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Since its original landmark publication in 1980, A People's History of the United States has been chronicling American history from the bottom up.

Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History is the only volume to tell America's story 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. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country's greatest battles-the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women's rights, racial equality-were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance. Covering Christopher Columbus's arrival through President Clinton's first term, A People's History of the United States features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history.

Library Journal calls Howard Zinn's iconic A People's History of the United States "a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those. . . whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories." Packed with vivid details and telling quotations, Zinn's award-winning classic continues to revolutionize the way American history is taught and remembered.

Frequent appearances in popular media, like The Sopranos, The Simpsons, Good Will Hunting, and the History Channel documentary The People Speak, testify to Zinn's ability to bridge the generation gap with enduring insights into the birth, development, and destiny of the nation. [Publisher's description.]

More than two million copies sold.

The 35th anniversary edition, published in November of 2015, includes a new introduction by Anthony Arnove. He begins,

Howard Zinn fundamentally changed the way millions of people think about history with A People's History of the United States. He would be the first to say, however, that he didn't do so alone. The book grew out of his awareness of the importance of social movements throughout U.S. history, some of which he played an active role in during the 1960s and 1970s and beyond, namely the Civil Rights Movement, mass mobilizations to end the Vietnam War, as well as other antiwar movements, and the many movements for higher wages and workers' rights and the rights of women, Latinos, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, and others.

Quotes and Reviews

"It's a wonderful, splendid book-a book that should be read by every American, student or otherwise, who wants to understand his country, its true history, and its hope for the future." -Howard Fast, author of Spartacus and The Immigrants

"[It] should be required reading." -Eric Foner, for the New York Times Book Review

I remember first reading A People's History of the United States while on a train going to work. After reading about how the Tainos had their hands cut off when they didn't bring back enough gold, I had to put the book down. I felt betrayed by our education system. I couldn't believe that I had never heard of this before, especially as a man in his mid-twenties. From that point forward I decided that if I ever had the opportunity to teach, I would use this book as the classroom textbook. A People's History of the United States allows citizens to confront the most unpleasant acts of the past in order to gain strength to move on into the future. -Julian Hipkins III, Washington, D.C., High School U.S. History Teacher

Because of this book, I understood early in my college career the importance of the true, unfiltered words of the actual actors in a historical event. As a result, I was drawn further into the study of history and, eventually, into my career as a history teacher. What A People's History brought to my attention is that American history is much more interesting than that. Our history is an exciting, sometimes appalling, struggle for power and that makes us just like every other country that has ever existed. . . . A long list of "good guys" with no one to struggle with is neither a true story nor a good story. It doesn't resonate because it leads the student to believe that we are all waiting for the next exceptional leader, instead of becoming a force for change in our own communities. A People's History helped me recognize this as a student of history and inspires my attempt to bring true stories to young people, weary of the inaccessible lists that history teaching has become. -Reynolds Bodenhamer, Gulfport, Mississippi, 11th-Grade U.S. History Teacher

Read more quotes from teachers about the impact of Howard Zinn and A People's History of the United States on their work.

ISBN: 9780062397348 | Published by HarperCollins.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress

Chapter 2. Drawing the Color Line

Chapter 3. Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

Chapter 4. Tyranny Is Tyranny

Chapter 5. A Kind of Revolution

Chapter 6. The Intimately Oppressed

Chapter 7. As Long as Grass Grows or Water Runs

Chapter 8. We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God

Chapter 9. Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom

Chapter 10. The Other Civil War

Chapter 11. Robber Barons and Rebels

Chapter 12. The Empire and the People

Chapter 13. The Socialist Challenge

Chapter 14. War Is the Health of the State

Chapter 15. Self-help in Hard Times

Chapter 16. A Peoples War?

Chapter 17. Or Does It Explode?

Chapter 18. The Impossible Victory: Vietnam

Chapter 19. Surprises

Chapter 20. The Seventies: Under Control?

Chapter 21. Carter-Reagan-Bush: The Bipartisan Consensus

Chapter 22. The Unreported Resistance

Chapter 23. The Coming Revolt of the Guards

Chapter 24. The Clinton Presidency

Chapter 25. The 2000 Election and the "War on Terrorism"

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A People's History of the United States: 1492 - Present " Zinn Education Project

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Books - Non-fiction. By Howard Zinn. 2005, with a new introduction by Anthony Arnove in 2015. 784 pages. Howard Zinn's groundbreaking work on U.S. history. This book details lives and facts rarely included in textbooks-an indispensable teacher and student resource.

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Integrate social justice in math

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In Jr Arimboanga's ninth-grade classroom, students learn about critical consciousness: how to read the word, but also the world. It's a concept popularized by a Brazilian educational theorist named Paulo Freire in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

The class is ethnic studies. It's part of an effort by San Francisco educators like Arimboanga to teach courses centered on the perspectives of historically marginalized groups. Just last year, California passed a law mandating a model ethnic studies curriculum.

Sometimes called multicultural education or culturally responsive teaching (though there are subtle differences among the three), ethnic studies has been expanding on the west coast and in pockets across the country. San Francisco's curriculum is "designed to give high school students an introduction to the experiences of ethnic communities that are rarely represented in textbooks," according to the school district's website.

We have an obligation to ensure their heritage is aptly reflected in how we talk about America.

Teachers of ethnic studies argue that these courses give students a pathway to break the cycles of poverty, violence, and incarceration that so many communities of color face.

"Ethnic studies works," says Artnelson Concordia, a veteran teacher who is helping to develop the San Francisco curriculum. He wants students to see that "all of their experiences can be connected to larger issues."

"So by the end of the school year, they're seeing themselves as makers of history," Concordia says.
Movements and Counter-Movements
Ethnic studies has "gained momentum, frankly, with the election of Donald Trump," says Ravi Perry, president of the National Association for Ethnic Studies. This summer, Oregon set a timetable for the adoption of K-12 ethnic studies standards. Efforts to introduce statewide legislation are also ongoing in Kansas and starting this year, Indiana high schools will be required to offer ethnic and racial studies as an elective course. States with large indigenous populations - like Montana and Alaska - have already written standards for culturally responsive teaching.

"We have an obligation to ensure their heritage is aptly reflected in how we talk about America," Perry says. "This is not about promoting an individual agenda. It's about understanding the importance of community solidarity."

Other movements are concentrated at the district level. Seattle has passed a resolution, based on recommendations from the NAACP. Students in Providence, R.I., have successfully lobbied for a pilot of the ethnic studies curriculum. Albuquerque, N.M., has launched ethnic studies courses in all of its high schools.

Though the start of the ethnic studies movement can be traced to the early 1900s, it really kicked off in the 1960s at colleges and universities. In the past decade, the growth has accelerated in K-12 schools, partly in response to an Arizona law that banned the curriculum.

There, Republican lawmakers were specifically targeting a Mexican-American studies program at Tucson High School - where minority enrollment is 88 percent. The Republicans who wrote the legislation, Tom Horne and John Huppenthal, claimed the classes were stoking racial tensions and "radicalizing students." They pointed to the course materials - among them, Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Rodolfo Acuña's Occupied America - as well as the class decor, which included a poster of Che Guevara.

In 2010, Horne and Huppenthal passed HB 2281, prohibiting classes and materials that "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government," "resentment toward a race or class or people," or "ethnic solidarity." (This happened soon after the passage of SB 1070, which gave local police the authority to question a person's citizenship.)

There were other ethnic studies courses in Tucson that were not touched by the bill, Huppenthal says. He mentions African-American studies, for one. But the teachers of Mexican-American studies classes at Tucson High, Huppenthal says, were "indoctrinating students."

"They were doing a very simplistic application of Karl Marx's dictum: All of history is the struggle between the 'oppressor' and the 'oppressed,' " Huppenthal says. "And they were going to identify whites as oppressors and Hispanics as the oppressed."
Myths and Truths
"One of the things you would hear was that our classes were hateful. That we were teaching resentment," says Curtis Acosta, who piloted one of the Mexican-American studies classes that sparked the controversy in Arizona. "That's exactly the antithesis of what you would see."

Acosta taught for 18 years in Tucson Unified School District. On a typical day in his Chicano literature class, Acosta says, you'd find students sitting at tables "doing really controversial things like reading and writing well."

Each morning, his class would begin with an affirmation, a Mayan precept called In Lak Ech, which translates to "You are another me." Students would recite in Spanish and English part of the poem by Luís Valdez:
Tú eres mi otro yo. You are my other me. Si te hago daño a ti, If I do harm to you, Me hago daño a mi mismo. I do harm to myself. Si te amo y respeto, If I love and respect you, Me amo y respeto yo. I love and respect myself.
"Students were sharing and taking risks and that didn't happen by accident," Acosta says. "It was real intentional."

Alexei Marquez can attest to that. She was in Acosta's class the first year it was offered. Up until then, she had been a dutiful, if disengaged, student. "I learned from an early age to play the game as it was," Marquez says.

Kids react when the curriculum isn't speaking to their experiences or to the things that really matter to them.

When she took Acosta's class, it was the first time she'd connected to literature on a personal level. She fell in love with The Devil's Highway by Luís Alberto Urrea. "I can't even tell you what I read in AP English," Marquez says.

She is starting her PhD in Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Arizona. And she is not a lone success story. While 48 percent of Latino students were dropping out of high school, 100 percent of those students enrolled in Mexican-American studies classes at Tucson High were graduating, and 85 percent were going on to college.
Impact
"The research says, plainly, that this stuff works," explains Christine Sleeter, a California State University professor and ethnic studies expert. In 2010, the National Education Association asked her to review the academic and social impact of ethnic studies.

A few things happen when students take courses that connect with their lived experience, Sleeter says. Engagement increases, as do literacy skills, overall achievement and attitudes toward learning.

"As students of color proceed through the school system, research finds that the overwhelming dominance of Euro-American perspectives leads many such students to disengage from academic learning," Sleeter writes in the NEA report. "Ethnic studies curricula exist in part because students of color have demanded an education that is relevant, meaningful, and affirming of their identities."

Something else happens in these classes: students develop "a sense of agency," Sleeter writes. So they aren't just learning about history, they're engaging with it and shaping it - reading the word and the world.

A Stanford study finds similar outcomes - particularly for high school students at risk of dropping out. Taking a course which examines "the roles of race, nationality and culture on identity and experience" improved not only academic performance, but also attendance.

"Kids react when the curriculum isn't speaking to their experiences or to the things that really matter to them," Sleeter says. "They just get bored and they either intellectually drop out or physically drop out."
Waiting on a Verdict
A federal judge will rule any day now on whether GOP state officials violated students' constitutional rights when they all but abolished Tucson High's Mexican-American studies program.

For the main players, this trial has stirred up a lot of old emotions.

Huppenthal has held steady, maintaining that ethnic studies racializes the classroom. "To teach kids that they're victims and they can't get ahead in life because somebody's holding them down, I think it's a mistake," he says.

But that argument - that the world is a meritocracy, free of systemic racism and colonialism - is detrimental to students of color, according to a new study in the Child Development journal.

Acosta, who lost his class to the ban, has been helping other districts integrate ethnic studies into their schools. No matter what happens, he says, the legacy of Tucson's Mexican-American studies program remains.

"As emotional as this has been, what's really fascinating and affirming is that ethnic studies is now something seen," Acosta says. "And can be used to resuscitate hope."

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Federal Judge Finds Racism Behind Arizona Law Banning Ethnic Studies

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In Jr Arimboanga's ninth-grade classroom, students learn about critical consciousness: how to read the word, but also the world. It's a concept popularized by a Brazilian educational theorist named Paulo Freire in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The class is ethnic studies.

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Why Black Lives Matter in Your Classroom Too

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Why Black Lives Matter in Your Classroom Too

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I have a simple job. It has two easy mandates.

1. Love children with good teaching.

2. Love their teachers by supporting them with good stuff to teach with.

I work in classrooms all over the world. When there are pieces of your heart in far flung corners of the globe, a powerful kind of empathy grows. When communities hurt, I hurt.

When Trayvon Martin was murdered in Florida, I thought of the children I serve there. I thought of the books they like and the jokes they tell me when I get to town. I remembered his school and his teachers. I thought of his community and especially of his family that has had to find light in the traumatic void his absence creates. On some mornings, when I am particularly sensitive or tired, I can see his classroom. His empty desk haunts my dreams.

When the same thing happened with Mike Brown and Tamir Rice, a significant part of me broke. These names are not headlines or hashtags to me. These were children who read the books my colleagues and I suggested and wrote the essays we asked them to write. These are children who trusted us with their futures. Our system betrayed that trust.

I've worked in schools my entire career. The death of a student or family member is not a new occurrence to me. It is painful every single time. But I heal.

These recent wounds, however, are kept fresh not just by the regularity of these murders, but that they are carried out by agents of the state or their proxies and that they happen almost exclusively to black and brown children, to their siblings, to their mothers and to their fathers.

When educators talk about racism our conversation is often limited to individual acts of personal bias. As long as we don't know any mean or intolerant people, we are complacent in our thinking that these problems are not ours to contend with. Such a stance ignores the systemic complexities of how race is lived in America, on its streets and in our classrooms - and even when there are no people of color present.

Becoming more systemically aware means understanding the kinds of racism that shape our communities, schools, and classrooms, and where we stand in relation to those social forces.

Most people are aware of individual racism. If we choose to talk about race, it is what we spend most of our time talking about, but few understand how it works. There are two kinds of individual racism. The first kind of individual racism is internalized racism. These are all the conscious and subconscious racial biases, prejudices, and blind spots that we all have within ourselves as individuals.

The second kind of individual racism is interpersonal racism. This is what happens when we act out the biases we internalize on others. Most of us are sensitive enough to avoid acting out our internalized racism, but as humans, our biases, prejudices and blind spots are most likely to emerge when we are tired, stressed, late, scared or feel threatened. As educators we are tired quite regularly and stressed daily, so the work of avoiding interpersonal racism is real and significant, but it is not all.

There are also two kinds of systemic racism. The first kind - institutional racism - is the collection of racist policies and discriminatory practices in schools, government agencies, and workplaces that routinely produces unjust outcomes for people of color. These words may be new to us, but as teachers we are intimately familiar with this kind of racism. This is the "achievement gap." This is the testing industrial complex. This is school discipline.

Let's consider this: if there were an activity at school that resulted in the mass failure of kids with green eyes, we would not criminalize the kids with green eyes. We would ask, "What is it about this activity that excludes kids with green eyes?" and we would change the activity. Are we, as members of the education community, willing to do this for black boys who are suspended at rates that are exponentially more in comparison to their peers? What could this look like? If sitting in a desk all day listening to lectures leads to mass suspensions for a specific subset of kids, I need to get with my team and change the activity. To engage in this imaginative work - even if it is messy - is antiracist. It affirms that black lives do matter.

The second kind of systemic racism - structural racism - is the unjust patterns and practices that play out across societal institutions. It is the reality that those suspended black boys miss out on valuable instructional time and consequently miss out on opportunities that lead to college. It is the reality that this boy's earning potential over a lifetime is now a paltry percentage of his college educated peers. It is the knowledge that this reduced earning diminishes quality of life. To be antiracist is to know that all of these things are connected and to know that many of them start in school even when we express no interpersonal racism.

All of our students matter, but in a society characterized by its dogged refusal to treat all kids and their families equally, it is our moral imperative to affirm that black lives matter. If outcomes continue to be bleak for large groups of people, it diminishes the quality of all our lives. When there is massive disenfranchisement fueled by widespread failure and incarceration, the safety of all our communities is compromised.

In our search for solutions, people utter platitudes disguised as answers - we should love one another, I don't see color or race, let's talk more - and all of those things are lovely and important starts, but they alone will not change the systems that routinely produce unjust outcomes. To continue with business as usual, to do nothing, to be "neutral" is a passive declaration of racism because the system that we are most intimately connected with - school - will continue to produce unjust outcomes for people of color. To be antiracist is to be actively involved with the disruption of these systems.

What is our influence, as educators?

What can we do? We cannot reconstruct the world to reflect our views, but we are in a unique position to take action in our classrooms. We can start to disrupt the status quo by asking ourselves questions about our practice, community and curriculum. When I'm working in teams with other teachers, here are some initial questions we use to imagine what our disruption can look like.

1. Safety. In order for students to learn, they need to feel safe. How can I make sure that my classroom is a place where children feel safe and protected? Can I ensure the sustained management of the room while communicating respect (without cultivating fear, embarrassment or teacher dependence)?

2. Choice. Children read more when they feel capable and motivated. How can I create access to reading material that is high interest and appropriately challenges kids? How can I create consistent opportunities to do work that has both meaning and consequence?

3. Voice. When students have a voice, they feel empowered. When so much of childhood is about staying quiet and listening to adults, how can we give students a platform to talk, to write, to share what is important to them? How can we help them be heard by the constituencies that matter the most to them? Who are those people, can we get them to the classroom, and how can we communicate with them?

4. Growth. Learning is not an identical process for all kids; we cannot treat it as if it is. Where are my students now? Honestly. Where can they be by the end of the week? What kind of teaching and practice will it take for them to get there? How can I best facilitate progress - small groups, out of classroom activities, labs, centers, discussions, home visits? How can I measure progress? What tools might kids need in addition to what I have planned so that they may succeed? Do all kids need that tool?

5. Flexibility. Children and communities are changing all the time. What do we need to read to be more responsive to our kids and communities? Who do we need to learn from? What is the best way to share that learning with other teachers? How can we put that learning into action? Day to day, what can this kind of professional growth look like for us?

There is no right answer; rather, it's the questions that help us think about what actions or changes might lead to better outcomes for all of our students, particularly those who are underserved by traditional schooling. Being an advocate for black lives does not mean that I am an advocate against any other lives. When we make the conscious decision to address persisting injustices, this broadens access to justice for everyone.

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Why #BlackLivesMatter in Your Classroom Too

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I work in classrooms all over the world. When there are pieces of your heart in far flung corners of the globe, a powerful kind of empathy grows. When communities hurt, I hurt. When Trayvon Martin...

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How UDL Can Help You Create Culturally Responsive Classrooms

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How UDL Can Help You Create Culturally Responsive Classrooms

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Happy Tuesday, Inclusion Lab readers! Today we're bringing you a guest post from UDL facilitator Joni Degner, who stopped by the Lab to share her UDL "eureka moment" with us back in February. Today Joni's back with an eye-opening post on culturally responsive teaching-a critical topic in today's increasingly diverse classrooms. What does it really mean to be culturally responsive as a teacher, and how can adopting a UDL approach help? Read on to learn from Joni's firsthand experience.

***

As a universal design for learning (UDL) facilitator, I spend much of my time working with teachers and talking about learning environments. The question that most often comes up when we're talking about teaching strategies and the UDL framework is "What does that look like?" Teachers understand the power of modeling and often want to see a model of student engagement or a teaching strategy in action so that they can formulate what it's supposed to look like and then adapt that to their learning environment. In my most recent work, many conversations have revolved around culturally responsive teaching and how to demystify it.

When I first heard this term and started talking about it with administrators back when I was still in the classroom, it was over the post-observation conference table. I remember being scored a 3 out of 4 on a line item called Cultural Perspectives. I asked, "How do I get to a 4 on this?" The conversation that followed was well-intentioned, vague, and vapid. We sat there trying to define culturally responsive teaching, and in retrospect, we struggled because we were only talking about ethnicity. We were both committed professionals in our field, and we sat there talking and struggling because we knew that talking about it in such black and white terms at once oversimplified it and complicated it terribly. We knew there were so many other pieces that didn't relate to skin color, country of origin, and flags on the walls. After all, there is no flag for free and reduced lunch, mental illness, divorce, and so many other things that make up the world that our students live in every day. I walked out of the conference knowing we had a lot of work to do, and I wondered what so many other teachers wonder: "What does culturally responsive teaching look like?"

At the time, I was still learning about the UDL framework, something that was quickly becoming the driving force in my school district's value system. How could I add this other thing on top of that? The thing is...it's not another thing. I mean, it is, but really, it's not. Every part of our lives and every nuance of our behaviors is carried out by our own cultural perspectives: everything we see and how we choose to see it; every conversation we have and every conversation we choose not to have; the things we choose to deal with and the things we choose not to deal with. As I began to understand how deep and wide culture really is, and as I explored various resources on culturally responsive teaching and talked with many brilliant UDL colleagues (Jon Mundorf, Liz Berquist, Katie Novak, Lisa Carey, and Loui Lord Nelson), and as I looked to authorities like Dr. Geneva Gay and new voices like Chris Emdin, I began to filter the idea of culture and culturally responsive teaching into the UDL framework. I started looking at specific UDL guidelines and talking about culture in the language of the UDL checkpoints.

Here are some conclusions that I came to:

I can help my students find greater value and relevance if I know what they value.

I can foster collaboration and community if I get rid of my old ideas about what collaboration looks like. (In some cultures, it's actually considered rude to be the person who speaks up in a group and assigns roles and workloads. Sometimes collaboration is the student who quietly gathers the resources for the group, who handles the project design, or who checks the facts and research.)

I can offer better options for language if I know what my students want to talk about and how they want to talk about it.

I can best help my students plan and strategize by offering my ideas, but also by engineering opportunities for them to discover their own strategies based on their own decision-making and tempo of work.

You might ask, how am I supposed to know all of this? Ask. Ask your students. Build in regular opportunities for students to co-design lessons with you. This can be done by posting a question on the board and asking students to give you their input through a chalk talk, an exit ticket, a poll, a back channel chat, or by pulling a few students together for a 15-minute conversation about the work you're currently doing and the work you have coming up. What do they like? What's working? What's not working? What are their classmates talking about? What would they like to learn about? How do they want to learn it? Get their input and then use it. If we can do that, then we can create learning environments that are not only flexible and accessible, but ones with which our students can culturally identify. We can create learning environments with windows that give our students insight into other cultural perspectives, and learning environments with mirrors where our students see themselves reflected.

Culturally responsive teaching doesn't have a look. It has a vibe, a current, and that current moves the conversations and the decisions in the learning environment. Many of those conversations come in the form of questions to your students. Ask your kids for project ideas. Ask your kids what additional resources they need. Ask your kids what they want to learn about. Ask your kids if they want to collaborate. Ask your kids to show you the technology they love. Ask your kids for their stories. And when you ask, give them room to talk and tell their stories. Giving your students opportunities to tell their stories allows them to make connections with one another, and I cannot overstate how critical this is. Our students must be able to connect not only to the learning environment, but also to one another.

The relief in all of this is that teacher does not have to be the lone cultural resource in the room. In fact, if we try to assume that burden, we are actually moving away from culturally responsive teaching. Our students are our best cultural resources, and if we want learners who are knowledgeable and resourceful, it begins with us showing them that we value the knowledge and resources they come with. Because culture is so tightly woven into our perspectives, it can be difficult to step out from behind our own cultural screen. Asking our students and using their input is one way we can get out from behind that screen. It allows our students to tell their own story instead of allowing our assumptions to tell their story.

Our students are growing up in a world in which many of the national conversations are dominated by the language of division. Our students are constantly put in the position of choosing either/or. They are constantly hearing about and talking about which lives matter and they are steeped in the language and media of a two-party political system. We must create learning environments that allow students to make authentic connections to education and also to one another so that as our students move into the future, they become agents of change who don't answer either/or, but stand together and emphatically say, "Both and all!"

***

Big thanks to Joni for being here today and sharing her experience. Is her approach similar to yours? What does culturally responsive teaching mean to you? In your own diverse classroom, how do you encourage your students to tell their stories and form authentic connections to what you're teaching?

If you have a story about culturally responsive teaching-especially in the context of a UDL framework-we'd love to hear it. You can Submit a Story right here, or send it to jlillis AT brookespublishing DOT com.
KEEP READING

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How UDL Can Help You Create Culturally Accessible Classrooms - Brookes Blog

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Happy Tuesday, Inclusion Lab readers! Today we're bringing you a guest post from UDL facilitator Joni Degner, who stopped by the Lab to share her UDL "eureka moment" with us back in February. Today Joni's back with an eye-opening post on culturally responsive teaching-a critical topic in today's increasingly diverse classrooms. What does it really [...]

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Why Calling Slaves "Workers"  is More than an Editing Error

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Why Calling Slaves "Workers"  is More than an Editing Error

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Coby Burren was reading his textbook, sitting in geography class at Pearland High School near Houston, when he noticed a troubling caption. The 15-year-old quickly took a picture with his phone and sent it to his mother.

Next to a map of the United States describing "patterns of immigration," it read that the Atlantic slave trade brought "millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations."

"We was real hard workers wasn't we," Coby texted, adding a sarcastic emoji.

Coby caught a textbook error that had been missed by several editorial layers, starting with mega publisher McGraw-Hill Education, followed by the official textbook reviewers and, finally, members of the Texas Board of Education who have the final say on materials like this.

Roni Dean-Burren, Coby's mother, is a former teacher pursuing her doctorate at the University of Houston. For her, "that word - 'workers' - was an attempt to erase that hard writing that slavery has had on the paper of our society." She points out that, while the book describes many Europeans immigrating as indentured servants, she found no mention in this lesson of Africans forced to the U.S. as slaves.

Several weeks ago, Dean-Burren blasted the publisher in an online video that's been viewed nearly 2 million times. For her, the caption's language speaks to larger issues of social justice and the Black Lives Matter movement. "[The slaves'] stories, their lives, their bodies - they didn't matter enough to call it what it was," she says.

The story has renewed a national debate about how textbooks deal with race and slavery - especially the power of language and grammar as tools to interpret history, already a subjective area to teach.

Dean-Burren also has begun scrutinizing other books. "And there are other mistakes," she recently posted on social media. "I'm looking at the U.S. history books right now. There are some word choices in these books that I think most people would find problematic. We can do better, so let's!"

Both the publisher and Texas officials have agreed that the caption was inappropriate. But it's not clear if or how much the adoption process for new textbooks will change.

In the past year, Texas textbooks have been criticized for listing Moses as a Founding Father and for downplaying slavery as a cause of the Civil War. Those issues stemmed from the learning standards that the Texas State Board of Education sets to guide publishers.

But David Levin, CEO of McGraw-Hill Education, believes this mistake was an editorial error and not a problem with the standards or what he calls a "transparent" adoption process.

"It was a terrible error, and the minute we saw it we said, 'We've got to sort it out,' " Levin says.

There are 100,000 copies of the book in Texas, tens of thousands more around the country, and the company is scrambling to fix the problem. It will ship corrected copies to schools for free, or it will provide a sticker to cover the caption, along with a lesson plan about the cultural context of language.

While Levin stands behind the rest of McGraw-Hill Education's materials, he admits they need to review their books more carefully. In particular, the CEO wants more "cold reads." Those evaluate individual lessons on a standalone basis, which is basically what Coby Burren did when he spotted the error.

In Texas, some state officials are considering how to improve their textbook adoption process. One idea is to have more diversity among reviewers who are nominated by the state board.

"Everybody admits it shouldn't have happened, so let's figure out how to prevent it in the future," says Thomas Ratliff, vice chair of the Texas Board of Education. The board's 15 elected members approve the final materials for 5 million Texas students.

Still, Ratliff, a Republican, found 16 other references to slavery in the geography book that he believes were accurate. He says the story of that one, problematic caption has "gotten blown out of proportion."

Dean-Burren disagrees. She's concerned about the words textbooks use - or don't - to teach our nation's rich history. Still, she's proud of her son and the lesson he's learned.

"He knows that his voice matters," Dean-Burren says, "and that he'll be heard."

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Why Calling Slaves 'Workers' Is More Than An Editing Error

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Coby Burren was reading his textbook, sitting in geography class at Pearland High School near Houston, when he noticed a troubling caption. The 15-year-old quickly took a picture with his phone and sent it to his mother.

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Podcast episode about Brown v. Board & current problems

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Miss Buchanan's Period of Adjustment - Revisionist History

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A landmark Supreme Court case. A civil rights revolution. Why has everyone forgotten what happened next?

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James Baldwin

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"A Talk to Teachers" James Baldwin, 1963

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(Delivered October 16, 1963, as "The Negro Child - His Self-Image"; originally published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963, reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985, Saint Martins 1985.) Let's begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time.

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Cross-Pollinating Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning

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Cross-Pollinating Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning