Museum of Florida History Indian Statues, Tallahassee, Florida. Source: Public domain

An unfortunate but recurring feature of U.S. history has been the tendency of political leaders to lie to the American people. The mainstream media have often simply reported these lies with little or no critique, functioning as “stenographers to power,” to borrow from the title of a book by media critic Norman Solomon. This is not to say that everything government leaders tell us is a lie. However, an informed and skeptical public is perhaps the best defense against statements that mask policies that undermine human rights, at home and abroad.

A U.S. history course should seek to nurture this informed skepticism in students. It should encourage them to question the premises of textbooks, newspapers, films, and speeches of political leaders. It should ask them to check assertions against historical evidence.

The speech Andrew Jackson delivered to Congress in December 1830 is a good example of how leaders rely on widespread ignorance to promote their policies. For example, anyone even remotely familiar with the Cherokee people at the time would know that it was ludicrous to characterize them as “a few savage hunters.” Some people surely knew that this was a wildly inaccurate description, but didn’t care because they supported Jackson’s Indian policy. But others almost certainly assumed that, since Jackson is president, he must know best. In instances such as this, people’s critical capacities, or lack of them, have life and death consequences. In my experience, students find it exhilarating to discover that they have the knowledge and ability to critique the pronouncements of a U.S. president.

Classroom Stories

I’m a white high school history and English teacher in The Bronx, where 98 percent of the school’s population are students of color.  I do my best every single day to give them an equitable education and I often seek out resources from Zinn Education Project. Like many people in this country (especially white people), reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States was a real eye-opener and really forced me to confront the country that I was born and raised in. The spirit of that book obviously lives in so many resources on this website.

One of the resources I have used is Andrew Jackson and the ‘Children of the Forest.’ For 11th Grade, I teach an AP Humanities class with a co-teacher. In this class, which meets 11 times a week, we teach both AP English Language and AP U.S. History. We try to integrate our curricula as much as possible and we adapted this lesson for the purposes of our class. Because of the co-teacher dynamic, we are able to include students with learning disabilities and ELL students.

On the day of the lesson, our students came to class prepared with arguments for why the Cherokee and Seminole peoples should be allowed to stay on their land. Our school does not have a library, so the students had to conduct that research on the on their own. Using what they found, students made group posters detailing their reasons why Native people should not be removed from their land. We then conducted a “History Fair,” and students did a gallery walk listening to their peers make their case for the people not to be removed.

After the gallery walk, we conducted a close reading of Jackson’s speech and analyzed it for rhetorical strategies. The next day, the students wrote an AP rhetorical analysis essay on Jackson’s speech. The first half of the lesson gave students the context for Jackson’s speech and the insidious purpose he used rhetorical strategies for. I’m proud to say they did very well in their essays.

Thank you, Zinn Education Project, for all that you do.

—Michael Thomas

High Language Arts/English Teacher, New York, New York

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One of the most important aims of teaching is to prompt students to empathize with other human beings. This is no easy accomplishment in a society that pits people against each other, offers vastly greater or lesser amounts of privileges based on accidents of birth, and rewards exploitation with wealth and power.

Empathy, or “social imagination,” as Peter Johnson calls it in The Reading Teacher, allows students to connect to “the other” with whom, on the surface, they may appear to have little in common. A social imagination encourages students to construct a more profound “we” than daily life ordinarily permits. A social imagination prompts students to wonder about the social contexts that provoke hurtful behaviors, rather than simply to dismiss individuals as inherently “evil” or “greedy.”

One teaching method we use to promote empathy, and return to unit after unit, is the interior monologue. An interior monologue is simply the imagined thoughts of a character in history, literature, or life at a specific point in time. After watching a film, reading a novel, short story, or essay, or performing improvisation skits, the class brainstorms particular key moments, turning points, or critical passages characters confronted.

This lesson was published by Rethinking Schools in Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching For Equity and Justice (Volume 1). For more lessons like “Promoting Social Imagination Through Interior Monologues,” order Rethinking Our Classrooms, with creative teaching ideas, compelling classroom narratives, and hands-on examples that show how teachers can promote the values of community, justice, and equality while building academic skills, edited by Wayne Au, Bill Bigelow, and Stan Karp.

See Table of Contents.

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Black Panther children in a classroom with their teacher, Evon Carter, widow of Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, at the Intercommunal Youth Institute, the Black Panther Party school. Photograph by Stephen Shames. Source: The Washington Post

During the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement, in particular, community self-determination was central to many peoples’ struggles. The Black Panther Party for Self Defense sought social justice for African Americans and other oppressed communities through a combination of revolutionary theory, education, and community programs.

Free clothing being offered at an event sponsored by the Black Panther Party in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1969. Photo by David Fenton, Getty Images.

Mural depicting the BPP 10-Point Program, as seen on the side of Marcus Books in Oakland, California. Source: Josh Davidson

Their party platform, better known as the 10-Point Program, arose from the Black Panthers’ assessment of the social and economic conditions in their community. It became part of the party’s philosophical backbone and served as a model for many other community groups such as the Brown Berets, the Young Lords, and the Red Guard.

I taught about the Panthers in the context of a high school African Studies class in Seattle that focused on African history and the experience of the Diaspora. Of the 30 working- and middle-class students, most of them 10th graders, 25 were African American, four were white, and one was Chicana. When I teach about the Black Power Movement, I try to connect the movement to today’s issues. One way is by having students review the Black Panther Party’s 10-Point Program and develop their own personal versions of the program. This lesson, of course, has to take place within the context of a larger unit on the Panthers and African American history in general.

This lesson was originally published in the Fall 2001 issue of Rethinking Schools magazine.

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The lesson described here asks students to empathize with Douglass’ desperate confrontation with slave owners and their agents by drawing on their own experiences resisting those who would seek to control them. This is not to suggest any parity of oppression between slavery and students’ lack of independence. But our imaginative capacity is limited by our experience, and it’s that experience we must use as a resource if we’re to attempt to comprehend the lives of others.

Additional Resources

▸ The Library of Congress offers Frederick Douglass’ papers online.

Video Clip

Danny Glover reading Frederick Douglass’s speech on the 4th of July. This is one of many film clips that can be viewed online from Voices of a People’s History.

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The U.S. Constitution has been called one of the great documents of human history. In my own schooling, however, I recall the study of the Constitution as a source of great boredom. Sterile descriptions of the three branches of government dominated much of the study of that period each time I was cycled through American history — in 5th, 8th, and 10th grade. U.S. history textbooks gave the Constitution considerable space and probably share blame for the lifeless rendition of what was undoubtedly a very exciting time in our nation’s history.

It was only years later when I returned to the classroom as a teacher that I realized the Constitution’s importance and its potential as a learning tool. In fact, the study of the American Revolution and the struggle over the Constitution in my 5th-grade classroom helps set the basis for the rest of the year. I pose questions such as: Who benefited most (and the least) from the American Revolution? Who wrote and ratified the Constitution for the new nation? Who benefited most (and least) from the Constitution? Since the Constitution was finally ratified in 1787 how have people struggled to expand the democratic impulses of the American Revolution?

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This lesson was originally published by Rethinking Schools in Rethinking Our Classrooms, Volume 2: Teaching For Equity and Justice. For more lessons like “Rethinking the U.S. Constitutional Convention: A Role Play,” order Rethinking Our Classrooms, Vol. 2 with a rich collection of from-the-classroom articles, curriculum ideas, lesson plans, poetry, and resources — all grounded in the realities of school life.

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Less often explored is the experience of those whose everyday lives intersected with the struggle, and who responded with the kind of life-changing decisions that formed the heart of the movement.

This article by Doug Sherman describes his use of first person narratives such as Selma, Lord, Selma and films such as Eyes on the Prize to teach the often untold stories of the Civil Rights Movement.

This article was originally published by Rethinking Schools in an edition of Rethinking Schools magazine (Winter 1995/96).

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Attack on Apalachicola River. The fort had provided home and safety to more than 300 African and Choctaw families. Painting by Jackson Walker, Museum of Florida Art.

Colonial laws prohibiting Black and white people from marrying one another suggest that some Black and white people did marry. Laws imposing penalties on white indentured servants and enslaved Africans who ran away together likewise suggest that whites and Blacks did run away together. Laws making it a crime for Indians and Black people to meet together in groups of four or more indicate that, at some point, these gatherings must have occurred. As Benjamin Franklin is said to have remarked in the Constitutional Convention, “One doesn’t make laws to prevent the sheep from planning insurrection,” because this has never occurred, nor will it occur.

The social elites of early America sought to manufacture racial divisions. Men of property and privilege were in the minority; they needed mechanisms to divide people who, in concert, might threaten the status quo.

Find more remote-ready lessons here and refer to our remote teaching guide.

Individuals’ different skin colors were not sufficient to keep these people apart if they came to see their interests in common. Which is not to say that racism was merely a ruling class plot, but as Howard Zinn points out in chapters 2 and 3 of A People’s History of the United States, and as students see in this lesson, some people did indeed set out consciously to promote divisions based on race.

Because today’s racial divisions run so deep and can seem so normal, providing students an historical framework can be enlightening. We need to ask, “What are the origins of racial conflict?” and “Who benefits from these deep antagonisms?” A critical perspective on race and racism is as important as anything students will take away from a U.S. history course. This is just one early lesson in our quest to construct that critical perspective.

Classroom Stories

The Color Line lesson led to a discussion about how oligarchs defend their interests. We would come back to that throughout the school year because the students noticed how race was being used as a wedge issue again and again. . .

When students learned how race had been created, how the structure of white supremacy had been constructed, they began to realize that it could also be destroyed.

— Julian Hipkins III
High School U.S. History Teacher, Washington, D.C.
Originally quoted in “How American oligarchs created the concept of race to divide and conquer the poor” by Courtland Milloy in The Washington Post.

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Over the years I included in my curriculum at Portland, Oregon Franklin High School examples of resistance, set up simulations and activities where students challenged the system or took on the roles of change-makers. Still, I sent too many students into the world as cynical young adults when what I wanted was to empower students to become active citizens — thinking critically about society, identifying its problems and working toward solutions. I wanted to start this school year with one hopeful story we could return to repeatedly. I found it in Salt of the Earth, a compelling and dramatic film that demonstrates alliances, solidarity, and resistance.

Film is in public domain. View Salt of the Earth or download free online at Internet Archive.

This lesson was published by Rethinking Schools in Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching For Equity and Justice (Volume 1). For more teaching activities like “Salt of the Earth: Grounds Students in Hope,” order Rethinking Our Classrooms with essays, teaching ideas, compelling classroom narratives, and hands-on examples.

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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks to a crowd of an estimated 400,000 people at the United Nations Plaza after an anti-Vietnam War march, New York City, April 15, 1967. Source: Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images

On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech in New York City on the occasion of his becoming co-chairman of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam (subsequently renamed Clergy and Laity Concerned).

Titled “Beyond Vietnam,” it was his first major speech on the war in Vietnam — what the Vietnamese aptly call the American War. In these excerpts, King links the escalating U.S. commitment to that war with its abandonment of the commitment to social justice at home. His call for a “shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society” and for us to “struggle for a new world” has acquired even greater urgency than when he issued it decades ago.

The speech concludes:

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death….

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. . .

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain . . .

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter — but beautiful — struggle for a new world.

Full text and audio of Beyond Vietnam online at AmericanRhetoric.com.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had issued a statement against the Vietnam War the year before after the murder of Sammy Younge Jr.

Find related resources for the classroom below.

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World War II, like so many other events in history, presents the teacher with an overwhelming range of topics. The rise of Nazism and fascism in Europe, the Holocaust, the military history and diplomacy of the war, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war in the Pacific, the Nuremberg Trials, the dropping of atomic bombs, the beginnings of the Cold War — there is no way to cover all these events in a typical month-long unit.

One event that invariably gets neglected is the war-time internment of Japanese Americans from the West Coast of the United States. The reasons are numerous. But I suspect the main reason is that serious investigation of the internment would contradict the traditional presentation of the U.S. role in the war — how U.S. ingenuity and power turned back Hitler, liberated the concentration camps, halted Japanese expansionism, and generally fought the good fight. Such an interpretation does not leave much room for aberrations, particularly one as anti-democratic as the Japanese internment.

More resources on the incarceration (internment) of Japanese Americans during WWII.

This lesson was published by Rethinking Schools in Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching for Equity and Justice (Volume 2). For more lessons like “A Lesson on the Japanese American Internment,” order Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching for Equity and Justice (Volume 2) with a rich collection of from-the-classroom articles, curriculum ideas, lesson plans, poetry, and resources. See Table of Contents.

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