Category: In the News

L.A. students of color in lime green shirt

A People’s History Inspires Students’ Political Activism

In an experiment with nearly 700 students from nine Chicago-area schools, Matthew Nelsen (a PhD candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University) gave out readings on the abolitionist movement, the National Farmworkers Association, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Half of the readings were from the corporate textbook The American Pageant and the other half from A People’s History of the United States. Afterwards, when Nelsen asked students to report on their willingness to participate in political activities (voting, campaigning, or demonstrations), Black and Latino youth reported a greater willingness to participate when they read passages from A People’s History.
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History Distorted: Sam Wineburg’s Critique of Howard Zinn

By David Detmer One of Howard Zinn’s harshest, and most influential, critics is Sam Wineburg, the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University, and Director of the Stanford History Education Group. In the Winter 2012-2013 issue of American Educator, Professor Wineburg published an eight-page essay entitled “Undue Certainty: Where Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Falls Short.” My new book, Zinnophobia: The Battle over History in Education, Politics, and Scholarship (Zero Books, 2018), contains a lengthy, point-by-point rebuttal to the criticisms he advances in that essay.
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Washington Post - Writers Refute Fareed Zakaria | HowardZinn.org

Letters Refute Fareed Zakaria’s Claim: ‘Bannon’s view closest to Howard Zinn’

In a Washington Post article on February 9, 2017, Fareed Zakaria compared Steve Bannon and Howard Zinn, concluding that, "In a strange way, Bannon’s dark, dystopian view of U.S. history is closest to that of Howard Zinn, a popular far-left scholar whose 'A People’s History of the United States' is a tale of the many ways in which 99 percent of Americans were crushed by the country’s all-powerful elites. In the Zinn/Bannon worldview, everyday people are simply pawns manipulated by their evil overlords." In response, two letters to the editor of the Washington Post were sent. The authors have given us permission to publish them here.
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