TBT: A People’s History of the United States

TBT: Super Awesome People™ in History.

When it comes to American History, the United States has routinely failed to teach its citizens the unvarnished truth. Textbooks are politicized, with our country’s largest states dictating much of what is taught in schools. There are no academic standards for teaching social studies and U.S. history, leading to widespread historical illiteracy on important subjects like slavery. Generations of Americans have been left ill-equipped to think critically on⁠—or even know the truth about⁠—our country’s tumultuous past.

Forty years ago Howard Zinn (historian, professor, activist, author) recognized that what was missing from most history books was the point of view of ordinary people—especially marginalized communities. Zinn first published his bottoms-up history textbook, A People’s History of the United States, in 1980. The book is considered the first scholarly work that “tells U.S. history from the point of view of—and in the words of—America’s women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers.”

Ten years after Zinn’s death (and 40 years of A People’s History), we are living in historic times, but many of us are still historically illiterate. We don’t fully understand the 400 years that proceeded today’s protests⁠—400 years of slavery, oppression, racism, lynchings, assassinations, redlining, and police brutality.

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But it’s not too late to learn the people’s history. The Zinn Education Project (a collaboration of the nonprofits Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change) offers online history resources and workshops for educators—and anyone who wants to register to learn more. Teaching materials can be explored by time period, by theme, and by resource type.

Here are some places to start your people’s history education:

• Profiles of Black Abolitionists
• Teaching a People’s History of Abolition and the Civil War (Adam Sanchez)
• Five Myths About Reconstruction (James W. Loewen)
• Burned Out of Homes and History: Unearthing the Silenced Voices of the Tulsa Massacre (Linda Christensen)
• The Limits of Master Narratives in History Textbooks: An Analysis of Representations of Martin Luther King Jr. (Derrick Alridge)
• Lowndes County and the Voting Rights Act (Hasan Kwame Jeffries)
• The Politics of Children’s Literature: What’s Wrong with the Rosa Parks Myth (Herbert Kohl)
• COINTELPRO: Teaching the FBI’s War on the Black Freedom Movement (Ursula Wolfe-Rocca)
• Attica Prison Uprising
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Michelle Alexander)
• Five Years After the Levees Broke: Bearing Witness Through Poetry (Renée Watson)
• 150th Anniversary of the 15th Amendment

More online resources for students of history:

• The 1619 Project (New York Times Magazine)
• Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1938 (Library of Congress)
• The Reconstruction Era and the Fragility of Democracy (Facing History and Ourselves)
• Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching (Civil Rights Teaching)
• Reflecting on George Floyd’s Death and Police Violence Towards Black Americans (Facing History and Ourselves)