Articles by Bill Bigelow

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Five Years After: Long Live Howard Zinn
Bill Bigelow – Common Dreams, 2 Feb 2015

Today—Jan. 27, 2015—marks five years since the death of the great historian and activist Howard Zinn, best known, of course, for his beloved ‘A People’s History of the United States,’ arguably the most influential U.S. history textbook in print. Immediately following Zinn’s death, the writer and activist Naomi Klein said, “We just lost our favorite teacher.”

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Indiana’s Anti-Howard Zinn Witch-Hunt
Bill Bigelow – TRANSCEND Media Service, 22 Jul 2013

Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, one of the country’s most widely read history books, died on January 27, 2010. Shortly after, then-Governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels got on his computer and fired off an email to the state’s top education officials: “This terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away.”

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Rethinking Columbus: Towards a True People’s History
Bill Bigelow – Common Dreams, 15 Oct 2012

In more than 30 years of teaching U.S. history and guest-teaching in others’ classes, I’ve never had a single student say, “Taínos.” So I ask them to think about that fact. “How do we explain that? We all know the name of the man who came here from Europe, but none of us knows the name of the people who were here first—and there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of them. Why haven’t you heard of them?” This ignorance is an artifact of historical silencing—rendering invisible the lives and stories of entire peoples.

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