Building People's Histories: Graduate Student Pedagogy, Undergraduate Education, and Collaboration with Community Partners

Abstract

When Howard Zinn died in 2010, he was heralded for his longtime commitment to education and his award-winning A People’s History of the United States (1980). His popular revision of U.S. history foregrounded the actions and choices of everyday people over conventional leaders and heroes. In the tradition of radical pedagogy, from Paulo Freire to bell hooks, Zinn’s work critiqued educational practices that trained students merely to comply with the status quo rather than to question it. Zinn argued instead that the purpose of social studies was to imbue students with the desire to change the world. Despite its popularity at the high school level, Zinn’s work has been adopted in less than 2 percent of all undergraduate U.S. history survey courses, revealing a reticence that reflects scholarly and journalistic debates concerned with such problems as accuracy, polarization, and critiques of the text as either too politically fatalistic or, from alternate angles, idealized. Nonetheless, the broad commitment to social change and popular engagement signified by “people’s history” has been powerfully generative, inspiring numerous adaptations across print, performance, and electronic media. People’s history has thus come to represent a wide range of pedagogical engagements that push for more complex and dynamic historical analyses. Each of these approaches emphasizes the role of working classes, women, and racially marginalized people in creating social change; it also highlights the role students themselves play, building on past struggles and shaping the future through their actions in the present.