"He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future."
It seems appropriate to begin with those famous words by George Orwell, because to me they explain the importance of the life and work of Howard Zinn, best known for his A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present. That work was far from his only significant historical writing, nor did his productivity end when it was published in 1980.
His life and his work offered a different way of perceiving our history, one that was far more critical than traditional American histories, and thus far more honest.
The Zinn Education Project is the result of someone who wishes to remain anonymous, who after seeing the biographical film on Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, wanted to get Zinn's work more widely known and more widely used. Zinn, whose lectures he had attended while at Boston U in the 1970s, put him touch with Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change (two organizations all progressives should support), and the Zinn Education Project is the result.
Please keep reading.
Zinn had enlisted in World War II, serving as a bombardier. Without recapitulating his entire career, it is worth noting that in 1945 he participated in the first military use of napalm. He also participated in a late bombing of the city of Pilsen in then Czechoslavia which did NOT target the military works. In his research as an historian while working on his doctorate, Zinn became aware of the real effects of the bombing raids in which he had participated, and their intended purposes, and this began the process of turning him into someone very anti-war.
Zinn used his GI Bill to complete an education including a bachelors at NYU, and Master and Doctorates at Columbia, and became a noted scholar of history. He taught at Spelman College , saw the civil rights era up close. He constantly stood for the rights of underdogs, even when it threatened his own position.
Zinn was a man of genuine humility, who greatly touched those with whom he came in contact. I was not so fortunate, but have known many whose lives were touched directly.
Many more were taught by him - by his writings to be sure, but also by his living example.
It is one reason when his work (done with Anthony Arnove) Voices of a People's History of the United States, an anthology of sources on people who spoke up against social injustice and for social change, was turned into a documentary film called simply The People Speak, not only did Zinn participate, but so did the like of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Morgan Freeman, Danny Glover, Don Cheadle, Eddie Vedder, Pink, Viggo Mortensen, and many more. Joining Zinn and Arnove in producing the film were Matt Damon and Josh Brolin.
The book contained words of the likes of Chief Joseph, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, John Brown, Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, Upton Sinclair, Emma Goldman, Joe Hill, Eugene V. Debs, Langston Hughes, John Steinbeck, Malcolm X, Alice Walker, Martin Luther King, Jr., Allen Ginsberg, Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, Leonard Peltier, Noam Chomsky, César Chávez, Abbie Hoffman, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Julia Butterfly Hill and many others (list courtesy of this Wikipedia article).
Part of what is wrong in America is how ignorant we are of our own history. That is clear when we see the efforts by current Republicans to trash unions -too many people remain unaware of how much of what we value is the result of those who committed themselves to unions. After all, how much labor history is there in most schools? I know that in Maryland, the testable content for the Government exam required for graduation (but thankfully not after this year) includes nothing on items dealing with labor, not the NLRB, not Davis Bacon, not even the odious Taft-Hartley Act. Of King, we get a white-washed image, with people forgetting how radical he was, and that he died on April 4 1968 while in Memphis to help black sanitation workers achieve labor rights. Or might I remind people that if Helen Keller is mentioned, students are never taught that she was an ardent socialist, and why. Do they learn that Eugene Debs received almost 6% of the popular vote in 1912, an election in which the sitting president William Howard Taft receive less than 4 times as many votes. People learn about the 3-way race, with the votes Teddy Roosevelt won helping to elect Woodrow Wilson. Do they even hear about Debs? Doubtful.
Let's return to the Zinn Education Project. Let me offer this, from their About page:
June 2008: Distributed 4,000 free teaching people’s history packets to educators across the United States and its territories. The packet included the DVD Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, a copy of A People’s History of the United States, and a teaching guide developed especially for this project. (Report on the distribution of the 4,000 packets.)
November 2008: Helped to coordinate the keynote presentation by Howard Zinn at the National Council for the Social Studies Conference and gave a copy of the Teaching a People’s History teaching guide to 800 attendees.
December 2009: Launched new website, with over 75 free downloadable teaching activities and hundreds of books, films, and posters.
January 2010: Conducted an Author on Air interview with Howard Zinn based on questions submitted by teachers from across the country.
Spring 2010: Began the Teaching Outside the Textbook campaign by soliciting stories from teachers about how they teach a people’s history. Essays were submitted by 88 teachers. Sent A People’s History of the United States class sets to 21 teachers.
Summer 2010: At the request of the filmmakers, produced the teaching guide for The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
(By the way, that page contains good and concise information about both Teaching for Change and Rethinking Schools).
Teaching for Change runs the bookstores at the Washington DC area chain of restaurants Busboys and Poets, named for Langston Hughes, and founded by Andy Shallal. I first visited the original site at 14th & V Streets NW for a book event put on by Chelsea Green Publishers at the time of an American Booksellers convention - one of the authors speaking was Markos Moulitsas. I have since been back numerous times, and also to the smaller place in Shirlington (south part of Arlington County, where I live). I have gone with friends, I have purchased books. Most recently I attended for an event with Bill Ayers. It was at that event that I began talking with Deborah Menkart, who is executive director of Teaching for Change. When I asked about examples she might point me at of the work of the Zinn Education Project, she offered these words:
- we produced the teaching guide for the film about Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers - very useful for teaching about Vietnam War, whistleblowers, WikiLeaks - et al -- http://zinnedproject.org/...
- despite the fact that social studies is being sidelined by budget cuts and NCLB, we get teachers registering for and using Zinn Education Project site everyday -- here are some quotes from just a few of those teachers: http://zinnedproject.org/... (We have close to 9,000 teachers registered -- from all 50 states/territories, more every day, over 100,000 people have used the website.)
- we did a Teaching Outside the Textbook project last year and had teachers submit essays with the hopes of getting a class set of People's History -- 88 teachers responded and we sent out 21 class sets - http://zinnedproject.org/...
- with all the discussion about the Civil War -- we have some interesting pieces for the classroom such as this one: http://zinnedproject.org/...
I began with these words by George Orwell: "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future."
Howard Zinn understood that. He wanted to wrest control of the past away from those who did not less know or understand the entire truth of our nation.
It is up to those of us in the present to continue his task of reclaiming the full past, lest we surrender the future to those who do not value the ordinary people, who fear and despise the collective action - of unions, of the civil rights movement, of the anti-war movement, of the women's rights movement, of the movements for the rights of all who have been oppressed and left out.
There is a page on the website that is titled WHY On it you will find a video of Zinn's 2008 keynote address to the National Council of the Social Studies. You will read words from the likes of ordinary teachers (which would please Zinn), Judy Richardson (Co-editor of Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts By Women in SNCC, and historian Ronald Takaki (author of A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America).
You will also read words from Ray Raphael, a historian very much influenced by Zinn, as one can find in his work A People's History of the American Revolution. The WHY page has three paragraphs from a teaching activity, Reexamining the Revolution. Let me quote the last of these three:
The way we learn about the birth of our nation is a case in point. If we teach our students that a few special people forged American freedom, we misrepresent, and even contradict, the spirit of the American Revolution. Our country owes its existence to the political activities of groups of dedicated patriots who acted in concert. Throughout the rebellious colonies, citizens organized themselves into an array of local committees, congresses, and militia units that unseated British authority and assumed the reins of government. These revolutionary efforts could serve as models for the collective, political participation of ordinary citizens. Stories that focus on these models would confirm the original meaning of American patriotism: Government must be based on the will of the people. They would also show some of the dangers inherent in majoritarian democracy: the suppression of dissent and the use of jingoism to mobilize support and secure power. They would reflect what really happened, and they would reveal rather than conceal the dynamics of political struggle.
reveal rather than conceal the dynamics of political struggle - an essential reason we need to truly know know our history, so we can reclaim it, so we can learn from it.
If we are going to keep the promise of this nation from being lost to those who would impose a narrow view of what it should be, we have many tasks to take on. Certainly winning elections is a major part.
But so is how we educate our children. So is reaching out to adults who did not have the opportunity to truly learn our history and help them connect.
You can help in this task in many ways.
You can support the Zinn Educational Project. That link will provide you with a number ways of helping, including money if you have it to donate, and other ways if like me you do not.
The future depends upon what we now do. That should include reclaiming our history, the people's history.
Peace.
