An Advancement Placement U.S. History teacher in New Jersey was honored recently “for his work educating his students about social justice.”
Garbriel Tangalo teaches 10th- and 11th-grade AP US History at Bergen County Technical High School at Teterboro, New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan.
A St. Louis middle school social studies teacher named Sarah Miller offers a unique glimpse into the warped mind of a social justice educator.
As the College Fix reports, Miller encourages her students to become activists for social justice:
Two of Sarah Miller’s former students were arrested while peacefully protesting the not-guilty verdict in the murder trial of former St. Louis police Officer Jason Stockley. The Clayton teacher was proud.
What is unique about Miller is that she appears to support protesting not-guilty verdicts even when she believes the person on trial really was innocent:
Regardless of the specifics of the case, events such as killings by police seem to happen to African-Americans over and over, she said.
A sixth grade “social justice” teacher (whatever the hell that means) in Colorado brought in a radical left-wing activist and accused felon to speak to students without parental or administration approval.
Dezy Saint-Nolde, better known by her activist name, Queen Phoenix, spoke to a group of sixth graders at Sky Vista Middle School in Aurora, Colorado earlier this month.
On June 19, 1953, two Americans – a husband and wife – were put to death for turning their backs on their country. The couple were sent to the electric chair after being convicted of espionage against the United States. Throughout the 1940s, Julius Rosenberg – with the complicity and aide of his wife Ethel – sat at the center of a vast spy network responsible for the theft of numerous American military secrets. The Rosenbergs’ espionage activities ultimately aided the Soviet Union in the development of their nuclear weapons program.
Yet, in his book A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn works for six-and-a-half pages to convince readers that the Rosenbergs were actually victims of an anti-Communist witch hunt. In Zinn’s view, the Rosenbergs were brought up on flimsy charges after being unjustly targeted for their political beliefs amid the supposed anti-Communist “hysteria” of the early Cold War. Zinn’s attempt to cast doubt on the guilt of the Rosenberg’s fits into a wider effort in his book to white-wash the history of the Communist Party in the U.S. and the Communist movement worldwide, for which he was a lifelong fellow traveler.
One of the themes woven through out the opening chapters of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is that of the noble savage. The Native Americans lived, in Zinn’s view, free of the corrupting influences of civilization. They were pacifists, egalitarians, even progressives. This portrait fits into Zinn’s broader historical narrative of white Westerners as uniquely anti-progressive in the history of mankind.
As part of this narrative, Zinn draws a picture of the tribes of North America as gender egalitarians. He writes that “women were important and respected in Iroquois society,”[1] which, he claims, “was in sharp contrast to European values as brought over by the first colonists.”[2]
In a 700 page book, Zinn spends about a half dozen pages on Columbus’ four voyages, but he manages to pack a lot of nonsense into those few pages.
Here we will look at Zinn’s treatment of the native populations of the new world with whom Columbus first made contact. While Zinn is careful to use many of Columbus’ own words, the slicing and dicing and re-contextualizing paints a misleadingly black and white portrait – that of naiveté, sincerity, and generosity on the part of the natives, and greed and thuggishness on the part of Columbus and his men.
With all the attention around CNN for finally admitting publicly what has been plainly obvious for years, it’s worth taking some time to reflect on the roots of the intelligentsia’s preference for narrative over facts.
This is an excerpt from a review of Zinn’s book by Stanford University Education Professor Sam Wineburg:
In his lead-up to a discussion of the atomic bomb, Zinn makes this claim: “At the start of World War II German planes dropped bombs on Rotterdam in Holland, Coventry in England, and elsewhere. Roosevelt had described these as ‘inhuman barbarism that has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.’”[1] Zinn then adds: “These German bombings [of Rotterdam and Coventry] were very small compared with the British and American bombings of German cities.”[2] He then lists the names of some of the most devastating Allied bombing campaigns, including the most notorious, the firebombing of Dresden.
This is an excerpt from a review of Zinn’s book by Stanford University Education Professor Sam Wineburg:
Consider the question of whether World War II was a “people’s war.” On one level, as Zinn has to admit, it was. Thousands suited up in uniform, and millions handed over hard-earned dollars to buy war bonds. But Zinn asks us to consider whether such support was “manufactured.” Was there, in fact, widespread resentment and resistance to the war that was hidden from the masses?
Zinn opens A People’s History of the United States with a re-imagining of Columbus’ voyages to the New World. Zinn’s version of events is one in which Columbus is blinded by a single minded avarice, the sailors are ruthless thugs, the rulers back in Spain are Christian looneys, and all the natives of the new world are virtuous in every sense of the word.
