Articles Archives

The Truth About Helen Keller (Lesson) | Zinn Education Project

Who Stole Helen Keller?

By Ruth Shagoury

In these times of vast economic disparities and ecological crisis, children need examples of people throughout history who committed their lives to justice — to bringing more equality and fairness to the world. Helen Keller, whose birthday we celebrate this month — June 27th — could be one of those role models. Instead, textbooks and children’s literature distort her life’s work, and miss key opportunities to inspire young people to make a difference in the world.

Bombed out cars by Jo Freeman | Zinn Education Project

‘Is This America?’: Sharecroppers Challenged Mississippi Apartheid, LBJ, and the Nation

By Julian Hipkins III and Deborah Menkart

Fannie Lou Hamer gripped the nation with her televised testimony of being forced from her home and brutally beaten (suffering permanent kidney damage) for attempting to exercise her constitutional right to vote.

“Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings?” she asked the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

‘I’m Studying the Vietnam War . . .’: The Veteran Voice in the Vietnam War History Curriculum

Article. By Jerry Lembcke. 2013.
Reflections on the pros and cons of student oral histories with Vietnam War veterans.

A People’s History of Muslims in the United States (Article) | Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

A People’s History of Muslims in the United States: What Textbooks and the Media Miss

By Alison Kysia

When I teach history related to Islam or Muslims in the United States, I begin by asking students what names they associate with these terms. The list is consistent year after year: Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and Muhammad Ali.

All of these individuals have affected U.S. history in significant ways. If we take a step back and look at the messages these figures communicate about Muslims in U.S. history, we see a story dominated by men and by the Nation of Islam. Although important, focusing solely on these stories leaves us with a skewed view of Muslims in U.S. history. Even these examples are a stretch. Most of my students reference 9/11 as the first time they heard of Muslims.

10 Quick Ways to Analyze Children’s Books for Ableism

Article. By Chloë Myers and Hank Bersani Jr. Rethinking Schools, Winter 2008/09.
A guide for analyzing children's books for prejudice by able-bodied and able-minded people toward people with disabilities.

American History Lessons

The original idea for the Zinn Education Project’s “If We Knew Our History” column grew out of our reading “American History Lessons,” by Melissa Harris-Perry in The Nation magazine. Harris-Perry’s article, reproduced here, is a meditation about the role of Black History Month.

She argues that we suffer from a “national deficit of historical knowledge” and that this deficit has contemporary political consequences. If we knew our history, she suggests, people would be less likely to follow the bigots who patch together historical symbols and soundbites to justify their right wing nostrums. And if we knew our history, we’d be more likely to appreciate and defend the accomplishments of social movements.

A People’s History of Muslims in the United States

Article. By Alison Kysia. 2014. If We Knew Our History Series. Although the dominant media—including our schools’ curriculum—perpetuate stereotypes, history shows Muslims in the Americas have fought for social justice since the 15th century.

Teaching Activity by Alison Kysia

Abolition/Earth Day | Zinn Education Project

An Earth Day Message: Take Heart from the Abolition Movement

By Bill Bigelow

Imagine for a moment that it is 1858 and you are an abolitionist. Talk about discouragement: The previous year, in its Dred Scott decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that no Black person — whether enslaved or free — was entitled to become a U.S. citizen. A few years before, Congress had passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which vastly expanded the U.S. government’s authority to seize and return to slavery individuals who had fled to freedom — or even those Blacks born free in the North. Many Northern Blacks crossed into Canada rather than live in constant fear.

And abolitionists were waging not just a moral struggle against the enslavement of human beings. Slavery was the largest industry in the United States, worth more than all the factories, banks, and railroads combined. In effect, the abolition movement aimed to expropriate without compensation the wealth of the most powerful social class in the country.

Burning Tulsa: The Legacy of Black Dispossession

By Linda Christensen

The author describes teaching about racist patterns of murder, land theft, displacement, and wealth inequality through the 1921 Tulsa Massacre.

The term “race riot” does not adequately describe the events of May 31 - June 1, 1921 in Greenwood, a Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In fact, the term itself implies that both Blacks and whites might be equally to blame for the lawlessness and violence. The historical record documents a sustained and murderous assault on Black lives and property. This assault was met by a brave but unsuccessful armed defense of their community by some Black World War I veterans and others.

A Review of ‘42’: Jackie Robinson’s Bitter Pill

Article. By Dave Zirin. 2013.
Dave Zirin describes how 42 limits the story to a tale of “individual triumph through singular greatness,” ignoring the social movements and broader context of the time.

Pentagon Papers collage | Zinn Education Project

Camouflaging the Vietnam War: How Textbooks Continue to Keep the Pentagon Papers a Secret

By Bill Bigelow

In the Academy Award-winning documentary Hearts and Minds, Daniel Ellsberg, who secretly copied and then released the Pentagon Papers, offers a catalog of presidential lying about the U.S. role in Vietnam: Truman lied. Eisenhower lied. Kennedy lied. Johnson “lied and lied and lied.” Nixon lied.

Ellsberg concludes: “The American public was lied to month by month by each of these five administrations. As I say, it’s a tribute to the American public that their leaders perceived that they had to be lied to; it’s no tribute to us that it was so easy to fool the public.”

In June of 1971, Ellsberg surrendered to federal authorities at Post Office Square in Boston. Forty-two years later, few of the historical secrets that Ellsberg revealed — especially those that focus on the immediate post-World War II origins of U.S. involvement in Vietnam — appear in the school curriculum.

A Talk to Teachers

Article. By James Baldwin. October 16, 1963.
Baldwin addresses the challenges of education to prepare children to grapple with the myths and realities of U.S. history.

Changing the Climate in School

By Bill McKibben and Bill Bigelow

Maybe you’ve heard. We are facing a climate crisis that threatens life on our planet. Climate scientists are unequivocal: we are changing the world in deep, measurable, dangerous ways — and the pace of this change will accelerate dramatically in the decades to come.

Then again, if you’ve been a middle school or high school student recently, you may not know this.

That’s because the gap between our climate emergency and the attention paid to climate change in the school curriculum is immense. Individual teachers around the country are doing outstanding work, but the educational establishment is not.

Christopher Columbus: No Monuments for Murderers

By Bill Bigelow

A New York Times article said the symbolism of Christopher Columbus is "murky.” But there is nothing murky about Columbus’ legacy of slavery and terrorism in the Americas. The record is clear and overwhelming. The fact that the New York Times could report this with such confidence — adding that “most Americans learn rather innocently, in 1492 [Columbus] sailed the ocean blue until he discovered the New World” — means that educators and activists still have much work to do.

March on Washington | Zinn Education Project

Claiming and Teaching the 1963 March on Washington

By Bill Fletcher Jr.

August 28 marks the anniversary of the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Publicly associated with Dr. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, this march brought more than 250,000 people to the nation’s capital. The day went down in history as a powerful show of force against Jim Crow segregation. Over time this great event has risen to levels of near mythology. The powerful speech by Dr. King, replayed, in part, for us every January on Martin Luther King Day, has eclipsed all else — so much so that too many people believe that the March on Washington was entirely the work of Dr. King. It is also barely remembered that the March on Washington was for freedom and jobs.

Attica Prison Uprising

Resource list. Overview with links to articles, books, primers, films, and websites about the Attica Prison Uprising for the classroom.

Disguising Imperialism: How Textbooks Get the Cold War Wrong and Dupe Students

By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

The perpetual interventionism and global hegemony exercised by the U.S. government today urgently need to be questioned and dismantled. Such a monumental task requires a citizenry armed with clear-eyed understandings of its past. That cannot be accomplished when the Cold War is sanitized and downsized, confined to one chapter of a textbook . . .

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.

Because Our Islands Are Our Life

Article. By Moé Yonamine. Rethinking Schools, Summer, 2019.
A high school ethnic studies teacher describes how students in the Pacific Island Club used poetry to refocus the narrative surrounding climate justice onto frontline communities.

Teaching Activity by Moé Yonamine

Beyond the Medal: Representations of Disability in Caldecott Winners

Article. By Chloë Myers-Hughes and Hank Bersani Jr. Winter 2009-10.
The authors of “10 Quick Ways to Analyze Children’s Books for Ableism” look at what Caldecott winners tell young children about disability.

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?

Bob Herbert on Nelson Mandela: 1918–2013

Article. Bob Herbert. Jacobin Magazine. 2013.
A critique of the "feel good" and "sentimental stick figure" mis-representations of Nelson Mandela and Dr. King in mass media.

Guns and the Southern Freedom Struggle: What’s Missing When We Teach About Nonviolence

By Charles E. Cobb Jr.

The best way to understand this Mississippi movement episode is...as a story of organizers and the communities they were embedding themselves in during the Freedom Movement of the 1960s. Within this organizing experience, guns in the hands of supporters sometimes existed in tension with the nonviolence usually used to define movement philosophy and practice, but that more often existed in tandem with nonviolence. In other words, something more complex was at play.

Bound for the Rio Grande | Zinn Education Project

Bound for the Rio Grande: Traitors — Or Martyrs

Background Reading (PDF) and Song. Reading by Milton Meltzer and song by David Rovics. 1974. 4 pages and 5 minutes.
The story of the San Patricio Battalion, Irish-American soldiers who deserted the U.S. Army during the U.S.-Mexican War and fought on the side of the Mexicans.

Fists of Freedom: An Olympic Story Not Taught in School

By Dave Zirin

It has been almost 44 years since Tommie Smith and John Carlos took the medal stand following the 200-meter dash at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City and created what must be considered the most enduring, riveting image in the history of either sports or protest. But while the image has stood the test of time, the struggle that led to that moment has been cast aside.

When mentioned at all in U.S. history textbooks, the famous photo appears with almost no context. For example, Pearson/Prentice Hall’s United States History places the photo opposite a short three-paragraph section, “Young Leaders Call for Black Power.” The photo’s caption says simply that “. . . U.S. athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists in protest against discrimination.”

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