More than 2 million copies of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States have been sold since it was first published in 1980. Viewing the past through perspectives often neglected by standard history texts, the book has been the subject of controversy ever since. Although Zinn never claimed the book was objective, its use in education along with its promotion in popular media has earned it a fair host of both attackers and defenders over the past forty years. It's perfectly understandable that students, parents, and others in the community might want to know how excerpts from the book are used by CHS teachers.
Chatham students are exposed to dozens of secondary sources and interpretations in their two years of study of United States history, along with hundreds of primary source documents and evidence. Excerpts of Howard Zinn's People's History is just one of many sources that teachers use to help students read, write, and reason in the discipline of history. The skills historians use to interpret, evaluate, organize, and cross-check evidence and information, as well as to seek out, examine and consider multiple perspectives, while accounting for complexity, are foundational to success in any field.
CHS Social Studies teachers build upon previous experience with lessons and experiment with different sources, strategies, and activities to tailor them to the collective personalities and needs of their students. These are some of the different approaches teachers are using with the first chapter of Zinn's book this year.
Ms. Parness initially engages her students with questions they will face repeatedly throughout the year when they read secondary sources - What is the historian claiming? What evidence does the historian offer to support that claim? These questions guide the reading of the People's History
chapter on Columbus in such a way as to dig into the evidence Zinn uses and the analysis of how he describes it. Questions for small group discussion touch upon Zinn's explanation of the motives of the expedition, Columbus’ first impressions of the natives, and his interaction with the natives of Cicao. This lesson sequence also includes a short video excerpt from the documentary Mankind, The Story of all of Us" featuring Charles Mann, author of 1491, New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.
Ms. Kousoulis takes a different approach, students read the text without any introduction, engaging the narrative, explanations, and evidence without any preconceptions. After reading the chapter,
answering analysis questions, and discussing it as a class, Ms. Kousoulis has students look into Howard Zinn's background, searching news stories, editorials, and commentaries and post examples of criticism and support others on a Jamboard. This exposes students to the discrepancies between popular discussion of works of history and the close reading of them within the standards of historical scholarship.
Students then research the authors and book titles listed in the book's bibliography, analyzing the sources Zinn
cites as evidence for his claims. This is similar to the practice of "lateral reading", reading across sources to measure reliability.
This lesson sequence ends with the students themselves writing responses to the question "Based on what you have learned about Zinn, Do you feel that Howard Zinn is a reliable source? Why or why not?"
responses to launch a discussion about what students know about Christopher Columbus and where they think they learned it. He then reads three children's books to his classes, asking students to compare two books that portray Columbus as a courageous leader with another written from the perspective of a Native American, focusing on the results of European exploration. This technique helps students think about the
process through which popular conceptions of people of the past evolve and the role perspective plays in developing those conceptions.
Mr. Agree's students then actively read the chapter from People’s History, using guided annotation to mark what they found interesting and what they want to fact check.
Close Reading Annotation Guide:
Highlight 5 things that were new to you in green.
Highlight anything that you found surprising in blue.
Highlight anything that you want to fact-check in orange.
Write down at least 3 questions that you have with the comment feature.
None of the lessons described here could have been taught when People's History of the United States was first published in 1980. Today's students are not growing up at a time when just one book taking an unconventional approach to understand the past can provoke such contention. Instead, they are living at a time with an almost unlimited supply of different interpretations of the past, some of which are of questionable quality. Yet the same technology which makes those different interpretations easy to produce also provide the tools students can use to assess different histories and compare them against all of the primary source evidence at their fingertips.
The key to navigating such a world is developing and exercising a habit of mind that asks important questions before accepting historical explanations at face value. "Where is this claim coming from?', "Who is making it?", and "What evidence supports it?" These lessons show the value of those questions while giving students experience in the tools used to answer them.