Oh Freedom After While Colloquium at NCSS

One of the highlights of the 93rd National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Conference in St. Louis was the “Civil Rights in the 21st Century: Oh Freedom After While Colloquium” at the Missouri History Museum. The event featured a showing of the powerful documentary Oh Freedom After While, chronicling the January 1939 sharecropper protest in the Missouri Bootheel.
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Daughter of Lincoln Brigader Donates to Support People’s History

"In honor of my father, who died in the Spanish Civil War. He served in the Lincoln Brigade." Rhoda Seidler's donation to the Zinn Education Project came with a connection to people's history. Her father volunteered for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, an international volunteer army that fought to save Spain’s Republican government from being overwhelmed by the fascist Francisco Franco, and his allies, Hitler and Mussolini.
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Forever Young: Staughton Lynd

by Andy Piascik In an epoch of imperial hubris and corporate class warfare on steroids, the release of these books could hardly have come at a better time. Soldier, coal miner, Sixties veteran, recent graduate — there’s much to be gained by one and all from a study of Lynd’s life and work. In so doing, it’s inspiring to discover how frequently he was in the right place at the right time and, more importantly, on the right side.
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Art Students Promote Their College’s Civil Rights Archives

Queens College in New York has an important archive with a wealth of documents about the activism of their staff and students during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. To bring attention to the history and resources, the archive staff called on the college’s graphic design department for help. The results are the stunning images below.
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‘Howard Zinn, Presente’ by Staughton Lynd

The following essay was presented at the Howard Zinn Read-In held at Purdue University on November 5, 2013.
If you are like me, and I think you are, you may be expecting something like one of the old Wobbly free speech fights. I will say, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” after which I will be arrested.
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Philadelphia Embraces People’s History

Philadelphia City Councilman James Kenney authored a resolution, calling upon the Philadelphia School District “to make Howard Zinn’s best-selling book A People’s History of the United States a required part of the high school U.S. history curriculum.”
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The Zinn Education Project Responds to Mitch Daniels’ Attacks on Howard Zinn

On July 17, 2013 the Associated Press (AP) revealed that former Indiana Governor and current Purdue University President Mitch Daniels had tried to ban Howard Zinn’s writing, including A People’s History of the United States, in K-12 public schools. In a public statement on July 18, Purdue University stood by their president, stating that it is not an issue of censorship because it did not impact higher education, only K-12 public schools. In other words, academic freedom and censorship do not apply to K-12 teachers and students.
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Daniels Looked to Censor More Than Just Howard Zinn

By Mike Leonard, The Herald Times Columnist In July 2006, I wrote a column about sociologist James Loewen’s research on “sundown towns”----places where blacks were warned to leave before the sun went down. A native of Illinois who for many years taught at the University of Vermont, Loewen was stunned to discover that his home state had nearly 500 such towns, and neighboring Indiana was just as bad.
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A People’s History: Supplement or Textbook?

Essay by Staughton Lynd in response to one of the recent media attacks on Howard Zinn and A People’s History. These attacks include Sam Wineburg’s “Undue Certainty: Where Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Falls Short” in the American Federation of Teachers' American Educator magazine and “Agit-Prof: Howard Zinn's influential mutilations of American history” by David Greenberg in The New Republic.
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Women’s Labor Newspaper Digitized

For Women's History Month, we are pleased to share the digitized collection of the Voice of Industry newspaper. The Voice of Industry was a worker-run newspaper, published by young women from 1845-1848, who came to work in the factories in Lowell, Mass. Under the influence of the young labor leader Sarah Bagley, the paper was an uncompromising advocate for women’s rights, publishing pieces about marriage, suffrage, and equality.
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