Theme: Imperialism

Imperialism

IDA Treaties Explorer

Digital collection. View digitized historic treaties between Indigenous tribes and the U.S. government alongside key historic works that provide context to the agreements made and the histories of shared lands.
Continue reading

Fighting for Okinawa — My Home, Not a Military Base

By Moé Yonamine
My family moved to the United States from Okinawa when I was 7. But Okinawa is still home — and I’m hurt and angered at how the United States and Japan continue to treat Okinawa as little more than a colonial outpost. As a teacher, I’m even more dismayed at how the conventional school curriculum keeps young people in this country ignorant about the abuse, but also about the resistance, in my home islands.
Continue reading
Preaching and Farming at Mission Delores by Anton Refregier | Zinn Education Project

Lying to Children About the California Missions and the Indians

By Deborah A. Miranda
In California schools, students come up against the “Mission Unit” in 4th grade, reinforcing the same lies those children have been breathing in most of their lives. Part of California’s history curriculum, the unit is entrenched in the educational system and impossible to avoid, a powerfully authoritative indoctrination in Mission Mythology to which 4th graders have little if any resistance.
Continue reading

The Forgotten Fight Against Fascism

By William Loren Katz
Anyone who has gone through school in the United States knows that history textbooks devote a lot of attention to the so-called “Good War”: World War II. A typical textbook, Holt McDougal’s The Americans, includes 61 pages covering the buildup to World War II and the war itself. Today’s texts acknowledge “blemishes” like the internment of Japanese Americans, but the texts either ignore or gloss over the fact that for almost a decade, during the earliest fascist invasions of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the Western democracies encouraged rather than fought Hitler and Mussolini, and sometimes gave them material aid.
Continue reading
Grenada education poster| Zinn Education Project

Grenada: ‘A Lovely Little War’

By Bill Bigelow
Anti-bullying curricula are the rage these days. But the official history curriculum teachers are provided often celebrates, or at least excuses, bullying among nations. Well, at least when the United States is the bully.

A good example is the U.S. invasion of Grenada — Operation Urgent Fury, as it was called by the Reagan administration — launched on Oct. 25, 1983. Grenada made an unlikely target of U.S. military might. Its main product was not oil but nutmeg. Its naval fleet consisted of about 10 fishing trawlers. Grenada’s population of 110,000 was smaller than Peoria, Illinois. At the time of the invasion, there was not a single stoplight in the entire country. So what put Grenada in the crosshairs of the Reagan administration?
Continue reading

‘Repeat After Me: The United States Is Not an Imperialist Country — Oh, and Don’t Get Emotional About War’

By Bill Bigelow
You may have seen that an administrative law judge in Arizona, Lewis Kowal, just upheld the decree by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction that Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program violates state law. Judge Kowal found that the Tucson program was teaching Latino history and culture “in a biased, political, and emotionally charged manner.” According to CNN, one lesson that the judge objected to taught that the historic treatment of Mexican Americans was “marked by the use of force, fraud and exploitation.”

Try this “history detective” experiment. Ask the next person you encounter to tell you what they know about the U.S. war with Mexico. More than likely, this will be a short conversation, because that war (1846-48) merits barely a footnote in U.S. history textbooks.
Continue reading

Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement

Book — Non-fiction. Edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon. 2019. 448 pages.
Through poetry and prose, essays, photography, interviews, and polemical interventions, the contributors, including leaders of the Standing Rock movement, reflect on Indigenous history and politics and on the movement's significance.
Teaching Activity by Nick Estes (editor)
Continue reading

The People Shall Continue

Picture Book. By Simon J. Ortiz, illustrated by Sharol Graves. 2022. 32 pages.
This powerful telling of the history of the Native/Indigenous peoples of North America recounts their story from Creation to the invasion and usurpation of Native lands.
Teaching Activity by By Simon J. Ortiz, Illustrated by Sharol Graves
Continue reading