Stop Subsidizing Zinn’s Communist History of the United States

This Saturday teachers will gather at the Smithsonian (specifically the National Museum of the American Indian) for a continuing education class about Christopher Columbus. They will get lessons using Howard Zinn’s Marxist A People’s History of the United States, and produced by the Zinn Education Project. Breaking publishing records, Zinn’s book has sold over 2.6 million copies since it was first published in 1980. Sales grow each year. ZEP was started by one of Zinn’s adoring Boston University students-turned-wealthy-capitalist. By 2018, 84,000 teachers had downloaded their lessons. School districts pay for ZEP organizers to give workshops to teachers and librarians on such things as Islamophobia, climate change, and the labor movement. ZEP lessons are bracketed by such accusations against our president as spewing “racist rhetoric” and conducting a “war on immigrants.” At the prompting of the Southern Poverty Law Center, South Carolina adopted ZEP materials for use statewide in the teaching of Reconstruction. Like the passage of laws for child labor, food safety, and civil rights, Reconstruction is presented as a failure of an irredeemable American system.-- More...