If We Knew Our History - Zinn Education Project Monthly Column

Presented by the Zinn Education Project
A Collaboration between Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change

Rethinking the 4th of July

By Bill Bigelow, curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine and co-director of the Zinn Education Project

December 2013: A Yemeni boy walks past a mural depicting a U.S. drone and reading "Why did you kill my family?" Photo: Mohammed Huwais/AFP/Getty Images.

Apart from the noise pollution, air pollution, and flying debris pollution, there is something profoundly inappropriate about blowing off fireworks at a time when the United States is waging war with real fireworks around the world.

To cite just one example, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London found recently that U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan alone have killed more than 200 people, including at least 60 children. And, of course, the U.S. war in Afghanistan drags on and on. The pretend war of celebratory fireworks thus becomes part of a propaganda campaign that inures us----especially the children among us----to the real wars half a world away. Continue reading.

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"Rethinking the 4th of July" is the newest article in the Zinn Education Project's column,
If We Knew Our History, posted on Huffington Post.

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Related Resources
	Gerald Horne discusses "the creation myth" of the U.S. on Democracy Now! "July 4th, 1776, in many ways, represents a counterrevolution. That is to say that what helped to prompt July 4th, 1776, was the perception amongst European settlers on the North American mainland that London was moving rapidly towards abolition." View online \| Read transcript.
	"The Meaning of July 4th for the Negro" Film clip. Frederick Douglass's "The Meaning of July 4th for the Negro" (1851) is read by Danny Glover. From "Voices of a People's History of the United States."

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