In the News

Middle school teacher Lesley Younge was a featured guest on the Kojo Nnamdi Show on climate change. She noted, “I was teaching about early American history through an indigenous perspective. And we came up with the idea of teaching climate change through indigenous perspectives as a project. And we were able to incorporate the materials from the Zinn Education Project. And because they have a simulation of a conference that happened in 2009 that was a coalition of indigenous people meeting together to talk about how climate change was affecting them, and they have just really awesome materials that got our students started on the research required to study issues that are affecting indigenous people, and then to present those in a simulation of a model UN-style forum. And they got really into it.”

Seven states launched commissions designed to oversee state mandates to teach black history in public schools in recent years, and Illinois requires public colleges and universities to offer black history courses. To meet the rising demand for resources, at least six Black History textbooks are on the market, as well as lesson plans on websites including Teaching Tolerance, Teaching for Change, Zinn Education Project and Rethinking Schools. (The most-downloaded lessons from the Zinn Education Project website for most of 2019 were about Reconstruction.)

The fountainhead of the historian Bill Katz’s immersion in African-American culture was his father’s passion for jazz. Ben Katz had derived more pleasure from the music and its historical roots than from his day job as an art director for an advertising agency... Mr. Katz recalled in an interview with the Zinn Education Project (named after another progressive historian, Howard Zinn) that his provocative opinions had first surfaced in high school, when, in a school project, he devoted the first three chapters of a 200-page history of jazz to slavery.

Earth frowns. With a face of green and blue, the planet’s mood is blue, too — as unblinking eyes cast a somber stare.

This Black History Month has been packed with controversy, with scandals and headlines revolving around blackface dominating the national conversation. But some say the singular focus on blackface distracts from the larger issues — namely, how little is known about the nation’s deeply racist history, and what is — and isn’t — taught about the black American experience in the nation’s public schools. (PDF)

The future of labor unions is tenable not only because of political efforts to suppress them, but also because of pedagogical oppression. American schools are not teaching students about labor unions and their fight against economic injustice. Ask any young American what they know about labor unions, and you will likely get the same response. This points to a serious issue in the American school system, which tends to ignore the labor movement’s role in American history. (PDF)

The Zinn Education Project is a great resource, and has been on The Best Teacher Resource Sites For Social Justice Issues list [since] it began. They just unveiled a redesign and expansion of their website, and it looks great! One of the new features I’m most excited about is a complete and searchable “Today In History” page. It’s a great addition to The Best “Today In History” Sites.

Squeezed between the devastation of the U.S. Civil War and the excesses of the Gilded Age, the pivotal era of Reconstruction doesn’t always get the attention it deserves in grade-school history classrooms. Victoria Smalls wants to change that. A veteran public historian who has worked for Charleston’s planned International African American Museum and Saint Helena Island’s Penn Center, Smalls recently became the first state campaign organizer for the Zinn Education Project’s Teach Reconstruction initiative. Continue reading at The Post and Courier.