{"id":31939,"date":"2013-07-22T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2013-07-22T11:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=31939"},"modified":"2015-05-06T09:00:03","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T08:00:03","slug":"indianas-anti-howard-zinn-witch-hunt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/07\/indianas-anti-howard-zinn-witch-hunt\/","title":{"rendered":"Indiana\u2019s Anti-Howard Zinn Witch-Hunt"},"content":{"rendered":"

Howard Zinn<\/a>, author of <\/i>A People\u2019s History of the United States, one of the country\u2019s 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\u2019s top education officials: \u201cThis terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

\"Howard<\/a>

Howard Zinn<\/p><\/div>\n

But Gov. Daniels, now president of Purdue University, was not content merely to celebrate Howard Zinn\u2019s passing. He demanded that Zinn\u2019s work be hunted down in Indiana schools and suppressed: \u201cThe obits and commentaries mentioned his book \u2018A People\u2019s History of the United States<\/a>\u2019 is the \u2018textbook of choice in high schools and colleges around the country.\u2019 It is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page. Can someone assure me that is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?\u201d<\/p>\n

We know about Gov. Daniels\u2019 email tantrum thanks to the Associated Press<\/a>, which obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request.<\/p>\n

Scott Jenkins, Daniels\u2019 education advisor, wrote back quickly to tell the governor that A People\u2019s History of the United States<\/i> was used in a class for prospective teachers on social movements at Indiana University.<\/p>\n

Daniels fired back: \u201cThis crap should not be accepted for any credit by the state. No student will be better taught because someone sat through this session. Which board has jurisdiction over what counts and what doesn\u2019t?\u201d<\/p>\n

After more back and forth, Daniels approved a statewide \u201ccleanup\u201d of what earns credit for professional development: \u201cGo for it. Disqualify propaganda and highlight (if there is any) the more useful offerings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Daniels recently defended his attack on Zinn\u2019s work, telling the Associated Press, \u201cWe must not falsely teach American history in our schools.\u201d In a letter posted on his Purdue University webpage, Daniels claimed that, \u201cthe question I asked on one day in 2010 had nothing to do with higher education at all.\u201d Daniels should go back and read his own emails<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There are so many disturbing aspects to this story, it\u2019s hard to know where to begin.<\/p>\n

The first, of course, is Daniels\u2019 gleeful, mean-spirited reporting of Zinn\u2019s death. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Howard Zinn\u2019s career knows that his great passions were racial equality and peace<\/a>. Finding cause for joy in the death of someone whose life was animated by confidence in people\u2019s fundamental decency is shameful.<\/p>\n

As someone who spent almost 30 years as a high school history teacher, I\u2019m amused by the impoverished pedagogical vision embedded in Daniels\u2019 emails and subsequent defense. Daniels wants Zinn\u2019s A People\u2019s History of the United States<\/i><\/a> banned from the curriculum, so that the book is not \u201cforce-fed\u201d to students. Governor Daniels evidently assumes that the only way one can teach history is to cram it down students\u2019 throats. To see some alternative ways to engage students, Daniels might have a look at our lessons at the Zinn Education Project<\/a>, which use Zinn\u2019s People\u2019s History of the United States<\/i> in role plays, in critical reading activities, to generate imaginative writing, and to search for the \u201csilences\u201d in students\u2019 own textbooks.<\/p>\n

Take for example the last textbook I was assigned as a teacher at a public high school in Portland, Oregon, American Odyssey<\/i>, published by Glencoe\/McGraw-Hill. In the book\u2019s one thousand pages, it includes exactly two paragraphs on the U.S. war with Mexico\u2014the war that led to Mexico \u201cceding,\u201d in the polite language of school curricula, about half its country to the United States. American Odyssey<\/i> does not quote a single Mexican, a single soldier, a single abolitionist, a single opponent of the war. Well, in fact, the textbook doesn\u2019t quote anyone<\/i>. As one of my students pointed out when we read the book\u2019s dull passages in class, \u201cIt doesn\u2019t even view it as a war. It\u2019s a situation.\u201d<\/p>\n

This scant treatment of such an important event in U.S. and Mexican history is one reason why teachers search out alternatives like A People\u2019s History of the United States<\/i>, which includes a full chapter on the conflict, focusing especially on President Polk\u2019s hollow justifications for war, the anti-war resistance, and the human impact of the war. Unlike the gray prose of textbooks like American Odyssey<\/i>, Zinn\u2019s chapter on the U.S. war with Mexico\u2014\u201cWe Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God\u201d<\/a>\u2014is filled with quotes from soldiers and poets, surgeons and abolitionists, generals and journalists, clergymen and presidents. Every passage reminds young people that war is much more than a \u201csituation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe must not falsely teach American history in our schools,\u201d said Daniels to the Associated Press, implying that the true history is to be found in the officially adopted textbooks. As the Zinn Education Project reveals regularly in its\u00a0If We Knew Our History<\/em><\/a> column, the version of U.S. history taught in the textbooks produced by giant corporations is anything but \u201ctrue.\u201d The corporate textbooks hide the breadth of U.S. military and economic interventions throughout the world; they ignore the roots of today\u2019s environmental crises; they refuse to explore the origins of the vast wealth inequality in the United States; and the textbooks neglect the role of social movements throughout U.S. history, instead focusing on famous individuals; thus, they fail to nurture an activist sensibility\u2014a recognition that if we want the world to be better, then it\u2019s up to us to make it better.<\/p>\n

This is a point Howard Zinn emphasized when he spoke to teachers at the 2008 National Council for the Social Studies<\/a> conference in Houston\u2014some of them from Indiana!\u2014not much more than a year before he died. Zinn said: \u201cWe\u2019ve never had our injustices rectified from the top, from the president or Congress, or the Supreme Court, no matter what we learned in junior high school about how we have three branches of government, and we have checks and balances, and what a lovely system. No. The changes, important changes that we\u2019ve had in history, have not come from those three branches of government. They have reacted to social movements.\u201d<\/p>\n

Governor Daniels\u2019 advisers evidently found no evidence that Zinn\u2019s A People\u2019s History of the United States <\/i>was in use in K-12 schools in Indiana. I guess they didn\u2019t look hard enough. There are more than 300 Indiana teachers registered at the Zinn Education Project to access people\u2019s history curriculum materials to \u201cteach outside the textbook.\u201d And these are only the teachers who have formally registered at the site; many more share people\u2019s history-inspired lessons.<\/p>\n

And at the Zinn Education Project we\u2019ve heard all week long from Indiana teachers, professors, and parents who have committed themselves to work against censorship in K-12 schools. Their defiance is reminiscent of Indiana\u2019s Green Feather Movement<\/a> that challenged the McCarthy-era attempt to ban Robin Hood<\/i> from the elementary school curriculum in 1954. What began as the anonymous posting of green feathers on bulletin boards by a few students at Indiana University spread to campuses across the country. As Howard Zinn wrote at the end of his autobiography, You Can\u2019t Be Neutral on a Moving Train<\/i><\/a>, \u201cIf we remember those times and places\u2014and there are so many\u2014where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

__________________<\/p>\n

Bill Bigelow<\/i> taught high school social studies in Portland, Ore. for almost 30 years. He is the curriculum editor of <\/em>Rethinking Schools<\/a> and the co-director of the Zinn Education Project<\/a>. This project offers free materials to teach people\u2019s history and an \u201cIf We Knew Our History\u201d article series. Bigelow is author or co-editor of numerous books, including <\/em>A People\u2019s History for the Classroom<\/a> and <\/em>The Line Between Us: Teaching About the Border and Mexican Immigration<\/a>, and a contributor to <\/em>Teaching About the Wars<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 zinnedproject.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Howard Zinn, author of A People\u2019s History of the United States, one of the country\u2019s 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\u2019s top education officials: \u201cThis terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[142],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31939\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}