Catherine Fosl

I can’t even begin to name all the ways I use the Zinn Education Project.  My own teaching is mostly university students so I don’t often use the lesson plans directly but I pull historical data from them and I suggest them to anyone I meet interested in learning or teaching a more inclusive U.S. history. Your emails and social media presence keeps me alert to key historical currents that are powerful and significant but also terribly under the radar in our nation today.  Some I know of and am happy to be reminded about, but many times I learn of these episodes from you.

When I was studying U.S. history in grad school, I drew inspiration from Howard Zinn’s writings — & I still do!  So when I discovered this project that moves his vision forward,  I was excited,  and have remained a fan of ZEP ever since. As the biographer of white anti-racist activist and journalist Anne Braden and as someone who co-founded a university institute named after her that educates on the Black freedom movement and especially local and under-known stories from it, I also share some of our resources with ZEP.  And I often point local educators to your work when they approach us for ideas.

Your work is all the more important amid the rising tide of white supremacy the past few years have brought, and they will be all the more essential as our nation’s history curriculum necessarily transforms in creative, positive ways in response to the reckoning that the Black Lives Matter movement is propelling for us all. The work of the Zinn Education Project is helping to usher in that needed transformation. Thank you!