Popular Lessons in 2023–2024

The right is doing all they can to suppress the teaching of history, but they are not succeeding. How do we know? Check out this list of lessons that were most frequently downloaded from the Zinn Education Project website during the 2023–2024 school year!

Read the list and donate so that we can provide more teachers with these lessons.

	Teaching the Seeds of Violence in Palestine-Israel By Bill Bigelow This mixer/mystery activity helps students understand Zionism, anti-Zionism, peasant resistance, the Great War, the British Mandate, and more.
	Subversives: Stories from the Red Scare By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca In this mixer lesson, students meet 27 different targets of government harassment and repression to analyze why disparate individuals might have become targets of the same campaign, determining what kind of threat they posed in the view of the U.S. government.
	The Color Line By Bill Bigelow This lesson on the countless colonial laws enacted to create division and inequality based on race helps students understand the origins of racism in the United States and who benefits.
	U.S. Mexico War: “We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God” Lesson by Bill Bigelow and student reading by Howard Zinn This interactive activity introduces students to the history and often untold story of the U.S.-Mexico War. Roles available in Spanish.
	The People vs. Columbus, et al. By Bill Bigelow with contributions from members of the Taíno community In this mock trial, students determine who is responsible for the death of millions of Taínos on the island of Hispaniola in the late 15th century.
	Hunger on Trial: An Activity on the Irish Potato Famine and Its Meaning for Today By Bill Bigelow This trial role play helps students reflect on responsibility for the deaths of Irish peasants during the so-called potato famine.
	COINTELPRO: Teaching the FBI’s War on the Black Freedom Movement By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca Through examining FBI documents, students learn the scope of the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign to spy on, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt all corners of the Black Freedom Movement.
	Reconstructing the South By Bill Bigelow with companion lesson by Mimi Eisen and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca  This role play engages students in thinking about what freedpeople needed in order to achieve — and sustain — real freedom after the Civil War. In the follow-up lesson, students explore primary sources that reveal key outcomes of the Reconstruction era.
	Reconstructing the South: What Really Happened By Mimi Eisen and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca A follow-up lesson to “Reconstructing the South,” using primary source documents to reveal key outcomes of the Reconstruction era.
	‘What We Want, What We Believe’: Teaching with the Black Panthers’ 10-Point Program By Wayne Au How students can use the Black Panther Party’s 10-Point Program to assess issues in their own communities and to develop 10-Point Programs of their own.
	How Red Lines Built White Wealth: A Lesson on Housing Segregation in the 20th Century By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca The mixer role play is based on Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, which shows in exacting detail how government policies segregated every major city in the United States with dire consequences for African Americans.
	Poetry of Defiance: How the Enslaved Resisted By Adam Sanchez Through a mixer activity, students encounter how enslaved people resisted the brutal exploitation of slavery. The lesson culminates in a collective class poem highlighting the defiance of the enslaved.
	Water and Environmental Racism By Matt Reed and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca This lesson introduces students to the struggle of residents to access safe water in the majority-Black cities of Flint, Michigan; Jackson, Mississippi; and Newark, New Jersey.
	Whose “Terrorism”? By Bill Bigelow Using scenarios based on real situations, this lesson helps students examine the definition of terrorism and the use of the term terrorism in the media and U.S. foreign policy.
	Deportations on Trial: Mexican Americans During the Great Depression By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca In this lesson, students analyze who is to blame for the illegal, mass deportations of Mexican Americans and immigrants during the Great Depression.
	Stories from the Climate Crisis: A Mixer By Bill Bigelow This lesson introduces students to 23 individuals around the world — each of whom is affected differently by climate change.
	Congo, Coltan, and Cell Phones: A People’s History By Alison Kysia In this lesson, students learn about the colonial history of Congo, debate responsibility for crimes against humanity, and investigate the connection, past and present, between the exploitation of natural resources and violence.