Lesson on Reconstruction

Full of Primary Documents

Check out our recently released follow-up lesson to Reconstructing the South, using primary source documents to reveal key outcomes of the Reconstruction era.

Reconstructing the South, written by Bill Bigelow, has students imagine the perspective of newly freedpeople grappling with six critical questions about how to organize and build a post-slavery society.

In this follow-up, students find out “what really happened” by analyzing and discussing an assortment of primary source documents. Mimi Eisen and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca designed this activity to build off students’ curiosity and excitement from the role play.

This collection is organized around five themes of Reconstruction: land, labor, suffrage, safety/protections, and the Confederate coalition. The lesson prompts students to analyze each document in conversation with others.

Learn More and Download Lesson

The Attack on Anti-Racist Teaching Attacks

Environmental Justice Teaching

By Erik Ruin.

By Bill Bigelow

The same land that held people captive through slavery is now holding people captive through this environmental injustice and devastation. — Rev. Dr. William Barber II

But why? Why do race and environmental devastation align so neatly?

In an increasing number of states, it is illegal for teachers to engage students in attempting to answer this question.

Legislators in more than 44 states have passed laws — or are attempting to pass laws — to prohibit teachers from putting racism at the center of their classroom inquiry about the nature of U.S. society.

This hailstorm of legislation attacking anti-racist education has a less obvious target: teaching about the environment and about climate change.

Prentiss Charney Fellow

Spotlight

The Zinn Education Project hosts the Prenti ss Charney Fellowship to support a cohort of people’s history educator leaders to study, learn, and organize. Today we celebrate teacher and media specialist Esther Honda.

Esther has been teaching young people in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than 30 years in multiple subjects and grade levels.

Coursing through all of Esther’s education work is her love of and belief in the power of well-designed, socially relevant curriculum.

This year, she has engaged her 6th-grade English Language Development students in a multigenerational oral history Voice of Witness storytelling project that links students and local elders living in senior housing.

We are lucky to teach, learn, and organize alongside Esther and all the Prentiss Charney Fellows. Consider making a donation to continue and expand the fellowship, in honor of of lifelong education activists C. J. Prentiss and Michael Charney.

Statement by SNCC Veterans

The White Supremacist

Attack on Education

In the 1960s, SNCC established Freedom Schools and helped Black communities secure the previously denied right to vote to bring about change and to strive for quality education for all.

The effort by Ron DeSantis and Republican Party culture warriors to reverse the hard-fought gains of the last 50 years must not prevail.

Fortunately, courageous teachers and students across this nation are on the front line today: protesting and organizing to take back their education.

Mark Your Calendars

Staff from a bilingual school in Los Angeles at Teaching Banned Books installation at #SXSW.

Check out the list of upcoming events hosted by the Zinn Education Project and our colleagues. There are online classes with people’s historians, teacher institutes and conferences, and the Teach Truth Day of Action.

Events Calendar