This month we released a printed edition of our national report, Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction. Thanks to the generous support of a donor, we can mail copies of the report to teacher educators, state and school district policymakers, and staff at historical societies.
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The Slave Revolt of 1842 — when dozens of enslaved Black people in Webbers Falls, Oklahoma fought back and briefly escaped from their Cherokee overseers — was the largest rebellion of enslaved people in Indian Territory history.
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A community of armed Black men and women in Christiana, Pennsylvania successfully defended four Black people from capture, serving as a catalyst for further armed self-defense within the abolitionist movement.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Gerald Horne. 2022. 632 pages.
A detailed history of counterrevolutionary forces in Texas state history.
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On Saturday, March 25th, the Zinn Education Project offered a full-day workshop in Brattleboro on teaching Reconstruction.
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Enslaved people on a Santo Domingo sugar plantation owned by the son of Christopher Columbus attempted to free themselves and take over the land in the earliest recorded slave uprising in the Americas.
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Article. By Ana Rosado, Gideon Cohn-Postar, and Mimi Eisen. 2022. 44 pages.
The report includes assessments of education standards in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, along with findings and recommendations for how to improve instruction on Reconstruction.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Howard Zinn, adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with additions by Ed Morales. Translated by Hugo García Manríquez. 2023. 608 pages.
A Spanish translation of the young adult version of the best-selling A People’s History of the United States.
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The first Maine Anti-Slavery Society Convention was held in Augusta.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Michaël Roy. 2024. 264 pages.
Through a reexamination of archival materials including antislavery newspapers, correspondence, and autobiographies, this book centers children’s participation in the campaign to abolish slavery in the United States.
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Book — Historical fiction. By Marcus Rediker and David Lester, with Paul Buhle. 2024. 176 pages.
This book imagines outlaw fugitive John Gwin and an eclectic crew of renegades as they attempt to disrupt and overthrow the colonial social order.
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A purported conspiracy of the enslaved in New York City led to multiple fires and arsons followed by mass jailings, trials, and eventual executions of many involved.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Monica Edinger and Lesley Younge. 2023. 216 pages.
The story of Olaudah Equiano, from his childhood in Africa to his capture, enslavement, and eventual liberation.
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Picture book. By Lesa Cline-Ransome, illustrated by James E. Ransome. 2024. 40 pages.
Shows how one enslaved man, secretly named Teach, helps others learn to read and write wherever he can.
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Book — Non-fiction. By . 2024. 256 pages.
This young adult history offers a researched account with first-hand testimonies of how people in bondage were themselves a driving force behind their own emancipation.
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Book — Non-fiction. By John Swanson Jacobs. 2024. 288 pages.
A first-person narrative of the enslaved, lost for 169 years, now reproduced in full.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Kate Masur and illustrated by Elizabeth Clarke. 2024. 192 pages.
This graphic history reveals the hopes and betrayals of Reconstruction, a critical period in American history.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Hilary N. Green. 2025. 400 pages.
The untold stories of ordinary African Americans who took extraordinary steps in remembrance and resistance during and after the Civil War.
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An abolitionist raid against a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia in an attempt to start an armed revolt against the institution of slavery.
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Freedom’s Journal was the first African American owned and operated newspaper in the United States.
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While the state of Rhode Island legally abolished slavery in 1652, it wasn’t until 1784 — after mounting public pressure to do away with the enslavement of other human beings once and for all — that the state passed the Gradual Emancipation Act.
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Film. By Sam Pollard, Catherine Allan, Douglas Blackmon and Sheila Curran Bernard. 2012. 90 minutes.
Reveals the interlocking forces in the South and the North that enabled “neoslavery” post-Emancipation Proclamation.
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Twenty-four enslaved Africans launched a rebellion in Manhattan, New York.
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Teaching ideas and discussion questions for How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith.
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Teaching Activity. By Cierra Kaler-Jones.
In this lesson, students use key excerpts from How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith as inspiration for a project where they tell their and their loved ones’ stories.
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