history. This book details lives and facts rarely included in textbooks—an indispensable teacher and student resource.

Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies & Sparked the American Revolution

Book — Non-fiction. By Alfred Blumrosen and Ruth Blumrosen. 2006. 304 pages.
A detailed account of the role slavery played in the Revolutionary War and the writing of the U.S. Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson Advertisement Runaway Slave | Zinn Education Project

Freedom on the Move: Rediscovering the Stories of Self-Liberating People

Digital collection. Crowdsourcing project that provides access to information, through thousands of print advertisements, about freedom-seekers and their would-be enslavers in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American Slave Trade Database

Digital collection. Through this website, over 130,000 voyages made in the Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade can be searched, filtered, and sorted by variables including the port of origin, the number of enslaved Africans on board, and the ship's name.

Re-examining the Revolution

Background Reading. By Ray Raphael. 7 pages.
Based on his book Founding Myths, Raphael critiques the textbook portrayal of the American Revolution. The textbooks say that "a few special people forged American freedom" which "misrepresents, and even contradicts, the spirit of the American Revolution."

Whitewashing Our First President

Article. By Clarence Lusane. 2014.
Critical review of an upper elementary non-fiction book about George Washington and the people he kept in bondage.

Teaching Activity by Clarence Lusane

A People’s History of the United States: Highlights from the Twentieth Century (Audio)

Audio. By Howard Zinn. Read by Matt Damon. 2003. 8 hours, 44 minutes.
Audio book version of excerpted highlights from A People's History of the United States.

Half a Revolution

Teaching Activity. By Gayle Olson-Raymer. 16 pages.
Questions and teaching ideas for Chapter 5 of Voices of a People's History of the United States on the Revolutionary War as "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight," as well as the failure of early Americans to complete a full revolution.

Servitude and Rebellion

Teaching Activity. By Gayle Olsen-Raymer. 15 pages.
Questions and teaching ideas for Chapter 3 of Voices of a People's History of the United States on the role and dissent of indentured servants in American colonial history.