Thanks to donations from publishers and authors, we can offer free books in appreciation for your teaching stories.
Lessons on Reparations and Climate Justice
In appreciation for a teaching story about either of our lessons on reparations, any of our lessons on climate justice, or the climate crisis timeline, we can send you a copy of the new edition of Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Reconsidering Reparations: Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism. Táíwò offers a clear, new case for reparations as a “constructive,” future-oriented project: one that responds to the weight of history’s injustices with just distributions of benefits and burdens.
Learn about Reconsidering Reparations from the recording of our class with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò as part of our Teach the Black Freedom Struggle series. Táíwò discussed the “ancestor perspective” and “constructive” reparations to help us meet the climate crisis. He said that it is impossible to tell a meaningful story of the last 500-plus years without emphasizing resistance — that oppressed people have always had their hands on the steering wheel of history. And that is true today, too. It is what we mean by a people’s history of the United States.
All Lessons
In appreciation for a teaching story about any of the people’s history lessons at the Zinn Education Project, we can send you a copy of the new chapter book, Will’s Race for Home by Jewell Parker Rhodes. This book of historical fiction describes the experience of a late 19th century era Black family participating in the Oklahoma Land Rush. Readers learn of the brutal racism faced by the family while sharecropping in Texas and as they try to secure economic independence in Oklahoma as one of the Black families that later formed Black towns like Tulsa. The afterword provides a description of the theft of Native American land that enabled the Oklahoma Land Rush. For background reading, we recommend I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land by Alaina Roberts.
Lessons on Slavery and Resistance
In appreciation for a teaching story about any of the lessons for How the Word Is Passed, or for Poetry of Defiance: How the Enslaved Resisted, we’ll send you a copy of The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery; A Rediscovered Narrative, with a Full Biography by John Swanson Jacobs and edited by Jonathan D. S. Schroeder.
Lessons on Palestine
Norman Solomon begins his book, War Made Invisible, with a discussion of propaganda — which requires repetition, repetition, repetition.
Think, for example, of the everywhere-present term “defense spending.” The United States spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined. And yet the very term “defense spending” emphasizes its necessity and discourages doubt.
But propaganda is also silence, in the media and in the curriculum.
Thanks to a donation by The New Press, we can offer a free copy of War Made Invisible to teachers who share stories about teaching any of the lessons at the Zinn Education Project on war, anti-war campaigns and/or Palestine and Israel. Thanks to a donation by the editor Nora Lester Murad, we can also offer free copies of I Found Myself in Palestine. Let us know which book you would like to receive when you share your story.
Note that we are only able to send books within the continental United States.
Find more free book offers below.
I’m thankful to the Zinn Education Project for providing the resources that challenge my teachers to provide a “true narrative” of the history of America. Your lessons and resources have pushed our students and instructors out of their comfort zone and into growth. Thank you for these lessons in truth and resilience!