Dear Zinn Education Project friends,

As the Pentagon commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, we revisit Bill Bigelow's article that deals with the textbooks' failure to grapple with the import of the Pentagon Papers, which were historical documents not military secrets, and why Daniel Ellsberg felt the American public needed to know the history of U.S. intervention and deceit.

On this 45th anniversary of Earth Day, we also feature articles and lessons to help students confront the causes and consequences of climate change and the broader environmental crisis.

Sincerely,

Lauren Cooper, Zinn Education Project Coordinator

In the Academy Award-winning documentary Hearts and Minds, Daniel Ellsberg, who secretly copied and then released the Pentagon Papers, offers a catalog of presidential lying about the U.S. role in Vietnam: Truman lied. Eisenhower lied. Kennedy lied. Johnson "lied and lied and lied." Nixon lied.

 

Ellsberg concludes: "The American public was lied to month by month by each of these five administrations. As I say, it's a tribute to the American public that their leaders perceived that they had to be lied to; it's no tribute to us that it was so easy to fool the public."

 

The Pentagon Papers that Ellsberg exposed were not military secrets. They were historical secrets---- a history of U.S. intervention and deceit that Ellsberg believed, if widely known, would undermine the U.S. pretexts in defense of the war's prosecution. Continue reading.

Teaching About the Environmental Crisis
Edited by Bill Bigelow and Tim Swinehart

Abolitionists were waging not just a moral struggle against the enslavement of human beings. Slavery was the largest industry in the United States, worth more than all the factories, banks, and railroads combined. In effect, the abolition movement aimed to expropriate without compensation the wealth of the most powerful social class in the country. Continue reading.

 

Edited by Linda Christensen
and Dyan Watson
Rhythm and Resistance offers practical lessons about how to teach poetry to build community, understand literature and history, talk back to injustice, and construct stronger literacy skills across content areas and grade levels----from elementary school to graduate school.
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