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    Remembering Howard Zinn, The People's Historian, at 100

    Through his example, his activism, and the enduring relevance of his writings, we can commit, on the centennial of his birth, to reiterate one of his central messages: war is not the answer to conflict in the 21st century.

    Amy Goodman
    Denis Moynihan
    Aug 25, 2022

    August 24th marked six months since Russia launched its war on Ukraine, with millions displaced and tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers killed. That same day, August 24th, marked the centennial of the late historian Howard Zinn's birth. Zinn was an author, professor, and anti-war activist. His seminal book, A People's History of the United States, revealed a different, dissident perspective on the historical arc of the Western hemisphere, from Christopher Columbus' arrival in 1492 to the so-called "War on Terror." First published in 1980, A People's History has become a standard text, with over 2 million copies in print. Howard Zinn died in 2010, at the age of 87. His words, more than a decade after his death, are still worth hearing in a world wracked by war, racism and inequality.

    "War poisons everybody who engages in it."

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    Opinion
    reenactment

    Why the GOP Is Very Afraid of Students Learning the Real History of Reconstruction

    This breathtakingly ambitious effort led by formerly enslaved people to eradicate a brutal and centuries-old form of racist exploitation—and to build an entirely new society—is rarely captured in state standards.

    Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
    Apr 05, 2022

    According to the state of Georgia's Standards of Excellence for teaching the Reconstruction era to eighth-graders, students ought to "compare and contrast the goals and outcomes of the Freedmen's Bureau and the Ku Klux Klan." That side-by-side framing of the federal agency tasked with supporting formerly enslaved people in the years after the Civil War with a group of White supremacist terrorists has two problems: It is not only an unsettling echo of the "both sides" language mobilized by then-President Donald Trump following the 2017 deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, but is also an example of how state standards fail to help educate young people about one of the most important eras in U.S. history.

    The economic, political, and social gains made by the formerly enslaved during the 1860s and 1870s were swiftly and violently reversed.

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    Opinion
    Rights & Justice
    The United States Is Not a Democracy. Stop Telling Students That It Is.

    The United States Is Not a Democracy. Stop Telling Students That It Is.

    When our students only learn about this exceptionally strange system from their corporate-produced history and government textbooks, they have no clue why this is how we choose our president.

    Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
    Nov 17, 2020

    When U.S. voters cast their votes in the 2020 November election, an unchecked pandemic raged through the nation, uprisings against racism and police violence stretched into their eighth month, and new climate change-intensified storms formed in the Atlantic. The reactionary and undemocratic system by which we select our president was an insult to the urgency of the moment. Although the most recent tallies show more than 5 million more people voted for Joe Biden than for Donald Trump, thanks to the Electoral College, it took several days to learn who won. To the relief of many, it appears that this time -- unlike 2000 or 2016 -- the candidate who got the most votes nationwide also won the election.

    When our students only learn about this exceptionally strange system from their corporate-produced history and government textbooks, they have no clue why this is how we choose our president. More importantly, they develop a stunted sense of their own power -- and little reason to believe they might have the potential to create something better.

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    Opinion
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