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Final full week of classes :)

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phenomenal

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i’m going home tomorrow so great but stressed

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i’m going home tomorrow so great but stressed

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Cold and stressed

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This is my busiest week ever

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So happy because semester is almost done

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Sleepy

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Soooo tired

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insanely stressed

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cold and tired

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stressed but gotta push through!!!!

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Ok I guess

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GREAT!!!!

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stressed but for no specific reason

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By Bill Bigelow
Once again this year many schools will pause to commemorate Christopher Columbus. Given everything we know about who Columbus was and what he launched in the Americas, this needs to stop.

Columbus initiated the trans-Atlantic slave trade, in early February 1494, first sending several dozen enslaved Taínos to Spain. Columbus described those he enslaved as "well made and of very good intelligence," and recommended to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that taxing slave shipments could help pay for supplies needed in the Indies. A year later, Columbus intensified his efforts to enslave Indigenous people in the Caribbean. He ordered 1,600 Taínos rounded up-people whom Columbus had earlier described as "so full of love and without greed"-and had 550 of the "best males and females," according to one witness, Michele de Cuneo, chained and sent as slaves to Spain. "Of the rest who were left," de Cuneo writes, "the announcement went around that whoever wanted them could take as many as he pleased; and this was done."

Taíno slavery in Spain turned out to be unprofitable, but Columbus later wrote, "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."

The eminent historian of Africa, Basil Davidson, also assigns responsibility to Columbus for initiating the African slave trade to the Americas. According to Davidson, the first license granted to send enslaved Africans to the Caribbean was issued by the king and queen in 1501, during Columbus's rule in the Indies, leading Davidson to dub Columbus the "father of the slave trade."

From the very beginning, Columbus was not on a mission of discovery but of conquest and exploitation-he called his expedition la empresa, the enterprise. When slavery did not pay off, Columbus turned to a tribute system, forcing every Taíno, 14 or older, to fill a hawk's bell with gold every three months. If successful, they were safe for another three months. If not, Columbus ordered that Taínos be "punished," by having their hands chopped off, or they were chased down by attack dogs. As the Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas wrote, this tribute system was "impossible and intolerable."

And Columbus deserves to be remembered as the first terrorist in the Americas. When resistance mounted to the Spaniards' violence, Columbus sent an armed force to "spread terror among the Indians to show them how strong and powerful the Christians were," according to the Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas. In his book Conquest of Paradise, Kirkpatrick Sale describes what happened when Columbus's men encountered a force of Taínos in March of 1495 in a valley on the island of Hispañiola:

The soldiers mowed down dozens with point-blank volleys, loosed the dogs to rip open limbs and bellies, chased fleeing Indians into the bush to skewer them on sword and pike, and [according to Columbus's biographer, his son Fernando] "with God's aid soon gained a complete victory, killing many Indians and capturing others who were also killed."

All this and much more has long been known and documented. As early as 1942 in his Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that Columbus's policies in the Caribbean led to "complete genocide"-and Morison was a writer who admired Columbus.

If Indigenous peoples' lives mattered in our society, and if Black people's lives mattered in our society, it would be inconceivable that we would honor the father of the slave trade with a national holiday. The fact that we have this holiday legitimates a curriculum that is contemptuous of the lives of peoples of color. Elementary school libraries still feature books like Follow the Dream: The Story of Christopher Columbus, by Peter Sis, which praise Columbus and say nothing of the lives destroyed by Spanish colonialism in the Americas.

No doubt, the movement launched 25 years ago in the buildup to the Columbus Quincentenary has made huge strides in introducing a more truthful and critical history about the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. Teachers throughout the country put Columbus and the system of empire on trial, and write stories of the so-called discovery of America from the standpoint of the people who were here first.

But most textbooks still tip-toe around the truth. Houghton Mifflin's United States History: Early Years attributes Taíno deaths to "epidemics," and concludes its section on Columbus: "The Columbian Exchange benefited people all over the world." The section's only review question erases Taíno and African humanity: "How did the Columbian Exchange change the diet of Europeans?"

Too often, even in 2015, the Columbus story is still young children's first curricular introduction to the meeting of different ethnicities, different cultures, different nationalities. In school-based literature on Columbus, they see him plant the flag, and name and claim "San Salvador" for an empire thousands of miles away; they're taught that white people have the right to rule over peoples of color, that stronger nations can bully weaker nations, and that the only voices they need to listen to throughout history are those of powerful white guys like Columbus. Is this said explicitly? No, it doesn't have to be. It's the silences that speak.

For example, here's how Peter Sis describes the encounter in his widely used book: "On October 12, 1492, just after midday, Christopher Columbus landed on a beach of white coral, claimed the land for the King and Queen of Spain, knelt and gave thanks to God..." The Taínos on the beach who greet Columbus are nameless and voiceless. What else can children conclude but that their lives don't matter?

Enough already. Especially now, when the Black Lives Matter movement prompts us to look deeply into each nook and cranny of social life to ask whether our practices affirm the worth of every human being, it's time to rethink Columbus, and to abandon the holiday that celebrates his crimes.

More cities - and school districts - ought to f ollow the example of Berkeley, Minneapolis, and Seattle, which have scrapped Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples' Day - a day to commemorate the resistance and resilience of Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, and not just in a long-ago past, but today. Or what about studying and honoring the people Columbus enslaved and terrorized: the Taínos. Columbus said that they were gentle, generous, and intelligent, but how many students today even know the name Taíno, let alone know anything of who they were and how they lived?

Last year, Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant put it well when she explained Seattle's decision to abandon Columbus Day: "Learning about the history of Columbus and transforming this day into a celebration of Indigenous people and a celebration of social justice ... allows us to make a connection between this painful history and the ongoing marginalization, discrimination, and poverty that Indigenous communities face to this day."

We don't have to wait for the federal government to transform Columbus Day into something more decent. Just as the climate justice movement is doing with fossil fuels, we can organize our communities and our schools to divest from Columbus. And that would be something to celebrate.

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Time to Abolish Columbus Day - Zinn Education Project

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By Bill Bigelow Once again this year many schools will pause to commemorate Christopher Columbus. Given everything we know about who Columbus was and what he launched in the Americas, this needs to stop. Columbus initiated the trans-Atlantic slave trade, in early February 1494, first sending several dozen enslaved Taínos to Spain.

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The Koch Brothers Sneak into School: How Right-wing Billionaires Seek to Shape the Social Studies Curriculum

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The Koch Brothers Sneak into School: How Right-wing Billionaires Seek to Shape the Social Studies Curriculum

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The Koch Brothers Sneak into School: How Right-wing Billionaires Seek to Shape the Social Studies Curriculum

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How Right-wing Billionaires Seek to Shape the Social Studies Curriculum By Bill Bigelow This month in Boston, thousands of teachers will gather for the annual National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference. Two non-teachers will be there, too: Charles and David Koch, the notorious right-wing billionaires. Well, the Kochs won’t be there in person, but they will be represented by a Koch-funded and controlled organization: the Arlington, Virginia-based Bill of Rights Institute.

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When Black Lives Mattered: Why Teach Reconstruction 

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When Black Lives Mattered: Why Teach Reconstruction 

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When Black Lives Mattered: Why Teach Reconstruction - Zinn Education Project

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By Adam Sanchez Every day seems to bring new horrors as the U.S. president’s racist rhetoric and policies have provided an increasingly encouraging environment for attacks on Black people and other communities of color. The acquittal of yet another police officer accused of murdering a Black man in…

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The Trump Administration's horrifying record on immigration, exemplified by the heartbreaking scenes of family separation during the summer of 2018, sparked a new round of discussion and debate about U.S. deportation policy. Of course, deportations are nothing new; Obama was rightly criticized as the Deporter-in-Chief. But with enthusiastic cruelty and vigor, the Trump administration has embraced deportation, including the targeting of long-term residents with no criminal record. As acting Director of ICE, Thomas Homan explained, "The president made it clear in his executive orders: There's no population off the table. If you're in this country illegally, we're looking for you and we're going to look to apprehend you." The massive reach of this effort, the uncertainty and terror it elicits, and the opacity of the controlling laws, make this a dangerous moment, not just for immigrants and their families, but for everyone who cares about due process and human rights. It also recalls an earlier time in U.S. history, nearly 90 years ago, when Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants were ousted from the country in enormous numbers.

For me, teaching in the time of Trump meant I wanted to design an immigration unit for my high school U.S. history class to help students both make sense of this dangerous moment and, hopefully, think about how to fight back. I wrote a trial role play on the deportations of the 1930s to act as both a warning and a guide.

In this, I was heeding the call of a group of 5th graders in California who, in 2015, successfully lobbied their legislators to require that the story of the deportations be told in classrooms. Such legislative action was needed because this mass deportation of as many as 1.8 million people rarely makes it into the standard curriculum or textbooks. This omission is symptomatic of the diseases plaguing textbooks in general: their whitewashing of history, amplification of presidents over people, unswerving commitment to a narrative of progress, and marginalization of people of color to sidebars and extension activities.

Take my textbook, Pearson's American Journey. It has one paragraph on "Hispanic Americans" during the Great Depression. Of the six-sentence paragraph, only two sentences address the deportations. They read:

Economic woes and racism drove nearly half a million Mexican immigrants and their American-born children from the United States in the 1930s. Local authorities in the Southwest encouraged the federal government to deport Mexicans and offered free transportation to Mexico.

Notice the disembodied "economic woes" and "racism" that did the dirty work of driving people from their homes. Notice the "Mexican immigrants and their American-born children," obscuring the fact that 60 percent of those deported were citizens, children and adults. And finally, most perplexing, notice the textbook's cliffhanger, never telling readers what actually happened. Local folks "encouraged" the federal government to act, but did it? What happened?

What happened is that men, women, and children - immigrant and U.S.-born, citizen and noncitizen, long-time residents and temporary workers - all became the targets of a massive campaign of forced relocation, based solely on their perceived status as "Mexican." They were rounded up in parks, at work sites, and in hospitals, betrayed by local relief agencies who reported anyone with a "Mexican sounding" name to the Immigration Service, pressured (and often tricked) into "voluntary" deportation - sometimes called repatriation - by municipal and state officials, and forcibly deported in trains and buses, to a country some hadn't lived in for decades and others never at all.

American Journey and other textbooks ignore the stories of loss and forced relocation behind the numbers, stories like the terrifying raid that took place at La Placita park in Los Angeles in 1931. The park was a vibrant cultural hub in an immigrant neighborhood, a place to listen to music, talk politics, socialize. According to historian Doug Monroy, "In the days before television and radio, if you wanted stimulation and excitement, you went to La Placita." On a sunny afternoon in late February, the park was full of close to 400 people when suddenly, immigration agents sealed off the exits. Some were in military olive uniforms, others in plain clothes, wielding guns and batons. The agents demanded everyone in the park line up and show their papers. They arrested dozens and deported many. But the greatest impact was psychological, instilling terror into the Mexican American community.

The United States' own investigation of the deportations declared them unconstitutional. The federally appointed Wickersham Commission stated in its 1932 report: "The apprehension and examination of supposed aliens are often characterized by methods [that are] unconstitutional, tyrannic, and oppressive." The Wickersham Commission may have been thinking about cases like that of Angela Hernández de Sánchez. As recounted in the book, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, by Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Sánchez was returning from a short trip visiting relatives in Mexico, something she had done dozens of times before, when she was arrested and subjected to intrusive venereal disease tests. Since Sánchez had been a continuous resident of the United States since 1916, she was not eligible for deportation under current law. But even with her proof of residence and her negative blood test for sexually transmitted diseases she and her U.S.-born children were deported.

Another textbook used in my school's Advanced Placement classes, America: A Concise History (Bedford/St. Martins), attributes many of the departures of Mexican Americans to voluntary action, telling students that "many Mexican farm laborers left voluntarily as the depression deepened." But surely families fleeing persecution cannot be accurately described as volunteers. Perhaps if America devoted more than a single paragraph to this history, there might be space to tell the story of the family of one of the authors of Decade of Betrayal, Raymond Rodríguez. Rodríguez says his father - a legal resident - decided to leave following the La Placita raid, concluding the United States was too dangerous for him and his family. But his wife refused to leave with their five U.S.-born children. Rodríguez recalls his father's last words to her were, "If you don't go [too] . . . you'll starve to death and maybe worse." The family never saw him again.

As is clear from the story of the Rodríguez family, those targeted by nativism and deportations did not simply acquiesce to their treatment. Community organizations like Cruz Azul Mexicana and La Sociedad de Madres Mexicanas in Texas helped finance relief and legal services. El Confederacion de Sociedades Mexicanas in Los Angeles called "repatriation" a racist plot to remove all Mexican Americans, a sentiment reinforced by the Mexican press and radio, working on both sides of the border. Newspapers like La Opinión and La Prensa provided an important counternarrative of the deportations to the racist framing of The New York Times and The Saturday Evening Post. And leaving itself was sometimes an act of resistance. As one girl from Indiana explained, "This is my country but after the way we have been treated I hope never to see it again. . . As long as my father was working and spending his money in Gary stores, paying taxes and supporting us, it was all right, but now we have found we can't get justice here."

The sheer complexity of this history may partially explain why textbooks get it so wrong. Unlike other nativist efforts of the early 19th century, these deportations were not driven by any signature piece of legislation like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 or the Immigration Act of 1924. Rather they were orchestrated using a patchwork of federal and local authority, existing but seldom used deportation rules, and simple mob action against a vulnerable population. But it is precisely this messiness that is fruitful to surface with students. If no single law or leader ordered these deportations, then why and how did they happen and who is responsible for the damage they wrought? This is the question I raise in the Deportations on Trial lesson.

This is not just an academic exercise. Understanding the complex causes of illegal deportations in the 1930s can alert students to similar dynamics today. Just as students see that no single actor was responsible for the deportations of the 1930s, they can recognize that President Trump alone does not have the power to terrorize immigrants and their families. For that it takes the collaboration of the corporate media, ICE agents, for-profit detention centers, wall-builders and contractors, and an electorate primed by racism and capitalism to misplace blame for their own low wages or precarious social position. If that is true, then it matters how every single one of us responds.

I want my students to take what they have learned about deportations of the 1930s and be like Jordon Dyrdahl-Roberts, the Montana Department of Labor worker who quit his job, explaining on Twitter, "There were going to be ICE subpoenas for information that would end up being used to hunt down & deport undocumented workers. I refuse to aid in the breaking up of families. I refuse to just 'follow orders.'" I want my students to be like the more than 100 public defenders who walked off the job in New York City to protest ICE arrests in courthouses or like members of the Sanctuary Movement who are devising novel and brave ways to put themselves between ICE agents and their targets. And I want my students to be like those 5th graders in California who demanded they be taught about the deportations of the 1930s, who insisted that history matters, and that it might be the history that is not in the textbooks that matters the most.

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Downplaying Deportations: How Textbooks Hide the Mass Expulsion of Mexican Americans During the Great Depression - Zinn Education Project

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The Trump Administration's horrifying record on immigration, exemplified by the heartbreaking scenes of family separation during the summer of 2018, sparked a new round of discussion and debate about U.S. deportation policy. Of course, deportations are nothing new; Obama was rightly criticized as the Deporter-in-Chief.

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In these times of vast economic disparities and ecological crisis, children need examples of people throughout history who committed their lives to justice - to bringing more equality and fairness to the world. Helen Keller, whose birthday we celebrate this month - June 27th - could be one of those role models. Instead, textbooks and children's literature distort her life's work, and miss key opportunities to inspire young people to make a difference in the world.

Helen Keller worked throughout her long life to achieve social justice; she was an integral part of many social movements in the 20th century. Yet today, she is remembered chiefly as a child who overcame the obstacles of being deaf and blind largely through the efforts of her teacher, Annie Sullivan. While she may be hailed as a "hero" in lesson plans for today's children, the books recount only a fraction of what makes Helen Keller heroic.

Several years ago, I investigated and wrote about the image of Helen Keller in picture books for children in an article called " The Truth About Helen Keller," published in Rethinking Schools magazine, and posted at the Zinn Education Project website. According to these picture books, Helen should be remembered for two things after she grew up: her "courage" and her "work with the blind and deaf." Of course, both are true. But none of the many books I reviewed mentioned her work as a socialist and suffragist - movements that framed most of her life and were connected to her advocacy for people with disabilities. As Keller wrote in 1913, "The way to help the blind is to understand, correct, remove the incapacities and inequalities of our entire civilization."

As I continue today to search for thoughtful curriculum on people who worked for social change, I returned to more recent texts and Web information on Helen Keller, hoping the last decade had served to renew an interest in her true heroism. Sadly, her life - and life's work - continue to be distorted.

"Who was Helen Keller?" asks the jacket cover of the latest, and best-selling children's biography of Helen Keller: Who was Helen Keller? by Gare Thompson, illustrated by Nancy Harrison. In keeping with today's emphasis on standardized tests, the book presents readers with a multiple-choice format for the answer:

☐ A woman who could not see or hear

☐ A best-selling author

☐ A famous world traveler

☑ All of the above!

"Find out more about the real Helen Keller in this fun and exciting illustrated biography!"

This "teaser" for the biography is an example of what historian James Loewen calls "lying by omission." Within the text itself, the distortions of her life story are even more blatant. For example, take a look at how the New York Call newspaper described one stirring moment in her life:

On August 18th, 1919, Helen Keller took part in a strike called by Actor's Equity - joining the picket line against the debut of the silent film Deliverance, about her own life. Not only did she join in the picket line, she spoke at the union's strike meetings in support of their dispute with management regarding their wages. She declared she would "rather have the film fail than aid the managers in their contest with the players."

(The New York Call also was the first newspaper to publish Keller's article, "How I Became a Socialist," in 1912.)

What a lesson for young people: Here's a woman who turned her back on individual fame and glory to stand in solidarity with workers who were struggling for higher pay.

And yet here is how Gare Thomson "retells" the event:

Helen was so successful on stage that some people invited her to make a movie about her life and her feelings. Helen and Annie went to Hollywood and made the silent film Deliverance. Annie and Helen dreamed of the money they'd make from the film. They hoped to become rich and famous like movie stars. But the movie was not a success. Disappointed, Helen and Annie returned to Wrentham.

What? I'd call this flat-out lying - and not even by omission.

Gare Thompson's stance of turning Helen Keller into a passively "courageous" woman is repeated over and over again in the resources I found on the Internet, as well - where many educators go for curriculum. For example, Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan are listed together at the site: "The Real Heroes Club," where you can purchase "Real American Hero Trading Cards." One side features the important virtue we can learn from these heroes, COMMITMENT:

"When Helen Keller was a child, she became very sick and lost her hearing and her sight. Fortunately, Anne Sullivan became Helen's teacher, and devoted herself to helping. Anne's total COMMITMENT to her student totally changed Helen's life."

And on the other side are quotes, such as "Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow." And the personal connection to ponder: "How can you show you are devoted to others who are very special in your life?"

If I were creating Hero trading cards for Helen Keller, I would include her passionate work for women's voting rights, and against war and corporate domination. And I'd include her courageous quotes where she asks tough and impolite questions: "Why in this land of great wealth is there great poverty?" she wrote in 1912. "Why [do] children toil in the mills while thousands of men cannot get work, why [do] women who do nothing have thousands of dollars to spend?"

Sounds to me like the mother of today's Occupy Movement.

From publishers like Scholastic Teaching Resources - which uses her life events to "give children practice reading a timetable" by asking insipid questions such: "How can you use the first two dates to figure out Helen's age at the time she got sick?" - to St. Aidan's Home School pages, which encourages teachers to show "the Disney version of the The Miracle Worker," the information on-line portrays the same individualistic and socially empty Helen Keller myth.

It takes a little more digging, but I encourage parents and educators to turn to resources like the small press book Helen Keller from Ocean Press's series Rebel Lives, which includes excerpts from her writings on disability and class, socialism, women, and war, or the fine young adult biography Helen Keller: Rebellious Spirit by Laurie Lawlor. It's time to share with children Helen Keller's remarkable adult life. As a defiant rebel, she could be a true hero for 21st century activists.

This article is part of the Zinn Education Project's If We Knew Our History series.

Posted on: Huffington Post | Common Dreams.

© 2012 The Zinn Education Project, a project of Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

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Who Stole Helen Keller? - Zinn Education Project

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By Ruth Shagoury In these times of vast economic disparities and ecological crisis, children need examples of people throughout history who committed their lives to justice - to bringing more equality and fairness to the world. Helen Keller, whose birthday we celebrate this month - June 27th - could be one of those role models.

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Too often, textbooks present famines as natural phenomena. They are not. As Sudan, Congo, and Gaza move closer toward famine, it is not hard to see its causes. In addressing Gaza, the European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said recently:

This is a humanitarian crisis, which is not a natural disaster. It's not a flood. It's not an earthquake. It's man-made. And when we look for alternative ways of providing support, by sea or by air, we have to [remember] that we have to do it because the natural way of providing support, through roads, is being closed, artificially closed, and starvation is being used as a war arm. And when we condemn this happening in Ukraine, we have to use the same words for what's happening in Gaza.

Of course, the most famous famine is the so-called "Potato Famine" in Ireland. For better or worse, St. Patrick's Day is that brief period during the year when people pay attention to all things Irish. It is a good time to revisit Ireland's Great Famine and the refugee exodus it unleashed - and to recognize what it holds in common with other famines, past and present.

Studying the so-called Potato Famine can help students see that this was no natural disaster, it was the product of structural violence. As Bill Bigelow writes in this "If We Knew Our History" column, "The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools,"

During the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry - food that could have prevented those deaths.

The shape of the wound of famine was British colonialism and the capitalist system, which prized profit over the Irish poor. See our lesson, "Hunger on Trial," which brings this insight to life in the classroom - and helps students consider the roots of today's unnatural disasters.
By Bill Bigelow
"Wear green on St. Patrick's Day or get pinched." That pretty much sums up the Irish-American "curriculum" that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.

Sadly, today's high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.

Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O'Connor's haunting rendition of "Skibbereen," which includes the verse:

. . . Oh it's well I do remember, that bleak

December day,

The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive

Us all away

They set my roof on fire, with their cursed

English spleen

And that's another reason why I left old

Skibbereen.

By contrast, Holt McDougal's U.S. history textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences to "The Great Potato Famine." Prentice Hall's America: Pathways to the Present fails to offer a single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a "horrible disaster," as if it were a natural calamity like an earthquake. And in an awful single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin's The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People blames the "ravages of famine" simply on "a blight," and the only contemporaneous quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who describes the surviving tenants as "famished and ghastly skeletons." Uniformly, social studies textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to narrate their own horror.

These timid slivers of knowledge not only deprive students of rich lessons in Irish-American history, they exemplify much of what is wrong with today's curricular reliance on corporate-produced textbooks.

First, does anyone really think that students will remember anything from the books' dull and lifeless paragraphs? Today's textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one, learn nothing of anyone's life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum bound for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school social studies, I can testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn more about events so emptied of drama, emotion, and humanity.

Nor do these texts raise any critical questions for students to consider. For example, it's important for students to learn that the crop failure in Ireland affected only the potato - during the worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes in The Botany of Desire, "Ireland's was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly." But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and other crops thrived, why did people starve?

Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy's Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry - food that could have prevented those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.

The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist into our own time.

More than a century and a half after the "Great Famine," we live with similar, perhaps even more glaring contradictions. Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World's Food System:

Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.

Patel's book sets out to account for "the rot at the core of the modern food system." This is a curricular journey that our students should also be on - reflecting on patterns of poverty, power, and inequality that stretch from 19th century Ireland to 21st century Africa, India, Appalachia, and Oakland; that explore what happens when food and land are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit.

But today's corporate textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity about this inequality than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants. Take Pearson, the global publishing giant. At its website, the corporation announces (redundantly) that "we measure our progress against three key measures: earnings, cash and return on invested capital." The Pearson empire had 2011 worldwide sales of more than $9 billion - that's nine thousand million dollars, as I might tell my students. Multinationals like Pearson have no interest in promoting critical thinking about an economic system whose profit-first premises they embrace with gusto.

As mentioned, there is no absence of teaching materials on the Irish famine that can touch head and heart. In a role play, " Hunger on Trial," that I wrote and taught to my own students in Portland, Oregon - included at the Zinn Education Project website - students investigate who or what was responsible for the famine. The British landlords, who demanded rent from the starving poor and exported other food crops? The British government, which allowed these food exports and offered scant aid to Irish peasants? The Anglican Church, which failed to denounce selfish landlords or to act on behalf of the poor? A system of distribution, which sacrificed Irish peasants to the logic of colonialism and the capitalist market?

These are rich and troubling ethical questions. They are exactly the kind of issues that fire students to life and allow them to see that history is not simply a chronology of dead facts stretching through time.

So go ahead: Have a Guinness, wear a bit of green, and put on the Chieftains. But let's honor the Irish with our curiosity. Let's make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish - and that are starving and uprooting people today.

This article is part of the Zinn Education Project's If We Knew Our History series.

Posted on: Huffington Post | Common Dreams | Alternet | American Prospect

Republished in 2014, 2015, and 2022 on Common Dreams.

© 2012 Zinn Education Project, a project of Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change

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The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

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By Bill Bigelow "Wear green on St. Patrick's Day or get pinched." That pretty much sums up the Irish-American "curriculum" that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.

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The real Irish American story not taught in schools 

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The real Irish American story not taught in schools 

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In the latest issue of Orion magazine, Lacy M. Johnson writes:

When the next freeze or fire or pandemic or hurricane hits us, vulnerability will determine who gets to live, and who will die, and how. The disaster won't be the weather, but the shape of the wound structural violence has already made.

This is a profound insight that history can help our students grasp.

For better or worse, St. Patrick's Day is a brief period when people pay attention to all things Irish. It is a good time to revisit Ireland's Great Famine and the refugee exodus it unleashed.

Studying the so-called Potato Famine can help students recognize that this was no natural disaster, it was the product of structural violence. As Bill Bigelow writes in his "If We Knew Our History" column, "The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools,"

During the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry - food that could have prevented those deaths.

The shape of the wound of famine was British colonialism and the capitalist system, which prized profit over the Irish poor. See our role play, "Hunger on Trial," which can bring this insight to life in the classroom - and help students consider the roots of today's unnatural disasters.
By Bill Bigelow
"Wear green on St. Patrick's Day or get pinched." That pretty much sums up the Irish-American "curriculum" that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.

Sadly, today's high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.

Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O'Connor's haunting rendition of "Skibbereen," which includes the verse:

... Oh it's well I do remember, that bleak

December day,

The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive

Us all away

They set my roof on fire, with their cursed

English spleen

And that's another reason why I left old

Skibbereen.

By contrast, Holt McDougal's U.S. history textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences to "The Great Potato Famine." Prentice Hall's America: Pathways to the Present fails to offer a single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a "horrible disaster," as if it were a natural calamity like an earthquake. And in an awful single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin's The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People blames the "ravages of famine" simply on "a blight," and the only contemporaneous quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who describes the surviving tenants as "famished and ghastly skeletons." Uniformly, social studies textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to narrate their own horror.

These timid slivers of knowledge not only deprive students of rich lessons in Irish-American history, they exemplify much of what is wrong with today's curricular reliance on corporate-produced textbooks.

First, does anyone really think that students will remember anything from the books' dull and lifeless paragraphs? Today's textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one, learn nothing of anyone's life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum bound for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school social studies, I can testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn more about events so emptied of drama, emotion, and humanity.

Nor do these texts raise any critical questions for students to consider. For example, it's important for students to learn that the crop failure in Ireland affected only the potato - during the worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes in The Botany of Desire, "Ireland's was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly." But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and other crops thrived, why did people starve?

Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy's Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry - food that could have prevented those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.

The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist into our own time.

More than a century and a half after the "Great Famine," we live with similar, perhaps even more glaring contradictions. Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World's Food System:

Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.

Patel's book sets out to account for "the rot at the core of the modern food system." This is a curricular journey that our students should also be on - reflecting on patterns of poverty, power, and inequality that stretch from 19th century Ireland to 21st century Africa, India, Appalachia, and Oakland; that explore what happens when food and land are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit.

But today's corporate textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity about this inequality than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants. Take Pearson, the global publishing giant. At its website, the corporation announces (redundantly) that "we measure our progress against three key measures: earnings, cash and return on invested capital." The Pearson empire had 2011 worldwide sales of more than $9 billion - that's nine thousand million dollars, as I might tell my students. Multinationals like Pearson have no interest in promoting critical thinking about an economic system whose profit-first premises they embrace with gusto.

As mentioned, there is no absence of teaching materials on the Irish famine that can touch head and heart. In a role play, " Hunger on Trial," that I wrote and taught to my own students in Portland, Oregon - included at the Zinn Education Project website - students investigate who or what was responsible for the famine. The British landlords, who demanded rent from the starving poor and exported other food crops? The British government, which allowed these food exports and offered scant aid to Irish peasants? The Anglican Church, which failed to denounce selfish landlords or to act on behalf of the poor? A system of distribution, which sacrificed Irish peasants to the logic of colonialism and the capitalist market?

These are rich and troubling ethical questions. They are exactly the kind of issues that fire students to life and allow them to see that history is not simply a chronology of dead facts stretching through time.

So go ahead: Have a Guinness, wear a bit of green, and put on the Chieftains. But let's honor the Irish with our curiosity. Let's make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish - and that are starving and uprooting people today.

This article is part of the Zinn Education Project's If We Knew Our History series.

Posted on: Huffington Post | Common Dreams | Alternet | American Prospect | Irish Central.

Republished in 2014 and 2015 on Common Dreams.

© 2012 Zinn Education Project, a project of Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change

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The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools - Zinn Education Project

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By Bill Bigelow "Wear green on St. Patrick's Day or get pinched." That pretty much sums up the Irish-American "curriculum" that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.

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By Bill Bigelow
The most dangerous substance in the world is barely mentioned in the school curriculum. Coal.

According to the International Energy Agency, burning coal creates more greenhouse gases than any other source - including oil. James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and arguably the world's foremost climatologist, has called coal "the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on the planet."

And, as 350.org founder Bill McKibben pointed out recently in a remarkable article in Rolling Stone magazine, " Global Warming's Terrifying New Math," from a mathematical standpoint, it is demonstrably impossible to prevent the climate from spinning out of control with unimaginably horrible consequences, if we burn the fossil fuels that energy corporations are in the process of exploiting and selling. And the worst fossil fuel from a climate standpoint is coal - responsible for 45 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, a third more polluting in terms of carbon dioxide than oil, and twice as polluting as natural gas.

So when you think about Superstorm Sandy, melting ice caps, wildfires in Australia, drought in the Southwest, floods in Pakistan, climate refugees from Bangladesh, dying polar bears and species you've never heard of, increased rates of asthma, and farmland that can no longer be farmed - think coal.

Given coal's enormous role in the most significant challenge facing humanity - the climate crisis - you'd imagine that coal would occupy a similarly central place in our textbooks. You'd be wrong.

No, what textbooks do instead is to leave students with the impression that coal is something we should regard as a 19th-century phenomenon. Take the widely used Modern World History, published by McDougal Littell, owned by giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The text devotes three sentences to coal mining in the 1840s, telling students: "The most dangerous conditions of all were to be found in coal mines." And: "Many women and children were employed in the mining industry because they were the cheapest source of labor." Three hundred pages later, a single brief mention of coal in one sentence on nonrenewable sources of energy underscores the book's subtext: Coal was a problem in the 19th century, but today it's no big deal.

In environmentally conscious Portland, where I live, the sole adopted high school U.S. history textbook, History Alive!, similarly dumps coal in a distant and polluted past. History Alive! manages simultaneously to ignore the contemporary role of coal as well as to adhere to the Great Man Makes History script: "[President Theodore] Roosevelt helped improve working conditions for coal miners. In 1902, he pressured coal mine owners and the striking United Mine Workers to submit to arbitration, a legal process in which a neutral outside party helps to resolve a dispute." One would think that the union and activists like Mother Jones might earn some credit for organizing workers to challenge the rich and ruthless mine owners, but instead Teddy Roosevelt appears in this passage as the angel of progress. According to History Alive!, the union was as big an obstacle to improved working conditions as were the mine owners.

The more significant point is that yet another textbook fails to alert students to "the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on the planet." And in too many schools these days, the textbooks shape curriculum.

The silence about coal does not just enforce kids' ignorance about the world, it fails to equip them to think critically about crucial issues in their lives. Here in the Northwest, for example, coal and rail corporations hope to transport tens of millions of tons of coal through the Columbia River Gorge every year. Single-commodity trains lugged by poison-spewing diesel engines and barges would turn the Gorge into a virtual coal chute, shipping 150 million tons of coal to Asia every year. Indeed, in only three years, between 2009 and 2011, coal exports from the United States to Asia, via British Columbia, tripled - to more than 21 million tons in 2011. NASA's James Hansen calls coal trains "death trains."

And electricity throughout much of the eastern United States still comes from burning coal mined through mountaintop removal in Appalachia - a process that scrapes away entire mountains to access the thin coal seams below. The coal companies' exploitative worldview is reflected in the language they use to describe this attack on nature and communities; anything that is not coal is lumped into the this-is-garbage term: "overburden." The trees, the boulders, the streams, the bushes and herbs, the critters that depend on the land: an annoyance, a burden, to be blasted away and dumped into the valleys. To say nothing of the land's beauty and the memories that once adhered to those mountains.

What's needed is a curriculum not chained to tests and textbooks - a curriculum that fires students to life by addressing the most pressing issues facing humanity - like our sources of energy and climate change - all the while teaching students to question, to imagine, to read critically, to explore the interconnections between math and science and music and social studies, to speak their minds, to make a difference.

The good news is that the challenge to the curriculum's pro-coal bias is gaining momentum. Last year, a coalition of education and environmental groups, spearheaded by Rethinking Schools and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, exposed the cozy relationship between the coal industry and Scholastic, the world's largest publisher of materials for children. After publication of an exposé of Scholastic's propagandistic "The United States of Energy" in Rethinking Schools magazine, a campaign to pressure Scholastic to break its ties with the coal industry led to a New York Times editorial, " Scholastic's Big Coal Mistake," and then quickly to Scholastic pulling the curriculum off its website and promising not to shill for the coal industry any longer.

No thanks to the giant curriculum corporations, teachers around the country are beginning to piece together school events and lessons that deal honestly with the climate crisis, and the role of coal in filling the atmosphere with unprecedented amounts of carbon dioxide. As I write, teachers at the public Sunnyside Environmental School, in Portland, Ore., serving students from kindergarten to 8th grade, are holding a weeklong energy teach-in and bringing in experts and educators from around the region to help students think through the consequences of the world's energy choices. Every student in the upper grades is participating in a role play on the Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Climate Change, watching the poignant mountaintop removal film The Last Mountain, and engaging in a "mixer" activity in which they take on the personas of individuals - from Northern Cheyenne activists in Montana to longshore workers in Columbia River ports to riverkeepers in China to ranchers in parched southeast Australia - affected by the current proposals to export coal from the Powder River Basin to Asia. This is not a woe-is-me curriculum of despair. The teach-in concludes with groups of students working on making-a-difference action plans; students are invited to celebrate hope and to imagine themselves as changemakers.

Slowly but surely it seems that teachers are finding the confidence they will need to defy a corporate-dominated curriculum that is bulked up with facts and dates and accomplishments of famous people - but is silent about almost everything that matters.

Those corporate textbooks have made coal seem so old-fashioned, so last-century. Coal is an antique, a relic, and besides, it's dirty, it's ugly, it's far away. But as more and more teachers begin to challenge the corporate curriculum, they will also come to recognize coal's starring role as the worst planetary poison. The sooner the better.

This article is part of the Zinn Education Project's If We Knew Our History series.

Posted on: GOOD | Common Dreams | Huffington Post.

© 2013 The Zinn Education Project, a project of Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

Photo/image credits:

"I Don't Believe in Global Warming" by Banksy, photo by Romany WG.

Fishing near coal plant by Paul Anderson, posted at www.powerpastcoal.org.

Coal train photo by Daniel Dancer, posted at www.powerpastcoal.org.

Judy Bonds portrait by Robert Shetterly - www.americanswhotellthetruth.org.

"Coal Terminal Stacks, ""No Coal Exports" and "Coal Kills" photos by Paul Anderson, posted at www.powerpastcoal.org.

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The Poison We Never Talk About in School

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By Bill Bigelow The most dangerous substance in the world is barely mentioned in the school curriculum. Coal. According to the International Energy Agency, burning coal creates more greenhouse gases than any other source - including oil.

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By Bill Bigelow
The movement to abolish Columbus Day and to establish in its place Indigenous Peoples' Day continues to gather strength, as every month new school districts and colleges take action. This campaign has been given new momentum as Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas assert their treaty and human rights. Especially notable is the inspiring struggle in North Dakota to stop the toxic Dakota Access Pipeline, led by the Standing Rock Sioux.

Dave Archambault, chairperson of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, explains that the oil pipeline "is threatening the lives of people, lives of my tribe, as well as millions down the river. It threatens the ancestral sites that are significant to our tribe. And we never had an opportunity to express our concerns. This is a corporation that is coming forward and just bulldozing through without any concern for tribes."

The "bulldozing" of Indigenous lives, Indigenous lands, and Indigenous rights all began with Columbus's invasion in 1492. Columbus's policies toward Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean were genocidal. On the island that became Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Columbus ordered Taíno people's hands chopped off if they did not deliver sufficient quantities of gold. His men took women and girls as sex slaves. He had Taínos chased down by vicious dogs. He ordered his men to "spread terror" among Taínos who resisted - and they did resist. And he launched the transatlantic slave trade - from the Americas to Europe, as well as from Africa to the Americas. "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold," he wrote.

Through the conventional story of the "discovery of America," the school curriculum has taught students to celebrate colonialism and racism, and to disregard the lives of the Taínos, and other Indigenous peoples. The Columbus-discovers-America story has long been a kind of secular book of Genesis - "In the beginning there was Columbus . . ." - the original Only White Lives Matter myth. And it has played a central role in the curricular erasure of the humanity of Indigenous peoples.

I taught high school social studies for almost 30 years. One of my first activities in my high school U.S. history classes was to steal a student's purse. Yes, I wanted to capture students' attention at the beginning of the school year, but I also wanted them to think about whose lives are valued - and whose aren't - in the traditional curriculum.

I began by loudly calling for everyone to watch carefully, and then I'd snatch a purse off a student's desk. Frankly, purses worked better than backpacks, because they are more personal, and my theft seemed more, well, invasive.

"This is my purse," I would announce to looks of disbelief and annoyance. But annoyance turned to outrage when I opened the purse and started taking things out. (The student who owned this purse, let's call her Maria, knew what was coming, and had agreed to it, but I'd alerted no one else.) "This is my comb. This is my pen. This is my lipstick." And when students protested, I demanded that they prove that the purse was Maria's and not mine. "That's her stuff in there." "We saw you take it." "She knows everything that's in there, and you don't."

"Alright, alright. Then let's say I discovered the purse. That makes it mine, right?"

Students quickly saw where I was going, as we compared my purse-stealing to Columbus's "discovery": The people who were here first - the Taínos - had "stuff" in their land, they had lived there a long time, they knew the land better than Columbus, etc. "So why do some people call it discovery? Why don't we use the same language that you used to describe what I did to Maria's purse? Columbus stole the Taínos' land. He ripped it off. And because he came armed, he invaded it."

At the heart of all our schooling is a narrative about whose lives matter-who counts in the world. Even today, if I stand in front of a class of high school students and start rhyming, "In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-Two . . .," large numbers of students will finish with ". . . Columbus sailed the Ocean blue." But few of them know the name of the people who were here when Columbus arrived - the Taínos. This tells us that too often our schools still teach young people to celebrate Great White Men and disregard the lives of the "discovered" and dominated.

The Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, used the term los nadies, the nobodies. Nobodies can be ignored and ruled, removed and slaughtered, without consequence. They are people who don't matter:

Who don't speak languages, but dialects.
Who don't have religions, but superstitions.
Who don't create art, but handicrafts.
Who don't have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.

"With 50 men we can subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want," Columbus boasted in his journal about the Taínos - los nadies, the nobodies - on just his third day in the Americas.

This disregard for the lives and rights of Indigenous peoples has long been mimicked in the school curriculum, and so often it begins with the Columbus-discovers-America myth. Students readily learn whose lives matter and whose don't. Whose lives are they invited to imagine? Whose stories are featured in history classes and the literature read in the language arts curriculum?

The good news is that this is changing. The Black Lives Matter movement has denounced our society's failure to value all lives equally - challenged the continuous war waged especially on Black men, but on people of color more broadly. And high school students, educators, and communities of color are winning demands for more ethnic studies in the schools - curriculum that interrogates racial inequality and features historic struggles to make society more equal.

And that brings us back to Columbus Day. If we are sincere in our claim that all lives have value, then schools need to refuse to honor the first European colonialist of the Americas, the "father of the slave trade." This is not about what went on 500 years ago. It's about what's going on today: an inspiring struggle for rights and dignity. We need to begin to see Indigenous peoples - in the world and in the curriculum.

This article is part of the Zinn Education Project's If We Knew Our History series.

Posted on: Common Dreams | Alternet.

© 2016 The Zinn Education Project, a project of Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

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Support Indigenous Rights: Abolish Columbus Day - Zinn Education Project

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By Bill Bigelow The movement to abolish Columbus Day and to establish in its place Indigenous Peoples' Day continues to gather strength, as every month new school districts and colleges take action. This campaign has been given new momentum as Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas assert their treaty and human rights.

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The Other '68: Black Power During Reconstruction

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The Other '68: Black Power During Reconstruction

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By Adam Sanchez
From the urban rebellions to the salute at the Olympics, commemorations of 1968 - a pivotal year of Black Power - are popular every year. Yet there is another anniversary of Black Power that merits our attention - 1868 during Reconstruction.

It's not surprising this anniversary has been ignored. Reconstruction is given short shrift in classrooms across the country and history textbooks tend to focus their narrative on the battles between the president and Congress. The year 1868 comes up in textbooks as significant only because of the election of Ulysses S. Grant. This focus on those at the top, misses the groundswell of activity that made the year so explosive.

Lerone Bennett Jr., historian, journalist, and editor at Ebony magazine for decades, wrote about the importance of 1868. His book on Reconstruction, Black Power U.S.A., remains one of the most powerful and engaging texts on the era.

Bennett calls 1868 "The Glory Year":

In the North, in this year, there was wild talk of using troops to forcibly dissolve Congress and arrest its leaders; and in the South thousands on thousands of angry Black people thronged the dusty roads, shouting defiance and demanding a division of the loaves and fishes. This was the year of the 14th Amendment; this was the year men made the Declaration of Independence walk in the streets; this was the year almost all things were made new. . . . During the whole of this pivotal year, the South vibrated with the impassioned sounds of extraordinary assemblages of Blacks, native whites, and Northern newcomers.

It was in 1868, in state after state, when Black men, many of them formerly enslaved, gathered with white men, many of them poor and disempowered until Reconstruction, to rewrite the constitutions of the South.

In the early years following the Civil War, however, far from having the power to reshape the basic law of the land, for many Blacks it seemed as if freedom would not be that different from slavery. After Lincoln's assassination, President Johnson pardoned former slaveowners, returning land to them that had been confiscated and given to freedpeople, and laid out extremely lenient requirements for Southern states to rejoin the union.

Johnson's actions gave a green light to white planters who led violent campaigns to intimidate freedpeople back into submission. Southern states passed new laws known as Black Codes, aimed at imposing slavery by another name. For example, Mississippi demanded that freedpeople carry proof they had entered into a labor contract or they could be imprisoned. The law also forbade African Americans from renting or leasing land. In South Carolina, Blacks unwilling to be farm workers had to get special permission from a court.

But throughout the South, Black people refused to go back. They organized into Union Leagues, defending each other from white attacks and organizing boycotts and strikes to prevent plantation owners from imposing slavery-like conditions. They organized Black political conventions across the South to demand the right to vote, schools, fair wages, and land. They marched, protested, and flooded Congress with petitions and resolutions. Their efforts were successful.

When Congress convened in 1866, they refused to seat the delegates - many of them former Confederates - from Johnson's state governments. Instead they came up with their own Reconstruction plan requiring states to hold new conventions to rewrite state constitutions and adopt the 14th Amendment declaring Black people citizens whose rights could not be violated by laws like the Black Codes.

By the time the new voter registration process was completed, Blacks were a majority of the registered voters in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Georgia. In South Carolina, there were nearly two Blacks registered for every white person. In every other Southern state, they held sizable and influential minorities.

Starting in Alabama in November of 1867 and ending with Texas that opened its convention in June of 1868, multiracial assemblies met in Southern state capitol buildings - most built by the labor of the enslaved - to radically alter the political and economic landscape.

As Bennett points out,

Here were no middle-class lawyers and businessmen speaking for the people. Here, for the first and last time in America, was an assemblage of people, many of them poor, speaking for themselves. . . . Although experienced men, some of them lawyers and former legislators, moved to the fore in many places, there was, in every state convention, an articulate core of common people who spoke with uncommon authority, not because they had conferred with the people, but because they were the people.

In the name of the people these delegates fought to make Southern constitutions reflect social and economic justice. The Mississippi state convention passed a tax for the relief of needy freedmen and a resolution that would have returned property taken from freedmen if it hadn't been vetoed by the general controlling the state. In Alabama, a resolution passed that allowed freedmen to collect $10 a month in back pay from former masters for any work completed after January 1, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect.

In South Carolina, the only state where Blacks made up a majority of the delegates, the convention passed a resolution asking Congress to lend the state $1 million to buy land for poor whites and Blacks. When Congress rejected the proposal, the first South Carolina legislature under the new constitution passed a homestead law to aid poor farmers and shifted the tax burden to large plantation owners.

At a time when even most Northern states restricted the franchise to white men, every convention extended suffrage to Black men and a few delegates, like W. J. Whipper in South Carolina and Thomas Bayne in Virginia, pushed to extend the franchise to women as well. Several conventions expanded women's property rights and in South Carolina legalized divorce.

Also unlike the Northern constitutions, the South's new laws protected Black civil rights. Blacks could now hold office, serve on juries, and several constitutions explicitly banned the kind of discrimination that would later characterize the Jim Crow South.

The Reconstruction conventions provided for the first tax-supported public schools throughout the South. A few states even mandated integration. Louisiana's constitution, for example, provided for free public education for "all children between 6 and 21 years of age" and emphasized that "there shall be no separate schools or institutions of learning established exclusively for any race."

Yet none of these accomplishments is highlighted in today's corporate textbooks. Glencoe's American Journey, offers one line summing up these revolutionary conventions: "By 1868, seven Southern states - Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina - had established new governments and met the requirements for readmission." Even this is more than most textbooks allot. The texts that I've reviewed mention African Americans as beneficiaries of Congress' benevolent policies, not as actors in securing their own liberation.

The history of this transformative year is worth resurrecting. Like in 1968, the achievements of the Black freedom struggle, inspired others to fight against their own oppression. 1868 was also the year that organizing pressured Congress to enact an eight-hour work day for federal employees. William Sylvis, who argued that Black and women workers should be welcomed into the white male labor movement, was elected president of the National Labor Union - the first national labor federation. Augusta Lewis formed the first female union, the Women's Typographical Union in New York City, and made common cause with suffragists. Women's rights advocates and abolitionists still worked together for universal suffrage in the American Equal Rights Association.

The explosion of grassroots activism during 1868 offers teachers the opportunity to bring this democratic ferment into our classrooms. In a mixer lesson I wrote with the Zinn Education Project's Nqobile Mthethwa, students take on the roles of Sylvis, Lewis, and others who fought for women's and workers' rights, as well as P. B. S. Pinchback, W. J. Whipper, and other key players in the 1868 conventions. As students "meet" these individuals, they learn about the revolutionary possibility of solidarity. They also learn how racism, sexism, and classism can divide movements with devastating consequences. The dissolution of these alliances helped pave the path for Reconstruction's end.

Yet in 1868, what had seemed impossible only a decade before - four million enslaved people wielding political power in the South - became a reality. Black Southerners led a political revolution that for a short time advanced the interests of all poor and working-class people. The implications of this achievement are hard to grasp. In today's deeply unequal society the typical U.S. Congress member - a majority of whom are millionaires - is at least 12 times richer than the ordinary U.S. citizen. How might society change if teachers, nurses, waiters, transportation and construction workers, and other working-class people rewrote the laws of the land? Recalling a time when the empowerment of the most oppressed in our society paved the way for other social struggles also gives weight to today's slogan that all lives will matter only when Black lives matter.

1868 is a year we should remember and learn from.
This article is part of the Zinn Education Project's If We Knew Our History series.
© 2018 The Zinn Education Project, a project of Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change. Updated in 2022.

Posted at: Common Dreams

Image Credits

"The shackle broken - by the genius of freedom"; modified * Library of Congress

Collage: Frances Harper, Library of Congress * Isaac Myers, Wikipedia * William Sylvis, artist unknown/The Glory and Despair of Challenge and Change by The International Molders and Allied Workers Union (1976) * Augusta Lewis, Wikipedia

This article is also available at Newsela. It was adapted for several additional reading levels by Newsela staff in December 2018.

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The Other '68: Black Power During Reconstruction - Zinn Education Project

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By Adam Sanchez From the urban rebellions to the salute at the Olympics, commemorations of 1968 - a pivotal year of Black Power - are popular every year. Yet there is another anniversary of Black Power that merits our attention - 1868 during Reconstruction.

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By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
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.

To review: A voter in Montana gets 31 times the electoral bang for their presidential vote than a voter in New York. A voter in Wyoming has 70 times the representation in the Senate as a voter in California, while citizens in Puerto Rico or Washington D.C. have none. The Republican Senate majority that recently confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, was elected by 14 million fewer votes than the 47 senators who voted against her confirmation.

Yet politicians and pundits regularly pronounce the United States a "democracy," as if that designation is self-evident and incontrovertible. Textbooks and mainstream civics curricula make the same mistake, treating democracy as a fact rather than an enduring struggle - in which our students can play a critical role.

The standard iteration of "civics" in schools stipulates the brilliance of the framers, the democratic nature of the U.S. system, the infallibility of the Constitution (it was built to be amended!), so that our institutions seem outside of history and beyond politics. As the Koch Brothers-funded Bill of Rights (BRI) Institute states,

The founding documents are the true primary sources of America. Writings such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and others written from 1764 to 1791, showcase the philosophical, traditional, and political foundations on which our nation was built and that continue to shape our free society.

"Our free society." One danger of a curriculum that declares the United States "free" is that it casts all U.S. institutions, by definition, as also free. The district-adopted textbook I was assigned last year in my Portland, Oregon, suburb, America Through the Lens (National Geographic, 2019), says about the 2016 presidential election, "...Trump won a narrow majority of voters in a number of swing states, or states where the election might go to either party. Even though almost 3 million more Americans cast their votes for Clinton, Trump won the electoral vote 306 to 232." Since freedom is assumed, this textbook sees no need to offer any elaboration of a system in which "swing states" are decisive, and in which the person selected by the majority of voters does not win the presidency.

Perhaps the editors of America Through the Lens assume students have read a previous section of the text on the Electoral College? No. Paging back to the chapter on the Constitution, one finds only this anemic paragraph:

But how should the president be chosen? Some delegates thought the president should be directly elected by the voters. Others wanted Congress or the state legislatures to make the choice. The delegates finally arrived at a solution: an electoral college made up of electors from each state would cast official votes for the president and vice president. The number of electors from each state would be the same as the state's number of representatives in Congress, and each state could decide how to choose its electors.

Students deserve an explanation for the origins of the Electoral College. Instead, the textbook offers mere description, dry as dust. We learn that the Electoral College emerged from a disagreement among delegates, but nothing about the actual substance of that disagreement or the interests at stake. Shouldn't the authors explain to students why our founders rejected direct election of the president by the people, the most democratic option? With no sense of the problem, textbook writers assure students that the Electoral College was a "solution" and send them on their merry way.

But for whom was the Electoral College a solution? Many of the 55 White men at the Constitutional Convention worried about giving too much power to the people. Alexander Hamilton said the masses were prone to passion and might use their vote unwisely. Of course, both passion and wisdom are highly subjective terms. James Madison listed the "wicked schemes" inflaming the people to act so unwisely: "A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property. . ." Madison called voters advancing their own economic interests wicked, but referred to his brethren - insulating their own wealth and power in Philadelphia - as "enlightened statesmen." The Electoral College was a "solution" to the bankers and plantation owners in 1787 but looked like exclusion if you were a poor indebted veteran in western Massachusetts, an enslaved person in Virginia, or a Hitchiti person fleeing land-thieving White settlers in Georgia.

Madison expressed another set of concerns about the direct election of the president. He pointed out that a popular vote would deprive the White South of "influence in the election on the score of the Negroes." He was, of course, referring to the 40 percent of the southern U.S. population made up of enslaved people. Since the men at the Constitutional Convention had already adopted the Three-Fifths Compromise, establishing that enslaved people would bolster enslavers' representation in Congress, the Electoral College was a "solution" because it meant the humans they violently exploited would inflate their influence in presidential elections too.

When my textbook matter-of-factly declares that the Electoral College was a "solution," but makes no mention of the elite and white supremacist interests for whom that was true, nor the exploited and disenfranchised peoples for whom it was a disaster, it does not educate students, but lies to them. The very same textbooks that paint the Three-Fifths Compromise as a shameful relic of slavery, treat the Electoral College as an unremarkable feature of our system, as if they were not borne of the same white supremacist original sin.

This feigned neutrality covers up the classist and racist origins of our institutions. It is not only bad history but signals to students in 2020, "Nothing to see here." The mock elections and legislative simulations common in U.S. civics classrooms encourage students to investigate the swirl of issues inside the container of U.S. "democracy," but rarely the container itself. Students are commanded to vote, but not to judge the fundamental questions of governance not on the ballot - like the legitimacy of an electoral college devised by enslavers. What if our civics invited students not just to become occupants of an already-built U.S. government, but engineers and architects able to redesign, reframe, and rebuild the whole structure? What if our civics repurposed the word "framer" to mean all of us today - including our students?

One way to cultivate this activist sensibility in our students is to offer them a curriculum rich with an alternative pantheon of "framers" and "founding parents" in the ongoing struggle for democracy. Central to this project is the rejection of the singular, miraculous, and exceptional founding peddled by the Bill of Rights Institute and others. As Eric Foner's newest book, The Second Founding - about the Reconstruction Amendments that finally made multiracial democracy possible - suggests, building freedom is a work in progress.

Similarly, many scholars and activists, notably the Rev. William Barber II, have embraced the idea of a multiplicity of Reconstructions: the first Reconstruction, following the Civil War in which freedpeople and their allies reimagined citizenship, social relationships, and politics; the second Reconstruction in the 20th century, when Black activists and their allies dismantled 100 years of Jim Crow, championed and popularized "one person, one vote," and transformed U.S. law and society; and the third Reconstruction, happening now, exemplified by Black Lives Matter, the Dream Defenders, United We Dream, and others to address the ongoing manifestations of systemic racism in everything from housing to immigration, policing to education. In this telling, the United States has been constructed by many framers, not just those White elites in Philadelphia, but also the millions of unsung heroes who have never stopped seeking to transform the United States and the meaning of freedom.

Angela Davis writes that "freedom is a constant struggle." When, for example, we teach students about the fight for the 15th Amendment, alongside the movement 100 years later for the Voting Rights Act, alongside the efforts now to combat voter suppression, we not only provide evidence of Davis's words, but invite students into that struggle. By rejecting both the textbook's boring and evasive approach to our anti-democratic institutions, and BRI's glorification of a U.S. founding that meant - and continues to mean - oppression for so many, we affirm our students' reality and provide models of activism through which they might reimagine and revise it.

On November 2, 2020, one day before the general election that would deny him a second term, Donald J. Trump issued an executive order establishing the 1776 Commission. The commission's mandate? A "restoration of American education" to emphasize the "clear historical record of an exceptional Nation dedicated to the ideas and ideals of its founding." President Trump has been defeated, but this commitment to institutionalize the teaching of American exceptionalism has not. We educators must fight for a curriculum that teaches our students facts not fables. The United States has never been a democracy, defined by freedom and equality for all. But nor has there ever been a time when people did not struggle toward a democratic future, dreaming of freedom, risking life and limb to make those dreams manifest, and creating a more just society along the way. Let's teach civics and history that affirms for our students there is nothing sacrosanct in the political and economic status quo, that freedom fighters, past and present, are founders too, and we all have a right to be framers - to redesign this structurally unsound house to better shelter our lives, safety, comfort, and full humanity.
A shorter version of this article, TEACHER VOICE: The United States is not a democracy. Stop telling students that it is, was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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The United States Is Not a Democracy. Stop Telling Students That It Is. - Zinn Education Project

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By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca When our students only learn about this exceptionally strange system, the electoral college, 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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The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated the United States

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The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated the United States

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Racial segregation characterizes every metropolitan area in the United States and bears responsibility for our most serious social and economic problems - it corrupts our criminal justice system, exacerbates economic inequality, and produces large academic gaps between white and African American schoolchildren. We've taken no serious steps to desegregate neighborhoods, however, because we are hobbled by a national myth that residential segregation is de facto - the result of private discrimination or personal choices that do not violate constitutional rights. In truth, however, residential segregation was created by racially explicit and unconstitutional government policy in the mid-20th century, including the racially explicit federal subsidization of whites-only suburbs in which African Americans were prohibited from participating. Only after learning the history of these policies can we be prepared to undertake the national conversations necessary to remedy our unconstitutional racial landscape.

Such a national conversation is now possible. Without minimizing the terrible dangers of today's resurgent white supremacist activity, we also should take hope from the reaction to it: a widespread willingness to confront, in many cases for the first time, the history of African American subjugation. Our previous failure, even refusal to do so, has impeded our ability to eliminate the racial caste conditions that permeate U.S. society.

Not to be underestimated is the wave of Confederate monument removals across the South, and the acknowledgement that these monuments were erected not after the Civil War to commemorate the misguided heroism of Confederate soldiers, but rather during the Jim Crow and post- Brown v. Board of Education eras, for the purpose of celebrating slavery and its residues in second-class citizenship. Who could have imagined, even a few years ago, that a white elected politician in the South, presiding over the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, would proclaim that Confederate monuments celebrated a system "where hundreds of thousands of souls were bought, sold, and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor of misery, of rape, of torture."

Speaking to his fellow citizens in New Orleans of how we mis-celebrate our history, Mayor Mitch Landrieu continued:

America was the place where nearly 4,000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined "separate but equal"; where Freedom Riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp. So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well, what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth.

And it immediately begs the questions, why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame. . . all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans. So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission. There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

Recognition of historic wrongs is an essential predicate of the resolve to correct them. As another Southern white politician, Joseph Riley Jr., mayor of Charleston, South Carolina from 1975 to 2016, recently put it, only after we "acknowledge the burden so many were forced to bear, and set the table for a deeper inquiry into the past we all share, [can] we begin to heal the wounds of racial injustice, bridge the gulf that divides us still and come together at last around a common understanding of who we truly are as American people."

My recent book, The Color of Law, has become relevant only because of this new willingness to confront the reality of our racial history - as a first step toward remedy. It tells a "forgotten history of how our government segregated America," resulting in the concentration of African Americans in segregated neighborhoods in every metropolitan area of the nation, not only in the South, but in the North, Midwest, and West as well. The book explains that the Constitution requires knowledge of this history before we can enact policies to integrate our communities.

That's because the Supreme Court has made a distinction between de facto and de jure segregation. De facto segregation is racial concentrations that result from private prejudice, discriminatory practices of rogue real estate agents, personal choices to live with same-race neighbors, or income differences that have kept low-income families from moving to middle-class communities. De jure segregation, in contrast, results not from private activity but from government law and policy that violated the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth amendments to the federal constitution.

The Supreme Court has said that if segregation is de facto, there is little we can do to correct it. What happened by accident can only be undone by accident. But if segregation has been created de jure, by government's explicit racial policies, not only are we permitted to remedy it, we are required to do so.

We share a national myth that residential segregation is de facto. It is a myth embraced not only by conservatives, but by liberals as well. It is perpetuated by our standard high school history curriculum, in which commonly used textbooks routinely describe segregation in the North as de facto, mysteriously evolved without government direction. Yet, as The Color of Law recounts, the myth is false. Federal, state, and local governments deliberately segregated residential areas of every metropolitan area of the nation, designed to ensure that African Americans and whites would have to live separately.

For example, the federal government purposefully placed public housing in high-poverty, racially isolated neighborhoods to concentrate the black population. And it created a whites-only mortgage insurance program to shift the white population from urban neighborhoods to exclusively white suburbs. The Internal Revenue Service granted tax exemptions for charitable activity to organizations that openly enforced neighborhood racial homogeneity. Government-licensed realtors, with the open support of state regulators, enforced a "code of ethics" that prohibited the sale of homes to African Americans in white neighborhoods. In thousands of cases, police forces organized and supported mob violence to drive black families out of homes on the white side of racial boundaries. Federal and state regulators sanctioned the refusal of the banking, thrift, and insurance industries to make loans to homeowners in other-race communities.

By the time the federal government reversed its policy of subsidizing segregation in 1962, and by the time the Fair Housing Act banned private discrimination in 1968, the residential patterns of major metropolitan areas were set. White suburbs that had been affordable to the black working class in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s were now no longer so, both because of the increase in housing prices (and whites' home equity) during that period, and because other federal policies had depressed black incomes while supporting those of whites. At the beginning of the New Deal the National Recovery Act established industrial wages at lower levels for industries where black workers predominated; later, Social Security and Fair Labor Standards legislation excluded from coverage occupations in which African Americans predominated, for example, agriculture and domestic service. It was not until 1964 that the National Labor Relations Board for the first time refused to certify a union's exclusive bargaining status because it openly refused to represent black workers.

I've summarized some of these policies on Terry Gross's radio program, Fresh Air. But my articles and The Color of Law are not the only sources for correcting the de facto myth. Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example, in "The Case for Reparations" and other articles in The Atlantic, also tells part of this story. Several scholars have done the same.

We promote the myth of de facto segregation by mis-teaching our young people about our past. When I was researching The Color of Law, I examined high school history textbooks that were commonly in use during the early years of this decade, and was shocked by their mendacity in describing racial history. For example, in the more than 1,200 pages of the widely used high school textbook The Americans, a single paragraph was devoted to 20th-century "Discrimination in the North." That paragraph included one sentence on residential segregation, stating that "African Americans found themselves forced into segregated neighborhoods," with no further explanation of how this happened or how public policy was responsible.

Another widely used high school textbook, Pearson's United States History, also attributed segregation to mysterious forces: "In the North, too, African Americans faced segregation and discrimination. Even where there were no explicit laws, de facto segregation, or segregation by unwritten custom or tradition, was a fact of life. African Americans in the North were denied housing in many neighborhoods." The passive voice construction - "were denied" - is not just bad writing, it hides who exactly denied housing to African Americans.

The popular high school textbook History Alive! also teaches a distorted view by suggesting that segregation was only a problem in the South. "Even New Deal agencies," it says, "practiced racial segregation, especially in the South," failing to explain that the New Deal's Public Works Administration initiated the nationwide civilian public housing program by demolishing integrated neighborhoods even in the North to build segregated projects in their place, or that the New Deal's Federal Housing Administration denied loan guarantees to developers of suburbs wherever the danger of "infiltration" of "incompatible racial groups" was present.

Such indoctrination of today's high school students minimizes the possibility of progress toward equality when these students become our country's leaders. As New Orleans' Mayor Landrieu put it, referring to the South's glorification of Confederate leaders, "We justify our silence and inaction by manufacturing noble causes that marinate in historical denial." This is equally true of the de facto myth we have manufactured about how our nation became segregated. The next generation will do no better a job than our generation has done of progressing toward a better future, unless we teach our young people a less-sanitized version of the past.

This article is part of the Zinn Education Project's If We Knew Our History series.

Published on: Huffington Post.

© 2017 The Zinn Education Project, a project of Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

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The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated the United States - Zinn Education Project

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By Richard Rothstein Racial segregation characterizes every metropolitan area in the United States and bears responsibility for our most serious social and economic problems - it corrupts our criminal justice system, exacerbates economic inequality, and produces large academic gaps between white and African American schoolchildren.

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By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

My 11th-grade U.S. history students and I were coming to the end of our unit on the Cold War in 2016 when news broke of Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election. As we discussed news articles about the reported foreign interference, my students were incredulous: “Why is the media making such a big deal about this? What the Russians are being accused of is nothing compared to what the U.S. did in Cuba!” Sarah added, “I mean I know it’s bad to have the Russians hacking us, but it’s not like anyone died. In Congo, the leader was killed.”

In the days following the original revelations of Russian hacking, some journalists sought to remind readers of the United States’ own sordid past of foreign meddling. CNN, for example, ran a piece by Chilean author Ariel Dorfman about the U.S. role in overthrowing the democratically elected Chilean leader Salvador Allende in 1973. Dorfman’s readers could be forgiven if they did not recognize Allende’s name. They might never have heard of these either: Patrice Lumumba, Mohammad Mossadegh, Jacobo Arbenz. In many U.S. history textbooks, these leaders, all of whom were overthrown with the help (and sometimes at the direction) of the U.S. government, are mentioned only in passing, if at all.

Too often, when it comes to U.S. Cold War interventions, the official curriculum is sanitized and disjointed, leaving students ill-equipped to make sense out of their nation’s global bullying. Important events are just not there. Today, Congo and Afghanistan are among the most unstable places in the world. But how did they get that way? The Cold War history of these nations is nowhere to be found in our textbooks. What students do learn about U.S. interventionism is vague and incomplete, obscuring economic motivations behind anti-communism, and the significant harm caused by U.S. policies. And because Cold War content is spread over so many chapters, U.S. global intervention seems haphazard rather than methodical. Glimpsing one thread here and another thread there, textbooks do not invite students to see the whole tapestry of U.S. Cold War action, which systematically undermined democratic, often anti-colonial, movements around the world. (Textbooks also omit the Cold War anti-communism fearmongering used against U.S. labor and civil rights movements.)

Patrice Lumumba (center), at the 1960 round table conference in Brussels to discuss Congo’s independence. Source: Wikicommons.

Pearson’s American Journey, the adopted textbook for my 11th-grade students, has a stand-alone chapter, “The Cold War at Home and Abroad: 1946–1952.” Since the authors of American Journey insist on maintaining a chronological approach, this chapter does not include Cold War policies of the later 1950s or the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. If you want to learn about Cuba, Vietnam, or Nicaragua, you will need to dig through other chapters, which follow the stale and triumphalist march of presidencies. And if you want to understand what motivated the overthrow and assassination of Allende in Chile, or Lumumba in Congo, you are out of luck. The textbook entirely leaves out the nefarious meddling of the United States in these places.

America: A Concise History, the college-level text adopted for the AP U.S. History courses at my school, shares some of the same limitations as American Journey. Though its Cold War chapter extends all the way to 1960, somewhat accurately describes U.S. support for dictators (“U.S. policymakers tended to support stable governments, no matter how repressive, as long as they were overtly anti-communist.”), and at least mentions CIA-directed coups in Guatemala and Iran, there is no reference to the coup in Chile or other Latin American interventions of the 1970s and ’80s. When one looks for El Salvador in the index, that country is mentioned exactly once, in the final chapter, and there is no mention about U.S. military or political interference there: “Although Mexico continued to provide the largest group of Spanish-speaking immigrants, large numbers also arrived from El Salvador and the Dominican Republic.” The textbook offers no explanation for why large flows of Salvadorans might flee their country and what role a destabilizing U.S. imperialism had in creating that crisis. This omission is especially egregious today, as Trump strips Temporary Protected Status from Salvadorans and immigrants from other countries.

Even when these textbooks do include important events, readers come away less than enlightened. Take this paragraph, which appears under the heading “Containment in Action” in American Journey:

Twice during Eisenhower’s first term, the CIA subverted democratically elected governments that seemed to threaten U.S. interests. In Iran, which had nationalized British and U.S. oil companies in an effort to break the hold of Western corporations, the CIA in 1953 backed a coup that toppled the government and helped the young Shah, or monarch, gain control. The Shah then cooperated with the United States until his overthrow in 1979. In Guatemala, the leftist government was upsetting the United Fruit Company. When Guatemalans accepted weapons from the Communist bloc in 1954, the CIA imposed a regime friendly to U.S. business.

Although American Journey rises above some of its competition for including U.S. actions in Iran and Guatemala, one cannot ignore its ambiguous language. Why do the authors define Shah but not nationalized? Surely these two words would be equally unfamiliar to most U.S. adolescents. Without understanding the economic impact on foreign business interests when governments take control of key industries or land holdings, it is hard for students to see clearly what motivated these coups.

Princess Liliʻuokalani in 1887. She was queen of Hawai’i, 1891-1893, and was overthrown by U.S. forces. Source: Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

The verbs used in American Journey’s account are so vague as to put one to sleep, obscuring the drama and insidiousness of the actual events. American Journey says the CIA “backed” a coup in Iran; in reality that “backing” involved Kermit Roosevelt, CIA agent and grandson of Theodore, arriving in Tehran with suitcases full of cash to manufacture an opposition movement by hiring people to protest, bribing newspaper editors to print misinformation (real fake news), and creating a sham communist party to act as a straw man. American Journey says the Shah “cooperated” with the United States; it leaves out that such “cooperation” was defined by Iran’s purchase of billions of dollars of weapons from the United States as well as the CIA’s training of Savak, the Shah’s secret police force infamous for its human rights violations. American Journey says the Guatemalan government was “upsetting” the United Fruit Company; it fails to explain that United Fruit controlled 42 percent of Guatemalan land and that Jacobo Arbenz’s policies of nationalization threatened its profits. The authors seem unconcerned with asking students to think about why a private business might be directing U.S. foreign policy in the first place.

Instead of relying on the textbooks, students in my class investigate a single site of U.S. aggression, sharing what they have learned with each other to collaboratively write an essay comparing U.S. interventions in Cuba, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Congo, Nicaragua, Chile, and Iran. In this way, students surface the basic features of U.S. Cold War policy and reckon with the vast reach of U.S. state power. Students do not mistake any single example of anti-democratic wrongdoing by the United States as anomalous when the patterns are so stark.

The dominant periodization of U.S. history — in most textbooks and curricula — would have us learn something called “Westward Expansion,” separately from “U.S. Imperialism,” separately from “The Cold War.” In reality, these are better understood as a continuum. The political, economic, racial, and religious rationales used to justify the theft of Native land on this continent were the very same trotted out in 1893 and 1898 to steal the faraway lands of Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. The same insatiable greed for resources that led U.S. sugar barons to overthrow Queen Lili‘uokalani also fueled United Fruit’s seizure of land across Central America and its collaboration with the CIA to install business-friendly regimes there. U.S. imperialism cannot be neatly periodized; it is not an era to be bounded by the pages of a chapter. As long as the drive for profits remains paramount to U.S. foreign policy, imperialism will be central to the very existence of the United States.

Billboard promoting the Guatemalan agrarian reform movement, circa 1950s. Photo by Cornell Capa • LIFE Magazine

And by failing to teach the Cold War as imperialism, we also miss an opportunity to highlight the resistance that was at its heart: Many of the movements the United States deemed “communist” — and therefore eligible for elimination — were anti-colonial efforts to take back land, resources, and power from ruling elites. Students should learn about Arbenz’s land reform program as a popular attempt to redraw lines of wealth and landownership in Guatemala. When textbooks reduce this threat to “communist subversion,” they downplay the power and promise held out to people all across the globe by the Guatemalan example. If we want our students to imagine a world where resources are not hoarded by a few, to the detriment of the many, we have to show them people who resisted that inequality, found ways to confront and restructure it, and indeed, were so successful as to invite the wrath of the most powerful government and military in the world.

Each day I am confronted with new headlines to unpack with my students:

U.S. Drone Strike Kills Powerful Iranian Commander;
Military quietly prepares for a last resort: war with North Korea;
Up to 1,000 more U.S. troops could be headed to Afghanistan

The perpetual interventionism and global hegemony exercised by the U.S. government today — evidenced in those unsettling headlines — urgently need to be questioned and dismantled. Such a monumental task requires a citizenry armed with clear-eyed understandings of its past. That cannot be accomplished when the Cold War is sanitized and downsized, confined to one chapter of a textbook, and divorced from the larger narrative of U.S. imperialism, then and now.

This article is part of the Zinn Education Project’s If We Knew Our History series.

A longer version of this article, “It’s Imperialism: How the textbooks get the Cold War wrong” was originally published in the Winter 2017 issue of Rethinking Schools. That version includes more details on the lesson.

Published at: Common Dreams.

© 2020 The Zinn Education Project, a project of Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

Ursula Wolfe-Rocca has taught high school social studies since 2000. She is on the editorial board of Rethinking Schools and is a Zinn Education Project Writer and Organizer.

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Disguising Imperialism: How Textbooks Get the Cold War Wrong and Dupe Students - Zinn Education Project

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By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca The perpetual interventionism and global hegemony exercised by the U.S. government today urgently need to be questioned and dismantled. Such a monumental task requires a citizenry armed with clear-eyed understandings of its past. That cannot be accomplished when the Cold War is…

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A New York Times article, following the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the murder of anti-racist activist Heather Heyer, described the growing calls to remove monuments that celebrate the Confederacy. The article went on to cite some who balk, however, when "the symbolism is far murkier, like Christopher Columbus."

But there is nothing murky about Columbus' legacy of slavery and terrorism in the Americas. The record is clear and overwhelming. The fact that The New York Times could report this with such confidence - adding that "most Americans learn rather innocently, in 1492 [Columbus] sailed the ocean blue until he discovered the New World" - means that educators and activists still have much work to do.

In fact, Christopher Columbus launched the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1494, when he sent back at least two dozen enslaved Taínos, including children, to Spain. In February of that year, Columbus dispatched 12 of his 17 ships from the Caribbean back to Spain with a letter to be delivered to the king and queen by Antonio de Torres, captain of the returning fleet. Columbus wrote:

There are being sent in these ships some Cannibals, men and women, boys and girls, which Your Highnesses can order placed in charge of persons from whom they may be able better to learn the language while being employed in forms of service, gradually ordering that greater care be given them than to other slaves.

Here, as in so much of world history, violence and exploitation is sprinkled with a perfume of benevolence. Later in the letter, Columbus explains to the king and queen that his plans for colonizing the lands he has "discovered" could be financed by slavery:

These things could be paid for in slaves taken from among these cannibals, who are so wild and well built and with a good understanding of things that we think they will be finer than any other slaves once they are freed from their inhumanity, which they will lose as soon as they leave their own lands.

A year later, in February 1495, Columbus initiated massive slave raids, ordering his men to round up 1,600 Taínos and to bring the captives to La Isabela, on the island of Hispaniola (today's Haiti and the Dominican Republic), where the "best" 500 (some accounts say 550) men and women could be shipped to Spain. One of the colonists, Michele de Cuneo, was an eyewitness to these crimes. "Of the rest who were left," wrote Cuneo, "the announcement went around that whoever wanted them could take as many as he pleased; and this was done."

It's worth pausing to reflect on the terror the Taínos must have experienced being torn from home and families, and packed on ships bound for an uncertain destination - that is, those who survived Columbus' slavery free-for-all. Where are the monuments to these first victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade?

Gold. That was the essence of Columbus' "enterprise" - la empresa - as he called it. Wrote Columbus: "Gold is a wonderful thing! Whoever owns it is lord of all he wants. With gold it is even possible to open for souls the way to paradise." Later in 1495, to effect this gold lust, Columbus initiated the policy of forcing Taínos throughout Hispaniola to deliver tributes of gold every three months.

The Taínos resisted, of course, but were brutally suppressed by the Columbus regime. The Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas wrote that to quell the resistance, Columbus ordered his men to "spread terror among the Indians to show them how strong and powerful the Christians were." In sickening detail, Las Casas described some of what it meant for the Spaniards to "spread terror" among the Taínos:

Once the Indians were in the woods, the next step was to form squadrons and pursue them, and whenever the Spaniards found them, they pitilessly slaughtered everyone like sheep in a corral. It was a general rule among Spaniards to be cruel; not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians as daring to think of themselves as human beings or having a minute to think at all. So they would cut an Indian's hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin and they would send him on saying, "Go now, spread the news to your chiefs." They would test their swords and their manly strength on captured Indians and place bets on the slicing off of heads or the cutting of bodies in half with one blow. They burned or hanged captured chiefs.

No, there is nothing murky about Columbus' record of cruelty in the Caribbean. One can read the horrific details even in the biography of Columbus written by his own son Ferdinand. What's murky are any remaining rationales for failing to topple monuments to this brutal exploitation of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, for keeping the Columbus Day holiday, or for failing to address a curriculum that, as The New York Times describes, allows children to learn that Columbus "sailed the ocean blue until he discovered the New World."

Twenty-five years ago, I wrote an article, "Once Upon a Genocide," reviewing the major children's literature about Columbus. My conclusion was that these books teach young readers that colonialism and racism are normal. Consistently, the books presented Columbus coming ashore on the lands he "discovered," planting a flag, claiming it in the name of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and naming the island San Salvador - erasing the rights and humanity of the original inhabitants. No book I reviewed at that time asked children to reflect on who or what gave Columbus the authority to take over other people's land. These picture books were literary monuments to white European domination, and to the subordination of non-white Others.

Through my work as curriculum editor with Rethinking Schools magazine, I have been in a number of elementary and middle schools over the past couple of years. Sadly, many of the same books I reviewed in the early 1990s still populate school libraries. The good news is that, these days, many more teachers approach the Columbus invasion from the standpoint of the Taínos. One needn't tell young children about people's hands being chopped off for them to realize that it is wrong for people to arrive at your home from far away, claim it as theirs, and demand you work for them.

In classrooms throughout the country, students are putting Columbus on trial - along with the system of empire that animated his voyages. Instead of reading children's books and textbooks uncritically, teachers are asking students to read for the silences: What important information is missing, whose stories are not being told, whose lives are absent? In some schools, students are writing new children's books that tell a fuller, more accurate history of Columbus' arrival and the people who were here first. (Many of these activities are described at the Zinn Education Project, and in the book I co-edited, Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years.)

And throughout the country, schools, school districts, and cities - including Berkeley, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Albuquerque, and, most recently, Los Angeles - have abandoned Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples Day.

Donald Trump may still - for the moment - be president, but he is not president of how we remember the past. Everywhere people of conscience are challenging the iconography of hate, exploitation, racism, and colonial domination. Slowly, we are toppling Confederate monuments - and others celebrating more contemporary scoundrels like Philadelphia's Frank Rizzo.

When I lead workshops for educators critiquing how the traditional children's literature on Columbus celebrates white lives at the expense of people of color, how this literature endorses the bullying of little nations by big nations, how it teaches that there are two kinds of people in the world, the worthy and the unworthy, I end by asking participants: Why? Why is it that for such a long period of time these books have told a consistent story - is there some publisher conspiracy to lie to children?

No doubt there are many possible explanations. But the one I find most compelling is that in fundamental ways, Columbus' world is not so different from the world we live in today. Big countries continue to dominate "lesser" nations. The quest for profit is still paramount. The world is still sliced in two between the worthy - the owning classes, the corporate masters, the generals - and those the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano called los nadies - the nobodies. The invaded, the owned, the bombed, the poisoned, the silenced.

So yes, let's pull down the monuments, let's make the holidays more inclusive, let's rewrite the textbooks and children's literature. But let's also challenge the fundamental structures of ownership, power, and privilege that have given us such a skewed constellation of heroes and holidays.

This article is part of the Zinn Education Project's If We Knew Our History series.

Published on: Huffington Post | Common Dreams | AlterNet.

© 2017 The Zinn Education Project, a project of Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

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Christopher Columbus: No Monuments for Murderers - Zinn Education Project

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By Bill Bigelow A New York Times article, following the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the murder of anti-racist activist Heather Heyer, described the growing calls to remove monuments that celebrate the Confederacy. The article went on to cite some who balk, however, when "the symbolism is far murkier, like Christopher Columbus."

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By Bill McKibben and Bill Bigelow Maybe you’ve heard. We are facing a climate crisis that threatens life on our planet. Climate scientists are unequivocal: we are changing the world in deep, measurable, dangerous ways — and the pace of this change will accelerate dramatically in the decades to come. Then again, if you’ve been a middle school or high school student recently, you may not know this. That’s because the gap between our climate emergency and the attention paid to climate change in the school curriculum is immense. Individual teachers around the country are doing outstanding work, but the educational establishment is not.

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Doing ok, I got bit my one of my kids at work today😭

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Skibidi

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stressed

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looking forward to so much

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pretty good! Anxiously waiting for an exam grade...

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Stressed because I have 2 concerts this week

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LOTR, Punch Drunk Love, The Purple Rose of Cairo

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Shutter island

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Just Kids by Patti Smith and Kitchen Confidential By Anthony Bourdain for non fiction

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Shutter island

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this bright future

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Lord of the Rings—specifically Return of the King

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Bad Man by Dathan Auerbach

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The Minecraft Movie

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500 days of summer

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The Child Finder ! Such a hard read but an amazing book !

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River of time (series)—SOOOOOO good (it’s set in medieval Italy and focuses on these two sisters who travel back there and end up marrying these two soldiers…so good!!)

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Goodfellas

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a little burnt out