Category: Lessons & Resources

Revisiting Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel

Revisiting Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel

By Ari Mandel

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: Norton, 1997) is one of those books that feels revelatory the first time you read it. It takes a question that most people rarely stop to ask, “Why some societies ended up rich and powerful while others did not?,” and reframes it in a way that is both unsettling and reassuring. Unsettling, because it strips away comforting myths about cultural superiority and human exceptionalism, and reassuring, because it offers an explanation that does not rely on racism, divine favor, or civilizational destiny. Diamond’s central claim is that geography, rather than biology or culture, played the decisive role in shaping global inequality. In the epilogue, he steps back to defend this framework, clarify its limits, and argue that history itself can be studied scientifically.

Diamond’s ambition is enormous; he is trying to explain a great deal of human history with a single organizing framework. Geography, in his telling, shapes the availability of domesticable plants and animals, the timing of agriculture, population density, technological development, and ultimately conquest. By the time Europeans reached the Americas, the outcome was already largely predetermined by thousands of years of environmental advantage. Diamond is careful to insist that geography constrains rather than dictates outcomes, but it is hard to miss how much explanatory weight geography is made to carry.

In the epilogue, Diamond anticipates the charge of environmental determinism and pushes back. History, he argues, can still be studied scientifically, even if we cannot run controlled experiments. Continents and societies function as natural experiments, allowing historians to compare different environments and identify broad, recurring patterns. Diamond is explicit about what he believes his framework does and does not explain. He is not accounting for individual leaders, specific events, or moral responsibility.Instead he is explaining why some societies had early advantages and others did not.

When Diamond stays within these bounds, his arguments are often extremely persuasive. His comparison between Eurasia and the Americas is a good example. Eurasia benefited from an abundance of domesticable plants and animals, including wheat, barley, cattle, pigs, and horses, which supported early agriculture, large populations, and dense settlements. Dense populations, in turn, produced epidemic diseases, and over time, immunity. When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they brought not only steel weapons and guns, but germs to which they had long been exposed. Indigenous populations, lacking similar disease histories, were devastated. Diamond’s point is not that Europeans were smarter or more capable, but that they inherited a vastly different historical trajectory shaped by their environment.

The same logic applies to Diamond’s discussion of continental axes, particularly the contrast between Eurasia’s east-west orientation and the Americas’ north-south orientation. Eurasia’s east-west axis allowed crops, animals, and technologies to spread across similar latitudes and climates with relative ease. Innovations could diffuse over thousands of miles without needing to adapt to radically different environments. In the Americas, by contrast, north-south diffusion meant crossing deserts, jungles, mountains, and sharp climatic transitions. This slowed the spread of agriculture and technology and limited large scale integration. Over millennia, these differences compounded. Geography, in Diamond’s account, does not merely shape local conditions, it shapes connectivity itself.

Where Diamond’s framework begins to strain is when it starts to feel like a master key rather than one tool among many. In the epilogue, he insists that geography is not destiny, yet culture often appears in his account as a thin downstream effect of environmental constraints. Culture adapts to geography, rather than actively shaping how societies respond once similar options exist. This is where the model starts to feel incomplete. Culture is not just decoration layered on top of material conditions. It is the air we breathe, the water we swim in, and the lens through which material realities are interpreted. Societies facing similar geographic constraints can still make very different choices, build different institutions, and value different outcomes.

Diamond acknowledges this problem in theory but tends to underplay it in practice. He is strongest at explaining origins and weakest at explaining persistence and divergence. Geography helps explain why certain possibilities existed, but it does not fully explain why some societies embraced particular paths while others did not, even when those paths were available. Once agriculture, technology, and states exist, culture feeds back into material conditions in complex ways. Institutions, norms, and values can amplify or blunt geographic advantages, and these feedback loops receive less attention than they deserve.

This tension becomes even more apparent when Diamond’s framework is applied to contemporary global developments. Geography still matters enormously. Climate vulnerability, access to arable land, exposure to disease, and proximity to trade routes continue to shape global inequality. The uneven impact of climate change, for example, follows geographic lines Diamond would immediately recognize. At the same time, globalization, technology, and political institutions complicate the picture. Some societies have used technology and collective action to mitigate geographic disadvantages, while others have failed to do so despite favorable conditions. Here again, culture and politics mediate geography’s effects.

Diamond deserves credit for what he is trying to do. He offers a corrective to explanations that blame the victims of history for their own misfortune or attribute inequality to inherent superiority. His framework insists that history’s winners were not morally better or biologically superior, merely luckier in where they happened to have been born. That insight alone makes Guns, Germs, and Steel worth reading.

The epilogue clarifies what Diamond believes his project to be. Geography is not the whole story, but it is an essential part of it. Diamond is at his best when he treats geography as an ingredient rather than a recipe. History is shaped by environments, material conditions, and culture together. No single theory explains everything. Diamond’s contribution is to remind us how much of the story begins long before anyone makes a conscious choice, and how deeply the ground beneath our feet has shaped the world we inherited.

Spreading ‘Liberty’: Chautauqua County Women were a Force in the Underground Railroad

Spreading ‘Liberty’: Chautauqua County Women were a Force in the Underground Railroad

By Wendy Straight

(Reprinted from Observer Today, January 18, 2026) https://www.observertoday.com/news/top-stories/2026/01/spreading-liberty-chautauqua-county-women-were-a-force-in-the-underground-railroad/

From left: Carloyn E. Storum Loguen about 1860; Mary Ann Brigham Brown’s husband Rev. Abel Brown under assault in Westfield NY about 1835.

Chautauqua County women Carolyn Loguen (1817-1867) and Mary Ann Brown (1814-1842) were active in New York state’s anti-slavery movement and in the Underground Railroad. Working mostly in the shadows of their widely known husbands, the women themselves were locally famous for their own efforts in the cause of freedom.

Carolyn E. Storum Loguen of Busti married the formerly enslaved minister Jermain Wesley Loguen (1813-1872). The couple then operated an Underground Railroad station in Syracuse. They had six children, and their daughter, Amelia, married the eldest son of the nationally known abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), who also was formerly enslaved.

In 1851, the Rev. Loguen assisted in the rescue of William Henry, a formerly enslaved cooper working in Syracuse. Henry had been arrested under America’s Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, but he was rescued by abolitionists and then sheltered in Canada. Also in 1851, Harrison Williams was arrested under the same law, on Carolyn’s childhood farm in Busti, where her parents operated an Underground Railroad Station. In spite of several attempts to rescue him, Harrison Williams was returned to slavery. The historical marker paying tribute to Harrison Williams and the Storums stands today on Sanbury Road near Northrup Road in Busti. Another historical marker, to both Caroline Loguen and her husband, stands today at NYS Route 92 and Pine Street in Syracuse.

In 1854, Carolyn’s parents coordinated the widely attended Anti-Slavery Convention in Sugar Grove Pa., near Busti. Both Rev. Loguen and Frederick Douglass were featured speakers at that major event. However, Mary Ann Brigham Brown and her husband had been deceased long before the significant convention in Sugar Grove. Mary Ann was from nearby Fredonia, and she married another famous abolitionist, Rev. Abel Brown, Jr. (1810-1844) of nearby Forestville.

In the early 1830s, Mary Ann had met her future husband, while both attended the Fredonia Academy, which formerly stood on the site of today’s Opera House and Village Hall. The couple then traveled throughout the northeast, active in the Underground Railroad. Scholars have speculated that when the Western New Yorker Eber M. Pettit mentioned in his 1879 anti-slavery memoir that there was a “President” of the Underground Railroad, he was referring to the martyr Rev. Brown. Rev. Brown was so outspoken in his beliefs that he was often beaten by angry dissenters. His 1844 death in Canandaigua was said to have been from injuries sustained in just such a beating.

Another assault upon Brown had occurred in Chautauqua County a few years earlier, while he was preaching in Westfield. That was the period when New York State’s Anti-Slavery Society was being organized in central New York State, an endeavor also met with violent protests. However, within a few years of Brown’s beating in Westfield, the collected voices of Chautauqua County’s other abolitionists attracted increasingly more of their neighbors into what became known as “the liberty cause,” and the Underground Railroad became more safely active here, until the 1850 law. Although that law, signed by New York’s own Millard Filmore, generally made life dangerous for those involved in the Underground Railroad, the same law actually backfired in Chautauqua County, by drawing even more people into the anti-slavery movement.

Mary Ann died two years before her husband, shortly after the birth of their second child. Her children were then raised in Fredonia by her mother Mary (Polly) Dix Brigham Taylor (1790-1857), who also opened her home to a freedom seeker in 1844. There is no historical marker to memorialize Mary Ann, her husband, her children, or her mother, but a Fredonia mansion stands today where Mary Ann’s children grew up. The former Taylor farm is located on U.S. Route 20, just west of Fredonia.

After the Civil War, Daniel Fairbanks greatly expanded and modernized the former Taylor home. For the 1881 Chautauqua County Atlas, the elegant, new house was illustrated in the name of Sayles Aldrich.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Wilda B. and J. Carter Rowland operated a gift shop behind the mansion, at the approximate location of part of the former Taylor home.

Hidden Histories: What the Slave Masters of the Bronx Left Us

Hidden Histories: What the Slave Masters of the Bronx Left Us

By Alice Augustine, Reposted from Amsterdam News, February 5, 2026

This fall, I introduced 42 Lehman College honors students to the Enslaved African Burial Ground at Van Cortlandt Park. As the college’s director of Campus Honors and Scholar Engagement, I have made it mandatory that all Campus Honors students participate in this project, Hidden Histories, in their first year.

Colleagues and students are often surprised to learn that there were enslaved people as far north as the Bronx. However, Jacobus Van Cortlandt, who served two terms as mayor of New York City, profited from the buying and selling of Africans in Manhattan’s markets. A walk through the Bronx reveals streets and parks named after other plantation owners — the Pells, the Morrises, and the Fords.

My students learn firsthand how difficult it is to find information on people of African descent who lived in the colonial Bronx. But it is not impossible. Over the last two years, they have dug through original documents to learn about the talented and resourceful Africans whose labor contributed significantly to making early Bronx residents among the wealthiest in the state.

Their stories are hidden in bills of lading, records of sale, runaway ads, wills, legal actions, and diaries. Little Haneh, age 52; Hager, age 42; Long Betty, age 31; Zibia, age 27 — these are four of over 90 names of enslaved people my students have identified and geotagged on a digital map of the colonial Bronx. 

When we started, our goal was to contribute to the Northeast Slavery Record Index at John Jay College. Our initial search yielded little, but we gravitated toward wills after reading “Blacks in the Colonial Bronx”by Lloyd Ultan. The enslaved mostly appeared in recorded history only when wealth changed hands. Ironically, those diligent records of property are now the cracks where history lets in the light.

There were no birth certificates for Africans enslaved in the colonial Bronx and neither were there recordings of deaths. However, the heirs of enslavers were not deprived of their property. In wills, we learned of bequests of linen, kitchenware, land, rugs, and enslaved Africans that heirs would receive. Bequests quickly became our most trusted source of information on the people we have come to see as our ancestors. 

My hope is that more students sign up for the research-intensive phase of the project — the ongoing module invested in unearthing the hidden stories of highly-skilled enslaved Africans. It is too easy to forget the contributions of Blacks in the Bronx when negative and untrue stereotypes of this borough roll off tongues with reckless abandon.

The project is in its third cycle of joint stewardship with volunteers from the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance, which has done much to increase awareness. In 2021, Van Cortlandt Lake was renamed the Hester and Piero’s Mill Pond in honor of an enslaved couple — Piero the Miller and his wife Hester. The park now celebrates Juneteenth and Pinkster, an African American holiday which was originally a Dutch celebration of Pentecost. In 2024, the Mellon Foundation awarded a grant to the alliance to engage the community on ideas for a memorial at the Burial Ground. I serve on an advisory council for the construction, along with four of my students.

However, too much remains unknown. My students and the wider Bronx community deserve the chance to know, mourn, and celebrate our ancestors. My students are not historians; their majors span disciplines from biology to art. But almost all have incorporated lessons from this project as they go on to conduct research in their respective fields.

At the northeast corner of the burial ground, my students created an unofficial altar on top of a jagged rock shaped like a bench. They and community members have left flowers and photos of deceased loved ones there. We pour libations with water from Hester and Piero’s lake and call their names aloud as a collective. 

Our hearts are filled with love as we continue to build the project even as funding sources become scarcer. In July, our digital map disappeared from the StoryMaps website after the free version we used was retired. We are currently seeking grants for software to support our findings long-term. Our goal is to make this a community-based research initiative that can be replicated at other colleges and perhaps high schools.

I created Hidden Histories knowing that the answers we seek may take decades to uncover. The process is beautiful and heart-wrenching. We are eager to learn everything we can about the enslaved in the colonial Bronx, even as we are deeply shaken by the cruelty of enslavement. We are, however, clear that our ancestors wanted us to find them and share their stories, and we will keep learning and searching and listening.

Video, Museum and Book Reviews

Video, Museum and Book Reviews

Edited by Alan Singer

The Price of Silence – The Forgotten Story of New Jersey’s Enslaved People

“New Jersey is known as the Garden State,” says author Beverly Mills in the two-part documentary The Price of Silence. “We’re known for our blueberries. We’re known for our corn. We’re known for our peaches. But we’re not known for the slaves that were here tilling the soil. We’re not known for the whole history of slavery connected to New Jersey and how slavery was the underpinning of much of the wealth of New Jersey.” Enslavement was prolific from the very founding of New Jersey in the 1600s as a colony and eventual manufacturing hub that supplied the Southern states with leather goods and other products. Its eye on production and profit created a demand for the cost-effective services of the enslaved, a demand that only grew as New Jersey developed into a major maritime port. What’s more, white slave owners at the time could receive the equivalent of land rebates based upon the number of enslaved working their land. “New Jersey was the last Northern state to even attempt to abolish slavery,” says Linda Caldwell Epps, Ph.D. and CEO of 1804 Consultants, in the film. Mills reports New Jersey “was probably the Northern state with the strongest sympathies towards the South. Because it was the Southern-most Northern state, it had a lucrative trade policy with the Southern states.” She remembers “I never learned about this in school. … If anything, we were taught to feel shame. And today…I feel nothing but pride and I feel empowered.”

  • Part one of the documentary, “The Forgotten Story of New Jersey’s Enslaved People,” begins the series with the stunning fact that by the time New Jersey started the slow process of abolishing slavery in 1804, the state had 12,000 men, women, and children in bondage. The film reveals that New Jersey depended profoundly on enslaved people to drive agricultural and economic growth, was sympathetic to the South, and was the last of the Northeastern states to eliminate this heinous practice. https://www.pbs.org/video/price-of-silence-izsgr1/
  • Part two, “The Lasting Impact of Slavery in New Jersey,” continues with New Jersey’s history of bondage and expounds on the fact that the African American community is still feeling the effects of slavery today due to disparities with the White community in median income, criminal justice, and healthcare.
  • Part three, “The Search for Freedom in New Jersey,” examines the Black community’s Great Migration from the Jim Crow South to Newark, New Jersey, during the early years of the 20th century and tells the story through the eyes of descendants of individuals who made the Great Migration North and found life here to be a far cry from what they had hoped for.

  • By telling these fascinating stories through the eyes of descendants of slavery and individuals who have lived through the heartbreaking events depicted in the films, the audience will most certainly be captivated and inspired to learn more.

The Hidden History of Slavery in New York

The Hidden History of Slavery in New York is an Emmy award-winning 30-minute documentary produced by Larry Epstein and narrated by Richard French, a student at Rye Country Day School. The film features EJI founder Bryan Stevenson. Larry Epstein, an Emmy award-winning journalist and documentary writer/producer, is available to speak at schools and colleges. He can be contacted at larryep13@gmail.com. The Hidden History of Slavery in New York is available on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUzlcZXBHAM

Harlem Urban Civil Rights Museum

The museum is set to open in Fall 2026 in an approximately 20,000-square-foot space within the Urban Justice League’s new 400,000-square-foot Manhattan headquarters at 117 West 125th St., across the street from the Studio Museum. The Urban Civil Rights Museum in Harlem presents the history of the Northern civil rights movement. It is a cultural institution that educates, inspires, and activates visitors through powerful storytelling, cultural engagement, and collective action. Rooted in history and in Harlem, it stands as a local anchor and a global destination for learning, reflection, and empowerment.

Morven Museum and Gardens in Princeton

https://www.morven.org/exhibitions/five-independent-souls

Morven house in Princeton, NJ was home to Richard Stockon one the New Jersey’s signers of the Declaration of Independence and five early governors of New Jersey. Morven house’s current exhibit as part of the national celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence is Five Independent Souls highlighting the lives of the five men from New Jersey who voted for independence including Richard Stockon. As wealthy lawyers, the first two generations of Stocktons at Morven enslaved men, women, and children on site. At the expense of the enslaved, the Stocktons lived a comfortable lifestyle and increased their wealth with forced labor. Like other signers of the Declaration of Independence, Richard Stockton held people in bondage while signing a document that declared “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The rhetoric of revolutionary America—freedom, equality, and liberty—was inescapably intertwined with the practice of slavery. In 1804, the State of New Jersey passed an act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, making it the last northern state to do so. Records indicate that by the time the third generation of Stocktons took ownership of Morven in 1840, enslaved people no longer lived on the property. At first, they were replaced by free African Americans, and then eventually by immigrants from Ireland and Germany. Morven house’s permanent exhibition is “Historic Morven: A Window into America’s Past.”

NY State Parks Launches ‘Enslavement to Freedom 1627-1827-2027’ Initiative

NY State Parks Launches ‘Enslavement to Freedom 1627-1827-2027’ Initiative

In 2027, New York State will recognize the 200th anniversary of the end of legalized slavery in the state (1827) and the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans enslaved in the former New Netherland colony (1627). The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation is working with partners across the state to share new research and resources that explore early Black American history in New York as part of its “Enslavement to Freedom: 1627-1827-2027” initiative. Collaborations include exhibition displays with the Office of General Services, educational resources with ConsidertheSourceNY.org, events and programs, and traveling exhibitions available for non-profit and educational organizations throughout the state. During this multi-year interpretive initiative, State Parks and relevant state historic sites are planning will develop exhibits, public programs, and other educational resources. These are expected to explore New York’s history with the institution of slavery and a pivotal period of transition for the Black community in early New York. It provides better context and understanding for later historic movements, like abolition and the Underground Railroad. State Parks is also inviting educational and nonprofit organizations to host one or more of the four available traveling banner exhibitions:

1) Poisonous Seeds: The Dutch and the Institution of Slavery in New York

2) Redefining the Family: One Descendant’s Journey into History

3) Another Face of War: Enslaved and Free Blacks in the Revolution and

4) Many and Varied Hands: The Work and Labor of the Enslaved.

Compact enough to be displayed in various environments, the traveling exhibitions tell stories from the past that center Black experience. “Enslavement to Freedom: 1627-1827-2027” resources and activities are expected to continue to be developed and shared with the public over the next several years. For up-to-date information about this and other Black history initiatives at State Parks, including how to request the “Enslavement to Freedom” traveling banner exhibitions, visit this website.

Manhattan’s Merchant’s House was an UGRR Safehouse

The Merchant House (https://merchantshouse.org/) at 29 East Fourth Street in New York City is a 19th century brick and marble landmark rowhouse that is now a museum. It was built in 1832 by hatter and merchant Joseph Brewster and sold to the Tredwell family three years later. An Underground Railroad safe space was recently discovered underneath the drawers of a second floor built-in dresser. A cut in the floorboards leads to an enclosed space about 2ft by 2ft with a ladder down to the ground floor. Brewster was a leading New York City abolitionist. There is evidence that he signed at least two antislavery petitions and played a prominent role in three antislavery churches. When a church was being constructed on Rivington Street, he had builders include a false floor there as well.

A Protest History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2025) by Gloria J. Browne-Marshall

The book chronicles the history of protest and resistance in America, from Indigenous peoples’ resistance to colonization through modern movements like Black Lives Matter and climate activism. It highlights both known and forgotten figures and movements.  Drawing on legal documents, archives, and personal accounts to show how dissent has shaped the nation, it argues that protest is a vital force for change. It is part of Beacon’s ReVisioning History series. Browne-Marshall expands the definition of protest beyond traditional marches and rallies. Acts of resistance include journalism, legal battles, boycotts, everyday defiance, and more. There are sections on abolitionist John Brown, who was executed for initiating the 1859 slave revolt at Harpers Ferry; labor organizer Mother Jones, who fought for the enforcement of the 8-hour workday; and civil rights activist Daisy Bates, who played a leading role in the 1957 Little Rock school integration crisis. Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is a writer, educator, legal advocate, and playwright. She is a professor of Constitutional Law and African Studies at John Jay College (CUNY). Her books include She Took Justice: The Black Woman, Law, and Power, The Voting Rights War, and Race, Law, and American Society.

New York City Monuments of Black Americans: A History and Guide (New York: The History Press, 2025) by David Felsen (Reprinted from New York Almanack, December 10, 2025)

“New York City got its first monument of a real Black American in 1946 when the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in the Bronx dedicated a bronze bust to Booker T. Washington,” David Felsen, a history teacher at Avenues: The World School, writes in the introduction to New York City Monuments of Black Americans: A History and Guide (History Press, 2025). He believes n“Behind every first is a story of triumph over adversity and exclusion.” A 2021 study of the nation’s monuments found that 50% of the top 50 most memorialized people enslaved other people and that only 10% of the top 50 most memorialized people are Black/Indigenous. Just six percent of the Top 50 nationwide are women. It wasn’t until 2007 that the city dedicated its first monument to a Black woman, Harriet Tubman. “At this time, when the media and academics were paying so much attention to problematic Confederate monuments and the white men on them, it seemed too little attention was being paid to the representation of Black people in monuments,” writes Felsen. “As a history teacher living in New York City, I began to wonder how many monuments of Black Americans there were in the city. Who was the first Black American honored, and when did it happen? Who were the artists, activists and civic leaders behind these monuments? Why did they get made? And what could they teach us about New York history, Black history, art history and American history?” According to Felsen, the first Black American represented on a monument in New York City is “a nameless, shoeless former slave help[ing] a Union widow to find her husband’s grave in the South” at the base of the 1876 Civil War Soldiers’ Monument in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Felsen’s new guide identifies and tells the stories of thirty statues and monuments of Black Americans in the city. It includes maps, and photos and a detailed history of each. This book provides a refreshing take on a subject that has been on the minds of many Americans.

Black Legacy: A History of New York’s African Americans (Seven Stories Press, New Edition, 2026)

by William Loren Katz

Discover the complete Black history of New York — from 1609 to the present — by the award-winning author of Breaking the Chains and Black Indians. For readers 12 and up. Includes a new intro and last chapter with insights on modern-day movements like Black Lives Matter, plus 50+ historical maps, illustrations, and photos. Essential for NY teachers, librarians and teens. From the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in New Amsterdam in 1609, to the Harlem Renaissance, to the impact of Black Lives Matter, here is a concise and newly updated history of Black Americans in New York for readers 12 and up. Black Legacy reasserts the essential work of teacher and historian William Loren Katz, who was committed to documenting and uplifting the stories of Black Americans’ courage and creativity, resilience and rebellion, especially for younger readers. A new introduction by award-winning journalist Herb Boyd gives context to Katz’s “full tableau of Black accomplishments and aspirations,” and a new chapter by historian Alan Singer and social studies teacher Imani Hinson brings the book up to the present day, considering the changing economic, cultural and political influences on Black New Yorkers. Black Legacy includes Black politicians and poets, abolitionists and athletes and activists, and the first Black children to attend public schools; Sojourner Truth, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and others who fought for Black freedom; Shirley Chisholm, Madame C.J. Walker, NY’s first Black mayor David Dinkins and many other businesspeople and politicians who brought dignity through their work toward equality; and the Black history of Seneca Village and Weeksville, the Savoy and Cotton clubs of the Jazz Age, Harlem Hospital where Martin Luther King Jr. nearly died, the African burial site at Trinity Church, and so much more. Written with economy and flair, Black Legacy is a fascinating read, a necessary teaching tool, and a great addition to the literature of the Black history of New York and of America. According to Haley Pessin, co-editor of Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century: Documents of Hope and Resistance, “Dispelling the myth of Northern progressivism, Katz offers a far more compelling account of the bravery and perseverance through which Black people resisted their own subjugation and, in so doing, indelibly altered New York history. Katz reminds us that New York history is Black history, and Black history is the history of New York. This is a book that should be read by all New Yorkers.”

The Power of Quiet Courage (North Carolina Office of Archives, 2025) by Amy Nathan and Sarah Keys Evans; Illustrated by Jermaine Powell
Sarah Keys Evans wasn’t a person anyone thought would spend a night in a jail cell or change the world. But trouble came Sarah’s way in 1952 at a North Carolina bus station. Dressed in her Women’s Army Corps uniform, she was arrested for not moving to the back of a bus, three years before it happened to another Black woman, Rosa Parks. Sarah Keys Evans: The Power of Quiet Courage tells how Sarah stood up for what’s right and helped end that kind of unfairness. Others have now honored her by creating a monument that calls her a “Trailblazer for Justice.” Deborah Menkart wrote, “Sarah Key Evans’ story, along with many others who protested racism on public transportation in the 19th and 20th centuries, are omitted from most history books. Thankfully, Amy Nathan and Evans have broken that silence in a beautifully written book for upper elementary students. Readers learn that standing up for justice requires years’ worth of determination, patience, and courage. Evans was brave when she righteously refused to move on the bus, but there would have been no legal victory were it not for her continued bravery to pursue the case, to face lies about her actions, and to testify at hearings. As the book also makes clear, Evans’ family and attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree provided crucial support. Evans’s story will inspire readers and offer a roadmap of the pitfalls and possibilities when pursuing justice.”

The Sewards of New York: A Biography of a Leading American Political Family (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press) by Thomas Slaughter

The Sewards of New York shines a light on one of the most important and fascinating political families of the nineteenth century. Through recently discovered family correspondence, Thomas P. Slaughter unveils the inner lives of the Seward family, tracing their joys and sorrows as the nation grappled with rapid expansion and deepening divisions on its path to the Civil War. William Henry Seward, the family’s most prominent member, was a state senator, governor, U.S. senator, and Secretary of State. Henry, as his family knew him, was often absent from their Auburn, NY, home, serving in Albany or Washington, DC, and remained connected to the family through the long letters numbering in the thousands that they exchanged. These writings reveal Henry as a son, brother, husband, and father, as much as they show him as a politician and statesman. His wife Frances is the hub around which this family story revolves. Slaughter explores the extended Auburn family during a half century of profound change in American homes, marriage, and childrearing. With an eye for the provocative and revealing, Slaughter takes us behind the curtain of the early Victorian era’s private sphere. The Sewards of New York paints a rich portrait of an extraordinary family that played a key role in nineteenth-century New York and national politics.

Women, Immigrants, and the Working-Class Battle in Little Falls, New York: The Textile Strike of 1912-1913 (New York: Algora Publishing) by J.N. Cheney

J.N. Cheney recounts the political and cultural origins that created the conditions for the strike including factors such as immigration law and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. It carefully considers the plight of the primarily working-class immigrant women from Eastern and Southern Europe (mostly Italy, Poland and Slovakia) and their pursuit of better wages and improved working and living conditions.

The book details the horrific conditions they endured including dangerous, unsanitary factories, rampant tuberculosis, and dilapidated tenement housing, which were courageously exposed by nurse, social reformer, and suffragist M. Helen Schloss. When the workers in two Little Falls mills organized to improve their conditions with the help of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist Party of America, they were met with a brutal campaign of repression. This new research exposes the police violence, the suppression of free speech by local authorities, and the hostile media coverage that sought to demonize the strikers as dangerous agitators.

Jamie’s Decisions (TrueFiktion) by Joe Visconti

The graphic novel follows Jamie, a skilled laborer and formerly enslaved person in Virginia who found refuge in Syracuse, New York. His world is shattered when the federal government passes the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the U.S. Marshals capture his formerly enslaved friend, Jerry, under the law. Now, Jamie must decide whether to put his own freedom at risk to help the community save Jerry. This graphic novel focuses on the Jerry Rescue, an event that happened in Syracuse on October 1, 1851. A group of abolitionists forcibly liberated William “Jerry” Henry from U.S. custody after he was arrested under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Jamie’s Decisions explores the Jerry Rescue and the Syracuse abolitionist movement to highlight how community members – sometimes with different motives – can come together to seek justice for all.

Sag Harbor in the Revolution (Sag Harbor Museum) edited by Zachary Studenroth 

Have you heard of the Battle of Sag Harbor, the heroic raid on the British fort that still lies beneath our feet in the Old Burying Ground? Or of the mass exodus to Connecticut from Sag Harbor in September 1776, when local residents escaped the British occupation? Or do you know how our village rebuilt its economy after the Revolutionary War? These and many other questions will be answered in “Sag Harbor in the Revolution,” a book that the Museum is publishing to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Thirteen authors, all distinguished historians or specialists in their fields, have been brought together to contribute new research on the subject of Sag Harbor’s role in the American Revolution.

Until the Last Gun is Silent (New York: Viking, 2026) by Matthew Delmont

The book is sub-titled “A Story of Patriotism, The Vietnam War, and the Fight to Save America’s Soul.” While over 300,000 African American young men and women were serving in Vietnam, African Americans stateside played an important role in the anti-war movement, despite facing severe criticism in the media, by government officials, and by prominent leaders of civil rights groups. Anti-war activists included the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, and Medal of Honor recipient Dwight “Skip” Johnson. Much of the book focuses on Coretta Scott King, who the author credits with convincing her husband to support the anti-war movement, and Johnson’s family and friends, who fought to have him receive full honors and his family to receive full benefits. Matthew Delmont is a Professor of History at Dartmouth College.

Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (Chicago University Press, 2024) by Seth Rockman.

Rockman uses the exchange of products between the North and South to present a fuller picture of slavery as a national institution with economic ties binding different regions of the country. Examples include cloth and shoes manufactured in Massachusetts worn by enslaved Africans on Southern cotton plantations, tools like axes, hoes, and shovels manufactured in the North for sale to Southern planters, slave-produced commodities marketed by Northern companies, and a Northern ship construction industry building vessels to transport cotton to European markets. Seth Rockman is a Professor of History at Brown University.

Stitching Freedom: A True Story of Injustice, Defiance, and Hope in Angola Prison (New York: One Signal, 2025) by Gary Tyler with Ellen Bravo

This book is the memoir of Gary Tyler, written with the assistance of Ellen Bravo, an anti-racist activist involved in campaigns for fair trials and prison reform. In 1975, seventeen-year-old Gary Tyler was sentenced to death, a sentence later commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole at the notorious Angola Prison in Louisiana. Tyler, who is African American, was convicted of the murder of a white teenager by an all-white jury. His case was picked up by Amnesty International, and he was recommended for parole three times; each time the Governor of Louisiana rejected the recommendation. He spent four decades in prison for a crime he did not commit until he was released in 2016. While in prison Tyler took up quilting to remain sane, hence the book’s title Stitching Freedom.

Capitalism: A Global History (New York: Penguin 2025) by Sven Beckert

The text of this book is 1,087 pages. The total book with references, footnotes, and index is 1,325 pages. It is too heavy to hold so you can only read from it if it is positioned on your desk. For global history teachers, it acts more as a reference encyclopedia rather than a book, but it is an incredibly valuable reference. Beckert argues that no phenomenon has shaped human history as powerfully as capitalism. He believes capitalism shapes every facet of human existence including work, leisure, politics, values, and self-definition. Rather than centering the history of capitalism in Western Europe, Beckert examines islands of capitalism emerging all over the world starting about 1,000 AD with the development of trading centers, markets, and long distance merchants. The book starts at the port of Aden on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula and ends as globalization transforms rural, previously isolated regions of Southeast Asia. Along the way we learn how capitalism reshapes the world with the conquest of the Americas, the trans-Atlantic trade in human beings and slave-produced commodities, the Industrial Revolution, and a “neo-liberal age” of unfettered borders and instantaneous electronic transfers of capital around the globe. Key to the development of capitalism is the alliance of producers and traders with states that facilitate commerce and industry. This massive work draws on archives from six continents and countless countries. Sven Beckert is a Professor of History at Harvard University.

Book Reviews on First-Hand Accounts of the European Holocaust

First-Hand Accounts of the European Holocaust

Reviews by Ari Mandel and Josh Wolk

These books are first-person testimonies from survivors of the World War II European Holocaust. Most, but not all, of the survivor stories were written by Jews. The ability of students to meet survivors will soon end, so these accounts take on even greater historical and educational significance. The reviews are ordered by publication date.

The books reviewed are:

Smoke Over Birkenau, Seweryna Szmaglewska

Five Chimneys, Olga Lengyel

The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank

Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl

Night, Elie Wiesel

Auschwitz, Miklos Nyiszli

I Cannot Forgive, Rudolf Vrba and Alan Bestic

Auschwitz and After, Charlotte Delbo

Eyewitness Auschwitz, Filip Müller

Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi

Smoke Over Birkenau, Liana Millu

There Is a Place on Earth: A Woman in Birkenau, Giuliana Tedeschi

Europa, Europa, Shlomo Perel

A Gypsy in Auschwitz, Otto Rosenberg

People in Auschwitz, Hermann Langbein

A Lucky Child, Thomas Buergenthal

At the Mind’s Limits, Jean Amery

First One In, Last One Out, Marilyn Shimon

The Survivor, Josef Lewkowicz with Michael Calvin

Lipstick in Auschwitz, Miriam Nick

Smoke Over Birkenau, Seweryna Szmaglewska (Holt, 1945)

Seweryna Szmaglewska was a Polish Catholic writer and journalist arrested in 1942 and imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau. She survived and was liberated in January 1945. Her account of the camp was published in Polish in 1945 making it one of the earliest first-hand descriptions of the extermination process to reach the public. She later testified before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal where her book was entered into the trial record as evidence. Her account focuses on daily life in the women’s section of Birkenau. She explores the routines, the hunger, the selections, and the constant visibility of death. The title of the book refers to the smoke rising continuously from the crematoria that prisoners could see from across the camp. This account shaped the historical and legal understanding of the Holocaust in the years following the war. Its use at Nuremberg gives it a significance beyond testimony alone.

Five Chimneys, Olga Lengyel (Original English edition, Ziff-Davis, 1947)

Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz is a memoir by Olga Lengyel, a Jewish woman from Transylvania who survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Lengyel was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 along with her parents, husband, and two young sons. Upon arrival, her children and parents were immediately murdered in the gas chambers. Lengyel was assigned to the women’s section of the camp where she endured forced labor, starvation, disease, and constant terror. The title of the book refers to the crematoria at Auschwitz, whose chimneys continually released smoke from the bodies of murdered prisoners. In her memoir, Lengyel describes the daily life of female prisoners and the brutal system that governed the camp. She recounts the roles played by prisoner functionaries, including kapos, as well as the complex moral choices people faced in order to survive. The book also describes the medical experiments and mass killings carried out by the Nazis. Published shortly after the war in 1947, Five Chimneys was one of the earliest detailed accounts of Auschwitz written by a survivor. Lengyel later devoted much of her life to Holocaust education and remembrance. Her memoir remains an important testimony about the experiences of women in Nazi concentration camps.

The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank (Original English edition, New York: Doubleday, 1952 with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt)

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank was originally published in The Netherlands in 1947 as The Annex (Het Achterhuis). Anne Frank was a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis with her family and others in Amsterdam during occupation by Nazi Germany. Anne’s diary documents life in hiding ranging from the food they ate to the interpersonal dynamics within the Annex. The diary serves as a historical document, but also a deeply personal narrative that brings to life the fears of a young person amidst the Holocaust. Anne was captured in a Nazi raid on the secret annex in August 1944 and she died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in either February or March 1945.

Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl (Original English edition, Beacon, 1959)

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl combines memoir and psychological reflection based on the author’s experiences in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who was deported to camps including Auschwitz, Dachau, and other Nazi labor camps between 1942 and 1945. Much of his family perished in the Holocaust, including his parents and pregnant wife. In the first section of the book, Frankl describes daily life in the camps, including forced labor, starvation, disease, and the constant presence of death. He recounts how prisoners struggled to maintain hope and dignity under brutal conditions. Frankl observed that, while prisoners could not control their circumstances, they could still choose their attitude toward suffering. The second part of the book introduces Frankl’s psychological theory known as logotherapy, which argues that the primary human drive is the search for meaning in life. According to Frankl, individuals who were able to find purpose, whether through love, faith, or future goals, were often better able to endure the extreme hardships of camp life. First published in 1946, Man’s Search for Meaning became one of the most influential psychological and philosophical works of the twentieth century. It offers both a personal account of survival and a reflection on how humans can find meaning in even the most tragic of circumstances.

Night, Elie Wiesel (Original English edition, Hill and Wang, 1960)

Elie Wiesel’s Night is one of the most widely read Holocaust memoirs and recounts his experiences as a Jewish teenager during the Nazi genocide. Wiesel grew up in Sighet, a small town in Transylvania that was then part of Romania. In 1940 the village became part of Hungary and in 1944, when he was fifteen, German forces occupied Hungary and quickly began deporting Jews to concentration camps. Wiesel and his family were sent to Auschwitz, where his mother and younger sister were immediately murdered in the gas chambers. Wiesel remained with his father and endured forced labor, starvation, brutality, and constant fear of death. The memoir follows his movement from Auschwitz to the Buchenwald concentration camp as the Nazis evacuated prisoners during the final months of the war. Throughout the narrative, Wiesel describes the physical and psychological trauma of camp life, including the breakdown of moral norms among prisoners struggling to survive. The book also explores Wiesel’s crisis of faith as he witnesses immense suffering and cruelty. His relationship with his father becomes the emotional center of the story as they try to survive together in the camps. Published in 1956 in Yiddish and later translated into many languages, Night became one of the defining literary accounts of the Holocaust and is widely used in schools to teach about genocide and memory. After reading Night in its original Yiddish, I understand why the versions meant for mass consumption were heavily edited. Setting aside the length, the Yiddish version is more than 800 pages, the content, style and references are way too Jewish for a non-Jewish audience, and way too subversive and racy for the Orthodox world. I suspected few religious Jews could appreciate his yeshiva boy style, while not being scandalized at references to sex, or confronting God, or some Jews for not being “ideal victims.”

Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, Miklos Nyiszli (Original English edition, Crest, 1961)

Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account is the memoir of Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish doctor who was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Upon arrival, Nyiszli was selected to work as a pathologist for the notorious SS doctor Josef Mengele. Because of his medical training, Nyiszli was forced to assist Mengele with examinations and autopsies related to the doctor’s experiments on prisoners. This position allowed Nyiszli to witness many aspects of the camp’s operations, including medical experiments and the functioning of the crematoria. Although his role gave him slightly better living conditions than most prisoners, Nyiszli remained a prisoner under constant threat of death. His memoir describes both the horrors of the camp and the moral dilemmas he faced while being forced to participate in the Nazi system.

Nyiszli’s testimony provides a rare perspective on the camp from the viewpoint of a prisoner who worked within the medical system of the camp administration. The memoir remains an important historical source about the activities of Nazi doctors during the Holocaust.

I Cannot Forgive, Rudolf Vrba and Alan Bestic (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1963)

Rudolf Vrba was a Slovakian Jew born Walter Rosenberg in 1924. He was deported to Auschwitz in 1942 where he worked in various parts of the camp including the section where arriving transports were processed. In April 1944, he and fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler successfully escaped from Auschwitz. After their escape, Vrba and Wetzler compiled a detailed thirty-page report documenting the layout of the camp and the systematic mass murder taking place there. The Vrba-Wetzler Report was delivered to Allied governments and Jewish leaders. Vrba spent the rest of his life as a scientist and pharmacologist and died in 2006. His memoir was written with journalist Alan Bestic. I Cannot Forgive recounts Vrba’s two years inside Auschwitz and the planning and execution of the escape. This book addresses the role of bystanders and the failure of international institutions to respond. It questions the moral responsibilities of governments and organizations that received evidence of genocide and did not act.

Auschwitz and After, Charlotte Delbo (French edition, 1965. Original English Edition, Yale University Press, 1995)

Charlotte Delbo was a French writer and member of the resistance. She was arrested in 1942 and was deported to Auschwitz as part of a convoy of 230 French women. Of the 230 women only 49 survived. Delbo was later transferred to Ravensbrück before being released through a Red Cross negotiation in April 1945. She wrote her account of the camps immediately after the war but chose not to publish it until 1965, believing the story needed time after the war to be fully understood. She went on to write plays and essays and remained a committed voice against fascism until her death in 1985. Auschwitz and After is a three-part work that combines prose and poetry to recount Delbo’s experience in Birkenau. The story explores her transfer, death march, and the long years of psychological aftermath that followed liberation. The final section deals with the difficulty of returning to ordinary life and is one of the most powerful literary testaments of survivor trauma ever written. This account is significant because Delbo approached the Holocaust not only as a witness, but also as a literary artist. The book supports interdisciplinary instruction across history and literature. Her poem “O You Who Know,” (“Vous qui saviez”) challenges the reader to consider the inadequacy of what they think they understand. “O you who know / Could you know that hunger makes the eyes sparkle? / While thirst makes them dim? / You who know, / Could you know that you can see your mother dead, / Without shedding a tear? / You who know, / Could you know how in the morning you crave death, / Only to fear it by evening?”

Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, Filip Müller (Original English edition, Stein, 1979)

Eyewitness Auschwitz is the memoir of Filip Müller, one of the very few members of the Sonderkommando who survived the Holocaust. Müller was a Slovak Jewish prisoner deported to Auschwitz in 1942. Shortly after arriving, he was forced into the Sonderkommando, a special unit of prisoners compelled to work in the gas chambers and crematoria. Members of the Sonderkommando were forced to remove bodies from the gas chambers, extract gold teeth, and burn the corpses in crematoria. Because they witnessed the mass murder of prisoners, the Nazis regularly killed Sonderkommando workers to eliminate witnesses. Müller survived this position for three years, an extremely rare occurrence. In his memoir, Müller provides one of the most detailed first-hand descriptions of how the extermination process at Auschwitz functioned. He describes the arrival of transports, the deception used to send victims into gas chambers, and the mechanics of the crematoria. The book is particularly significant because it reveals the psychological burden faced by prisoners forced to assist in the killing process. Müller’s testimony became an important historical source and was later used in trials against Nazi war criminals. His memoir remains one of the most powerful and disturbing eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust.

Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi (Original English edition, Summit, 1986)

Survival in Auschwitz, also known as If This Is a Man, is a memoir by Italian Jewish chemist Primo Levi about his imprisonment in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Levi was arrested by Italian Fascists in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz the following year. Upon arrival, most of the people on his transport were immediately murdered, while Levi was selected for forced labor. Levi spent approximately eleven months in Auschwitz before the camp was liberated by Soviet forces in January 1945. His background as a chemist eventually allowed him to work in a laboratory, which slightly improved his chances of survival. In the memoir, Levi describes the harsh realities of camp life, including starvation, disease, violence from guards, and the constant struggle among prisoners for survival. Unlike some memoirs that focus mainly on emotional responses, Levi carefully analyzes the social structure of the camp system. He explains how the Nazis created a brutal hierarchy among prisoners and how survival often depended on luck, resourcefulness, and small advantages. First published in Italy in 1947, the book is widely considered one of the most important literary testimonies of the Holocaust. Levi’s clear and analytical writing style provides readers with a detailed picture of the daily functioning of Auschwitz and the moral challenges faced by those imprisoned there.

Smoke Over Birkenau, Liana Millu (Original English edition, Jewish Publication Society, 1991)

Smoke Over Birkenau is a collection of short memoir stories written by Liana Millu, an Italian Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Millu was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 after being arrested for her involvement with the Italian resistance against Nazi occupation. Unlike many memoirs that follow a single chronological narrative, this book consists of several short accounts describing the lives of women prisoners in Birkenau. Each story focuses on a different individual and highlights the emotional struggles faced by women trying to survive in the camp. Millu writes about friendships, hopes, betrayals, and the desperate attempts by prisoners to maintain dignity in an environment designed to destroy humanity. The stories reveal how small acts of kindness or solidarity sometimes helped prisoners endure the brutal conditions of camp life. First published in Italy in 1947, the book was one of the earliest literary accounts of women’s experiences in Auschwitz. Millu’s writing combines personal memory with a reflective style that captures the emotional impact of life in the camp. The memoir remains an important contribution to Holocaust literature, particularly for its focus on the perspective of female prisoners.

There Is a Place on Earth: A Woman in Birkenau, Giuliana Tedeschi (Random House, 1993)

Giuliana Tedeschi was an Italian Jewish woman and mother of two from Turin who was a teacher and a writer. She was deported from Italy to Auschwitz in April 1944 along with her husband and mother-in-law. Neither of them survived the Holocaust. After liberation, she returned to Italy and dedicated much of her life to Holocaust education and public testimony. Tedeschi died in 2010 at the age of 96. In her memoir, Tedeschi described the squalor, starvation, and torment of the camps and living in the shadow of the crematorium. She explored the daily struggle for survival, the solidarity formed between women prisoners, and the effort to hold onto identity and dignity inside a system built to destroy both. It is an important memoir because it describes relationships between women and solidarity as the basis for psychological survival. During her imprisonment, Tedesci’s daughters were hidden by a Catholic family. Mother and daughters were reunited after the war.

Europa, Europa, Shlomo Perel (Original English edition, Trade Paper, 1999)

Europa, Europa is the memoir of Shlomo Perel, a Jewish boy who survived the Holocaust by hiding his identity and posing as a German. Perel was born in Germany in 1925 to a Jewish family. When the Nazis came to power, his family fled to Poland to escape persecution. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Perel became separated from his family and was captured by Soviet forces. Later he fell into German hands but managed to convince them that he was an ethnic German rather than a Jew. Because he spoke fluent German and knew the culture, the Nazis accepted his claim. Perel spent several years living among Germans, even attending a Hitler Youth school while hiding the fact that he was Jewish. His survival depended on constant deception and the fear that his identity might be discovered at any moment.

The memoir describes the strange and dangerous situation of a Jewish teenager living inside Nazi society while secretly belonging to the group the Nazis sought to destroy. After the war, Perel eventually emigrated to Israel. His story was later adapted into a successful film, also titled Europa, Europa, which helped bring his extraordinary survival story to a wider audience.

A Gypsy in Auschwitz, Otto Rosenberg (Original English edition, Allison and Busby, 2001)

A Gypsy in Auschwitz is the memoir of Otto Rosenberg, a member of the Roma community who survived Nazi persecution during the Holocaust. Rosenberg was born in Germany in 1927 and was targeted by the Nazi regime because the Roma were considered racially inferior under Nazi ideology. During World War II, Rosenberg was arrested and eventually deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the Nazis had established a special section for Roma prisoners known as the “Gypsy camp.” Conditions in this camp were extremely harsh, with overcrowding, disease, and starvation common among prisoners. Rosenberg describes witnessing the destruction of the Roma section of the camp in 1944, when thousands of Roma men, women, and children were murdered in the gas chambers. He survived by being transferred to other camps, including Buchenwald, before eventually being liberated near the end of the war. His memoir highlights the often overlooked genocide of the Roma people during the Holocaust. After the war, Rosenberg became an advocate for Roma rights and worked to educate others about the persecution his community suffered under the Nazi regime.

People in Auschwitz, Hermann Langbein (North Carolina Press, 2004)

Hermann Langbein was an Austrian communist who was imprisoned at Dachau before being transferred to Auschwitz. At Auschwitz he worked as a clerk for SS physician Dr. Eduard Wirths. His administrative position gave him access to records, personnel, and encounters with both perpetrators and prisoners. After the war he became one of the most important figures in documenting Nazi crimes and played a central role in organizing the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of the 1960s. While Langbein draws on his own experience, People in Auschwitz is not a personal memoir, but a sweeping historical account of the entire Auschwitz camp complex that covers its administration, its prisoner population, its SS personnel, and the social structures that developed within its walls. This account is important because it documents how Auschwitz functioned as a system, bureaucratic, hierarchical, and deliberately organized. It is an invaluable reference for teachers and students engaged in serious research about the Holocaust.

A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy, Thomas Buergenthal (Original English edition, Hachette, 2007)

A Lucky Child tells the story of Thomas Buergenthal, who survived the Holocaust as a young boy. Buergenthal was born in 1934 to a Jewish family in Czechoslovakia. When the Nazis occupied the region during World War II, his family was forced into a Jewish ghetto and later deported to Auschwitz.

At Auschwitz, Buergenthal was separated from his mother and endured harsh conditions typical of concentration camps, including forced labor, starvation, and illness. As a child prisoner, survival was especially difficult, yet Buergenthal managed to endure through a combination of luck, resilience, and help from other prisoners. Later in the war, he was transferred to another camp and eventually survived a Nazi death march before being liberated by Allied forces. After the war, Buergenthal eventually emigrated to the United States. He went on to become an important figure in international law and human rights, serving as a judge on the International Court of Justice. His memoir reflects not only on his childhood survival, but also on how those experiences shaped his later commitment to justice and human rights. The book provides a unique perspective on the Holocaust through the eyes of a child survivor.

At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, Jean Amery (Indiana University Press, 2009)

Jean Amery was born Hans Maier in Vienna in 1912. After Nazi Germany annexed Austria, he joined the Belgian resistance and was ultimately captured by the Gestapo in 1943. He was tortured by the SS and then deported to Auschwitz and later Bergen-Belsen. He did not publish his reflections on Auschwitz until 1966 and he took his own life in 1978. The book was written under a French name he adopted to conceal his German and Jewish origins. At the Mind’s Limits is a collection of philosophical essays where Amery explores what the Holocaust did to human consciousness. He writes about torture, about being a Jewish intellectual in the camps, about the experience of aging as a survivor, and about resentment. He argued that survivors have a moral obligation not to forgive their persecutors. His essay on torture, in which he wrote, “I dare to assert that torture is the most horrible event a human being can retain within himself,” is considered one of the most important texts ever written on the subject. He argued that “torture was not an accidental quality of this Third Reich, but its essence” and compares it to “rape, a sexual act without the consent of one of the two partners.” This account is important because it moves beyond testimony into analysis.

First One In, Last One Out: Auschwitz Survivor 31321, Marilyn Shimon (Create Space, 2016)

Marilyn Shimon is a Holocaust educator, retired teacher, and volunteer gallery educator at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. She holds a certificate in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Georgetown University as well as a master’s degree from Hofstra University. Her book explores the story of her own uncle, Murray Scheinberg. Scheinberg was a Polish Jew who received prisoner number 31321 and was among the first eight men to enter Auschwitz as a political prisoner in 1940 and was also among the last to escape Dachau in 1945. The memoir traces Scheinberg’s journey through a variety of locations including Pawiak prison in Warsaw, Tarnow prison, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau. Shimon reconstructed this story from various sources including family testimony and historical records. A publisher originally rejected the manuscript in the 1960s finding the details too extraordinary to be believed. Scheinberg was one of Auschwitz’s earliest prisoners which helps to offer a rare chronological view of how the camp system was built and expanded. The book illustrates how the Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers but with a deliberate and escalating system of imprisonment and dehumanization.

The Survivor: How I Survived Six Concentration Camps and Became a Nazi Hunter, Josef Lewkowicz with Michael Calvin (HarperCollins, 2025)

Josef Lewkowicz was a Polish Jew who was born near Krakow, Poland in 1926. When German forces occupied Poland in 1939, Lewkowicz was just thirteen years old and he and his family were deported to a Nazi concentration camp. Before being liberated by Allied forces in 1945, Lewkowicz passed through six concentration camps. He was the only member of his extended family of 150 people to survive. After the war Lewkowicz became a Nazi hunter who worked to identify and bring SS perpetrators to justice. Among those he pursued was Amon Goeth, the SS commandant of the Plaszow camp who was later depicted in the film Schindler’s List. Goeth was tried by a Polish court and executed in 1946. Lewkowicz passed away in December 2024 at the age of 98, just weeks before his memoir was published. The memoir was co-written with British journalist Michael Calvin and follows Lewkowicz from the occupation of Krakow through liberation and his postwar pursuit of Nazi perpetrators. The book is as much an account of survival as it is a story of justice. The book is exceptionally useful because it raises questions that go beyond survival. What does justice look like after genocide? What is the difference between simply getting revenge and accountability? The connection to Schindler’s List provides students with a recognizable cultural entry point into a deeper historical discussion.

Lipstick in Auschwitz, Miriam Nick (Valcal, 2025)

Miriam Nick was born and raised in Krakow, Poland and was seventeen when Germany invaded in 1939. She was relocated to the Krakow ghetto with her mother and subsequently deported through a series of seven concentration camps. She survived two death marches over five years of imprisonment. After the war, she studied at the Paris Academy of Arts and later taught art history in Israel. The memoir was originally written for her grandchildren before she died in 2012. The book centers on Nick’s experience alongside her mother in Auschwitz and other camps. The title refers to a pivotal moment upon arrival: facing the SS selection process that would determine whether they lived or died, Nick found a discarded tube of lipstick and applied it to both their cheeks to make them appear healthier and more capable of work. That small act may have saved both their lives. The book is particularly effective for discussing woman-centric experiences in the Holocaust, the moral weight of everyday decisions under Nazi rule, and the meaning of resistance.

Rethinking Holocaust Education

Rethinking Holocaust Education

By Ari Mandel

Holocaust education occupies a paradoxical position in modern classrooms. It is one of the most widely taught subjects in social studies and history curricula in secondary schools and colleges, appearing in textbooks, museums, films, and commemorative programs across the world. Yet widespread exposure has not necessarily produced deeper historical understanding. Many students leave these lessons with strong impressions but only a limited grasp of the broader historical context, and of the historical forces that produced the Holocaust. In some cases, repeated exposure can even produce a kind of numbness in which the subject loses the weight it should carry.

The problem is clearly not a lack of exposure, but the way the history is framed and taught. Efforts to extract blunt moral lessons from the Holocaust may be well intentioned, but they risk reducing a complex historical catastrophe to a simplified parable. When history becomes primarily a vehicle for moral messaging, students may disengage or fail to grapple with the deeper questions the event raises.

Effective Holocaust education therefore requires a shift from quantity to quality. Instruction should prioritize historical context, careful analysis of evidence, and deep engagement with the social and political forces that made the genocide possible. Teaching the Holocaust as serious history allows students not only to understand the event itself, but also to examine how genocide develops, compare it with other episodes of mass violence, and evaluate contemporary issues with greater historical awareness.

Visibility Without Understanding

Despite its prominence in school curricula, Holocaust education often produces uneven results. Research and classroom experience suggest that many students retain only a fragmented grasp of the subject. They may recognize familiar symbols such as Auschwitz, Hitler, and concentration camps without understanding the broader context that made the genocide possible. Chronology is often unclear, the ideological foundations of Nazism are poorly understood, and the political and social mechanisms that enabled the Holocaust frequently remain unexplored.

Part of the difficulty lies in how instruction is structured. Lessons often prioritize emotional engagement over analysis. Graphic imagery, survivor testimony, and powerful narratives can leave lasting impressions, but without careful contextualization they may produce reactions without deeper comprehension. Students may remember what they saw or felt without understanding how or why events unfolded.

In some cases, the sheer volume of Holocaust imagery and storytelling has the opposite effect. Rather than strengthening engagement, repeated exposure can create a form of desensitization in which the subject becomes familiar but intellectually distant. Some historians have called this “Holocaust fatigue.” When it occurs, the Holocaust risks becoming just another tragedy rather than a historically specific event shaped by identifiable causes and decisions.

These patterns suggest that more exposure is not necessarily better. Depth of instruction matters more than frequency. A smaller number of carefully structured lessons that emphasize context, evidence, and inquiry may prove more effective than repeated encounters with sanitized and decontextualized narratives. Examined as a complex historical process shaped by ideology, political decisions, bureaucratic structures, and social participation, the Holocaust becomes far more intelligible.

The Problem with Moral Slogans

Attempts to extract blunt moral lessons from the Holocaust often produce the opposite of the intended effect. Teachers understandably want students to leave with a clear ethical message. Yet when the event is reduced to slogans about tolerance or bullying, its complexity disappears. Such framing turns a vast historical catastrophe into a simple moral parable and often produces indifference rather than engagement. More importantly, this framing allows students to distance themselves too easily. If the lesson is that Nazis were uniquely evil, students can reassure themselves that they are nothing like the perpetrators. As long as they are not committing atrocities, the history appears irrelevant. Modern Holocaust scholarship challenges this assumption. The individuals who carried out the Holocaust were not monsters drawn from some separate category of humanity. Most were ordinary people who lived ordinary lives, saw themselves as respectable, and participated in a system that persecuted and murdered millions.

Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Kelley was a United States Army Military Intelligence Corps officer who served as chief psychiatrist at Nuremberg Prison prior to the post-World War II trial of leading Nazis. Kelley examined 22 high ranking officials of the Nazi party, including Hitler’s second-in-command Hermann Goring and his deputy Rudolf Hess to determine whether they were insane and predict if they would suffer a breakdown before and during their trial. In his book, 22 Cells in Nuremberg. A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminals (London: W. H. Allen, 1947) published after the trial, Kelley argued the defendants did not represent a specifically Nazi pathology, but that “they were simply creatures of their environment, as all humans are.” He believed that under similar circumstances, other people, including Americans might act in the same way. Kelley’s work with the Nazi prisoners is at the core of the recent movie Nuremberg.

Reaching similar conclusions, Hannah Arendt famously described this as the “banality of evil.” Observing Adolf Eichmann’s trial, she argued that genocide was often carried out not by fanatics but by individuals who were disturbingly normal. Eichmann presented himself as a bureaucrat who had simply performed his duties. While controversial, her argument forced historians to confront an unsettling reality: the Holocaust depended not only on ideology but on widespread participation.

Subsequent research reinforced this point. Stanley Milgram’s experiments demonstrated how ordinary individuals could be persuaded to harm others. Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men showed how middle-aged reservists, with little prior ideological commitment, became participants in mass murder through a mixture of obedience, peer pressure, and gradual moral accommodation.

Another crucial dimension concerns bystanders. Many people did not directly participate in violence, yet they witnessed persecution and chose not to intervene. Neighbors watched families disappear. Railway workers transported deportees. Civil servants processed the machinery of persecution. Their inaction helped sustain the system. For students, this category is often the most relevant. Few imagine themselves as perpetrators, and many hope they would be rescuers. In reality, most people occupy the space in between.

For Holocaust education, these insights are essential. The goal is not simply to label Nazis as evil, but to examine the social and psychological processes that made participation possible. Violence rarely begins with a single decision. It develops through smaller choices, compromises, and acts of conformity until the unthinkable becomes normalized. Taught this way, the Holocaust becomes not a distant moral fable but a deeply human and troubling historical process.

This approach also shifts the focus from abstract judgment to historical inquiry. Instead of asking whether people in the past were good or evil, students are encouraged to examine how ordinary individuals understood their actions, how institutions shaped behavior, and how social pressures influenced decision making. These questions do not excuse participation in violence, but they make it possible to understand how such participation occurs. In doing so, they bring the history closer to students’ own world, where moral choices are rarely presented in clear or dramatic terms.

What Students Never Learn: Jewish Life Before the Holocaust

Holocaust education often begins with persecution and ends with genocide. While these topics are essential, this framing creates a distorted picture of Jewish history. This problem is compounded by the fact that, for many students, Holocaust lessons may be their first real exposure to Jews or Judaism. Without prior knowledge or personal connection, their initial encounter may come through the lens of Nazi ideology itself. Students are often shown antisemitic caricatures to illustrate prejudice. These materials are important historical evidence, but without a broader context they can unintentionally reinforce the distortions they were meant to expose. With little else to draw on, students may come to understand Jews primarily through the representations created by their persecutors.

Before the Holocaust, Jewish communities across Europe were longstanding and integral parts of the social, cultural, and economic life of many cities and towns. Their traditions had evolved over millennia and supported vibrant intellectual, artistic, and political cultures. Jewish merchants, professionals, writers, musicians, and scholars played visible roles in the life of cities from Moscow to Paris. Political movements ranged from religious traditionalism to socialism and liberalism. Yiddish literature and theater flourished, and newspapers, schools, and community institutions shaped daily life across thousands of communities. This world was not defined solely by persecution. It was a living civilization with its own language, debates, and cultural achievements.

Understanding this world is essential to grasping the magnitude of the Holocaust. The destruction of European Jewry was not only the murder of millions but also the destruction of communities and traditions that had developed over generations. Without this context, students cannot fully understand what was destroyed.

Teaching Jewish life before the Holocaust corrects a deeper distortion. Jewish history is often presented as a sequence of persecutions culminating in genocide, reducing a complex civilization to a narrative of suffering. While antisemitism is part of that history, education should also present the richness of Jewish life that existed long before the Nazis attempted to eradicate it and that ultimately survived their attempt. Too often, students encounter Jews only as victims rather than as participants in a long and complex civilization.

This broader perspective has an additional benefit. When students encounter Jewish life as a living culture, they are better able to recognize the gap between antisemitic stereotypes and historical reality. In this sense, teaching Jewish life before the Holocaust is not a diversion but a necessary foundation for understanding it.

Why Holocaust Education Matters Now

Holocaust education matters not only because of the historical significance of the event itself, but also because the patterns that made it possible continue to appear in other contexts. Antisemitism has often flourished during periods of political instability, economic stress, or cultural anxiety. When individuals or communities explain difficult conditions by blaming vulnerable groups, it reflects a deeper failure to confront underlying problems and often leads to consequences that extend far beyond the targeted minority. In such moments, scapegoating replaces serious engagement with complex realities.

Crises have repeatedly produced movements that seek simple explanations for complex conditions. Economic hardship and rapid social change can generate narratives that attribute national decline to hidden enemies or internal betrayal. In these environments, conspiracy thinking takes hold and blame is redirected outward. Antisemitism has long provided one of the most persistent frameworks for this kind of explanation.

Teaching the Holocaust provides an opportunity to examine how such narratives develop and gain influence. Nazi ideology did not emerge in a vacuum. It drew on long standing traditions of antisemitism, racial theories, and conspiracy myths circulating across Europe, shaped in part by the political and economic crises that followed the first World War. Studied in context, these ideas reveal how prejudice becomes institutionalized and how conspiracy thinking can be translated into policy.

Holocaust education also encourages students to distinguish between different forms of mass violence. Genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity are related but distinct. Examining these categories allows for more precise analysis and comparison without diminishing the Holocaust.

In this sense, Holocaust education serves an important civic function. Students learn how propaganda reshapes public opinion, how institutions become instruments of persecution, and how narratives of blame take hold. The goal is not to draw simplistic parallels, but to equip students with the tools to recognize dangerous patterns.

Understanding the Holocaust therefore requires more than memorization. It requires examining how prejudice becomes normalized, how conspiracy thinking spreads, and how societies respond to crisis by directing anger toward vulnerable groups. When approached this way, Holocaust education becomes not only an exercise in remembrance but a framework for understanding how societies can descend into exclusion and violence.

Conclusion

Teaching the Holocaust presents educators with a difficult but essential responsibility. The challenge is not simply to present the facts, but to ensure that students understand the processes that made the genocide possible. Holocaust education can easily fall into repetition, emotional overload, or simplified moral messaging that leaves students with impressions but little analysis.

A more effective approach places historical inquiry at the center. Students should examine the ideological roots of antisemitism, the political and economic conditions that allowed extremism to flourish, and the structures that enabled genocide. This includes attention to the broader context in which Nazism emerged, including the aftermath of the First World War and the crises that followed. They should also confront the role of ordinary individuals, bystanders, and incremental choices in shaping events.

Equally important is situating the Holocaust within the broader history of Jewish life. The destruction of European Jewry cannot be understood solely through persecution. Without that context, the scale of the loss is diminished.

Ultimately, the purpose of Holocaust education is not only remembrance but understanding. Teaching the Holocaust as serious history allows students to grapple with the complexities of human behavior and the fragility of modern societies. It equips them to recognize patterns of scapegoating, conspiracy thinking, and political extremism before they escalate into something far more dangerous.

Remarks by German Chancellor Merkel, U.S. President Obama, and Holocaust Survivor Elie Wiesel at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp

Source: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-obama-german-chancellor-merkel-and-elie-wiesel-buchenwald-concent

In June 2009, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, United States President Barack Obama, and Holocaust Survivor Elie Wiesel spoke at a memorial service at the Buchenwald Concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. Wiesel was fifteen years old when he was imprisoned by the Nazis, first at Auschwitz, and then at Buchenwald These are excerpts from their speeches.

CHANCELLOR MERKEL: “Unimaginable horror, shock — there are no words to adequately describe what we feel when we look at the suffering inflicted so cruelly upon so many people here and in other concentration and extermination camps under National Socialist terror. I bow my head before the victims. We, the Germans, are faced with the agonizing question how and why — how could this happen? How could Germany wreak such havoc in Europe and the world? It is therefore incumbent upon us Germans to show an unshakeable resolve to do everything we can so that something like this never happens again.

On the 25th of January, the presidents of the associations of former inmates at the concentration camps presented their request to the public, and this request closes with the following words: “The last eyewitness appeal to Germany, to all European states, and to the international community to continue preserving and honoring the human gift of remembrance and commemoration into the future. We ask young people to carry on our struggle against Nazi ideology, and for a just, peaceful and tolerant world; a world that has no place for anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, and right-wing extremism.”

This appeal of the survivors clearly defines the very special responsibility we Germans have to shoulder with regard to our history. And for me, therefore, there are three messages that are important today. First, let me emphasize, we Germans see it as past of our country’s raison d’être to keep the everlasting memory alive of the break with civilization that was the Shoah. Only in this way will we be able to shape our future. I am therefore very grateful that the Buchenwald memorial has always placed great emphasis on the dialogue with younger people, to conversations with eyewitnesses, to documentation, and a broad-based educational program. Second, it is most important to keep the memory of the great sacrifices alive that had to be made to put an end to the terror of National Socialism and to liberate its victims and to rid all people of its yoke . . .

Third, here in Buchenwald I would like to highlight an obligation placed on us Germans as a consequence of our past: to stand up for human rights, to stand up for rule of law, and for democracy. We shall fight against terror, extremism, and anti-Semitism. And in the awareness of our responsibility we shall strive for peace and freedom, together with our friends and partners in the United States and all over the world.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: “More than half a century later, our grief and our outrage over what happened have not diminished. I will not forget what I’ve seen here today. I’ve known about this place since I was a boy, hearing stories about my great uncle, who was a very young man serving in World War II. He was part of the 89th Infantry Division, the first Americans to reach a concentration camp. They liberated Ohrdruf, one of Buchenwald’s sub-camps. … He returned from his service in a state of shock saying little and isolating himself for months on end from family and friends, alone with the painful memories that would not leave his head. And as we see — as we saw some of the images here, it’s understandable that someone who witnessed what had taken place here would be in a state of shock.

My great uncle’s commander, General Eisenhower, understood this impulse to silence. He had seen the piles of bodies and starving survivors and deplorable conditions that the American soldiers found when they arrived, and he knew that those who witnessed these things might be too stunned to speak about them or be able — be unable to find the words to describe them; that they might be rendered mute in the way my great uncle had. And he knew that what had happened here was so unthinkable that after the bodies had been taken away, that perhaps no one would believe it. And that’s why he ordered American troops and Germans from the nearby town to tour the camp. He invited congressmen and journalists to bear witness and ordered photographs and films to be made. And he insisted on viewing every corner of these camps so that — and I quote — he could “be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever in the future there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.”

We are here today because we know this work is not yet finished. To this day, there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened — a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful. This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts; a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history. Also to this day, there are those who perpetuate every form of intolerance — racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism, and more — hatred that degrades its victims and diminishes us all. In this century, we’ve seen genocide. We’ve seen mass graves and the ashes of villages burned to the ground; children used as soldiers and rape used as a weapon of war. This places teaches us that we must be ever vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time, that we must reject the false comfort that others’ suffering is not our problem and commit ourselves to resisting those who would subjugate others to serve their own interests . . .

When the American GIs arrived they were astonished to find more than 900 children still alive, and the youngest was just three years old. And I’m told that a couple of the prisoners even wrote a Buchenwald song that many here sang. Among the lyrics were these: “…whatever our fate, we will say yes to life, for the day will come when we are free…in our blood we carry the will to live and in our hearts, in our hearts — faith.”

ELIE WIESEL: “As I came here today it was actually a way of coming and visiting my father’s grave – but he had no grave. His grave is somewhere in the sky. This has become in those years the largest cemetery of the Jewish people. The day he died was one of the darkest in my life. He became sick, weak, and I was there. I was there when he suffered. I was there when he asked for help, for water. I was there to receive his last words. But I was not there when he called for me, although we were in the same block; he on the upper bed and I on the lower bed. He called my name, and I was too afraid to move. All of us were. And then he died. I was there, but I was not there. And I thought one day I will come back and speak to him, and tell him of the world that has become mine. I speak to him of times in which memory has become a sacred duty of all people of good will . . .

What can I tell him that the world has learned?

When I was liberated in 1945, April 11, by the American army, somehow many of us were convinced that at least one lesson will have been learned – that never again will there be war; that hatred is not an option, that racism is stupid; and the will to conquer other people’s minds or territories or aspirations, that will is meaningless . .

But again, the world hasn’t. Had the world learned, there would have been no Cambodia and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia. Will the world ever learn? I think that is why Buchenwald is so important – as important, of course, but differently as Auschwitz. It’s important because here the large – the big camp was a kind of international community. People came there from all horizons –

 political, economic, culture. The first globalization essay, experiment, were made in Buchenwald. And all that was meant to diminish the humanity of human beings . . .

Memory must bring people together rather than set them apart. Memories here not to sow anger in our hearts, but on the contrary, a sense of solidarity that all those who need us. What else can we do except invoke that memory so that people everywhere who say the 21st century is a century of new beginnings, filled with promise and infinite hope, and at times profound gratitude to all those who believe in our task, which is to improve the human condition.

A History of Civil Disobedience Lesson

A History of Civil Disobedience Lesson

by John Staudt

PBS and Ken Burns have a new three-part series on the legacy of 19th century American philosopher and writer Henry David Thoreau and his 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience,” which inspired activists including Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. The website includes a seven minute video and excerpts from the well-known essay.

Parts 1–2 work well as paired reading and analysis. Part 3 is designed for longer written responses or small-group discussion. Part 4 may be assigned as a take-home shot essay prompt. This worksheet is designed to serve as the capstone activity for a civil rights unit.

ADAPT (American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today)

Part 1Thoreau & the Origins of Civil Disobedience

CONTEXT: In 1846, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax, was arrested, and spent a night in jail. He opposed both slavery and the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), which he saw as an unjust war designed to expand slavery itself. His 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience” became the philosophical foundation for mass movements around the world.

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?… Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. – Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849

I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was still a more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. – Henry David Thoreau, regarding his night in jail

Questions:
1. Thoreau argues that “the true place for a just man” under an unjust government is prison. What does he mean? How can accepting imprisonment represent freedom rather than defeat?

2. Thoreau was upset not just with the federal government, but with Massachusetts (his home state), a state that claimed to oppose slavery but still collected taxes that funded it. What does his critique of complicity tell us about moral responsibility in a democracy? Is paying taxes that fund an unjust policy the same as supporting it?

3. Reportedly, when Thoreau was in jail, his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him and asked “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau replied, “Waldo, what are you doing out there?” What argument is Thoreau making in this exchange? Why does he consider Emerson’s freedom to be a kind of imprisonment for his friend?

Part 2Four Movements Comparing Civil Disobedience in Practice

REFERENCE TABLE: Use the comparison table and the core principles card to ground your analysis. Return to both as you work through each question.

MovementAct of DisobedienceUnjust Law TargetedScaleOutcome
Henry David Thoreau 1846 United StatesRefused to pay state tax; accepted one night in jailFugitive Slave Act; tax support of an unjust warIndividualEssay “Civil Disobedience” (1849); philosophical foundation for all later movements
Mahatma Gandhi 1930 British IndiaLed 240-mile Salt March; thousands deliberately violated British salt lawBritish colonial salt monopolyMass MovementExposed colonial injustice globally; accelerated Indian independence (1947)
Martin Luther King, Jr. 1955–1968 United StatesSit-ins, marches, boycotts; Letter from Birmingham Jail written while imprisonedJim Crow segregation laws throughout the SouthMass MovementCivil Rights Act (1964); Voting Rights Act (1965)
ADAPT Disability Rights Activists; 1990 United States60 protesters crawled up 83 Capitol steps; arrestedInaccessible built environment; no federal disability civil rights lawOrganized movementADA signed July 26, 1990 four months after the Capitol Crawl
Thoreau’s Four Core Principles of Civil Disobedience
1. Break the unjust law publicly; The act itself is the argument made visible
2. Accept the legal consequences willingly; Punishment demonstrates the law’s injustice
3. Use sacrifice to awaken public conscience; Suffering must be made meaningful, not merely endured
4. Force systemic change through moral pressure; The goal is transformation of law or policy

Questions:

1. What core principles of civil disobedience remained unchanged across all four movements from Thoreau (1846) to the Capitol Crawl (1990)? Identify at least two that appear in every case and explain why those specific principles are essential to the strategy of Civil Disobedience.

2. Thoreau’s act was individual. Gandhi turned the principle into a mass movement. King organized city-wide boycotts, sit-ins, and marches. ADAPT mobilized a coordinated national campaign. What did each movement gain by expanding from individual to collective action? What did it risk losing?
3. Is individual civil disobedience one person refusing, accepting arrest, making a point politically effective on its own? Or does it require mass participation to force change? Explain your response.

Part 3Conditions for Success: What Made Each Movement Effective?

ANALYTICAL FRAME: Effective civil disobedience does not operate in a vacuum. Timing, media coverage, public response, government reaction, and the clarity of the injustice being demonstrated all shape whether a movement succeeds or fails. Use the reading and the comparison table to analyze what specific conditions made each movement’s disobedience effective.

ANALYTICAL QUESTION COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS:

Compare the outcomes of at least two of the four movements identified above.

1. How did specific conditions, timing, public response, media attention, and government reaction make each form of civil disobedience effective?

2. Why did Thoreau’s individual act produce an essay rather than immediate political change? Why did the Capitol Crawl produce the ADA within four months?

3. Each of the four movements used protesters’ own bodies to make injustice visible: Thoreau in a jail cell, Gandhi marching to the sea, King’s marchers facing police dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, disability activists crawling up the U.S. Capitol steps. Why is using the body itself as the instrument of protest so powerful? What does it communicate that speeches and petitions cannot?

4. King wrote in the ̈Letter from Birmingham Jail ̈ that direct action “creates such a crisis and fosters such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.” How did each action or movement succeed in forcing confrontation?

Part 4Synthesis: The Legacy of Civil Disobedience

CORE SYNTHESIS QUESTION: Thoreau, Gandhi, King, and ADAPT activists all believed that breaking an unjust law openly, accepting punishment willingly, and making injustice visible could lead to changing unjust laws. Their success proves that civil disobedience works under specific conditions. What are those conditions?

PERSONAL REFLECTION: Is there an issue today for you which civil disobedience: breaking a law publicly and accepting the consequences willingly would be justified? What would be required before you made your move?

Excerpts from Thoreau’s Essay on “Civil Disobedience.”

Source: https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/10/Civil-Disobedience-by-Henry-David-Thoreau.pdf

Excerpt 1: Thoreau Believed there is a Moral Obligation to Resist Unjust Laws

“He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist. How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also. All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the Revolution of ’75. If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is

most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them. All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.”

Excerpt 2: Thoreau Rejected a Moral Obligation to Obey Authority

“[William] Paley, a common authority with many on moral questions, in his chapter on the “Duty of Submission to Civil Government,” resolves all civil obligation into expediency; and he proceeds to say that “so long as the interest of the whole society requires it, that is, so long as the established government cannot be resisted or changed without public inconveniency, it is the will of God… that the established government be obeyed, —and no longer. This principle being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of redressing it on the other.” Of this, he says, every man shall judge for himself. But Paley appears never to have contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself. This, according to Paley, would be inconvenient. But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.”

Note: William Paley was an 18th century British philosopher and theologian who argued that people had a duty to submit to government authority.

Excerpt 3: Thoreau Argued Against Waiting for Reforms that Might Never Happen

“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?”

Excerpt 4: Thoreau Advocated for Nonviolent Resistance

“One would think, that a deliberate and practical denial of its authority was the only offence never contemplated by government; else, why has it not assigned its definite, its suitable and proportionate, penalty? If a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that I know, and determined only by the discretion of those who placed him there; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from the State, he is soon permitted to go at large again. If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth, — certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

Excerpt 5: Thoreau Condemned the State’s Resistance to Change

As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone. I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong. It is not my business to be petitioning the Governor or the Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; and if they should not bear my petition, what should I do then? But in this case the State has provided no way: its very Constitution is the evil. This may seem to be harsh and stubborn and unconciliatory; but it is to treat with the utmost kindness and consideration the only spirit that can appreciate or deserves it. So is any change for the better, like birth and death, which convulse the body. I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

Excerpt 6: Thoreau Believed in the Power of Truth and the Individual

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable, ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her – the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, “But what shall I do?” my answer is, “If you really wish to do anything, resign your office.” When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.”

Using Graph Analysis to Document Climate Change

Using Graph Analysis to Document Climate Change

By Julianna Bellini

Social Studies teachers are expected to help students develop reading and analytical skills and promote written, oral, and numeric literacy. Including graphs like these in a lesson on the impact of climate change addresses both analytical skills and numeric literacy.

Graph #1: Global Average Surface Temperature (1885–2025)

Source: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature

A graph showing the temperature of the sun AI-generated content may be incorrect.

This graph shows changes in Earth’s global average surface temperature using temperature anomalies in °C. A temperature anomaly is how much the temperature is above or below a reference “normal” period (1850-1900), rather than the actual temperature. Temperatures stay fairly stable in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then rise noticeably from the mid-1900s, with the fastest warming in recent decades. This trend reflects the rise in greenhouse gases from human activities, especially burning fossil fuels, which trap heat in the atmosphere.

Questions

1. What does the horizontal x-axis represent?

2. What does the vertical y-axis represent?

3. At what point on this graph did global average temperature start to change?

4. What is the direction of this change?

5. What is the cause of this change?

Graph #2: Global Sea Level Average (1885–2025)

Source: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level

A graph of a sea level AI-generated content may be incorrect.

This graph shows changes in global average sea level from 1885 to 2025. Sea level is measured in centimeters compared to a long term baseline, so positive values mean higher than average seas. Over this period, sea level remained relatively low and stable in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then began a steady rise in the mid‐1900s. The rise accelerates in recent decades due to warming temperatures, which cause ocean water to expand and ice on land to melt. This long‐term increase in sea level is consistent with global warming driven by rising greenhouse gas concentrations.

Questions

1. What does the horizontal x-axis represent?

2. What does the vertical y-axis represent?

3. When did sea levels begin to rise?

4. When did sea level rise accelerate?

5. What is the cause of this change?

Graph #3: Ocean Heat Content (1955–2024)

Source: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-ocean-heat-content

A graph showing the growth of a company AI-generated content may be incorrect.


This graph shows changes in the amount of heat stored in the world’s oceans from 1955 to 2024. Ocean heat content is measured in joules, which are units of energy; the same unit scientists use to compare energy in different parts of the climate system. When greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, more than 90% of that excess energy goes into the oceans instead of staying in the air. Because water can store large amounts of energy with only small temperature changes, increases in ocean heat content clearly show the long‐term warming of the climate system. The graph shows that ocean heat content has risen steadily, reflecting continued heat absorption by the oceans as the planet warms.

Questions

1. What does the horizontal x-axis represent?

2. What does the vertical y-axis represent?

3. When did ocean heat content start to change?

4. What is the direction of the change?

5. What is the cause of this change?

Graph #4: Natural Disasters Reported (1955–2024)

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-natural-disaster-events

A graph showing the number of storms reported AI-generated content may be incorrect.

This graph shows the number of natural disaster events reported globally from 1955 to 2024. The data include disasters such as floods, storms, droughts, and wildfires that have been recorded in international disaster databases. The graph shows a clear upward trend in reported events over time. Some of this increase reflects better reporting and communication systems, especially in earlier decades.

Questions

1. What does the horizontal x-axis represent?

2. What does the vertical y-axis represent?

3. What is the trend in this graph?

4. What is the cause of this change?

Graph #5: CO2 Emissions (1885–2024)

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

A graph showing the growth of the company's growth AI-generated content may be incorrect.

This graph shows global carbon (CO2) emissions from 1885 to 2024, measured in gigatons of CO2 per year (GtCO2/yr). CO2 is the most abundant greenhouse gas emitted by human activities, mainly from burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. The graph remains low and somewhat stable in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then rises sharply throughout the 20th century as industrialization spread. Emissions accelerate particularly after World War II with increased reliance on fossil energy and continue to grow into the 21st century.

Questions

1. What does the horizontal x-axis represent?

2. What does the vertical y-axis represent?

3. When did carbon dioxide emissions start to change?

4. What is the direction of the change?

5. What is the cause of this change?

Graph #6: Maximum Arctic Sea Ice Extent (1980–2024)

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/arctic-sea-ice

A graph of the arctic sea ice extent AI-generated content may be incorrect.

This graph shows the annual maximum extent of Arctic sea ice from 1980 to 2024, measured in million square kilometers. Maximum sea ice extent refers to the largest area covered by sea ice each year, usually occurring in late winter. The graph illustrates a long term decline in the size of the Arctic’s winter ice cover, even though there is variability. This downward trend is linked to rising global temperatures, since warmer air and ocean conditions reduce the formation and persistence of sea ice.

Questions

1. What does the horizontal x-axis represent?

2. What does the vertical y-axis represent?

3. What is the trend with the annual maximum extent of Arctic sea ice?

4. What is the cause of this change?

Graph #7: Global Atmospheric Methane Concentrations (1984–2024)

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-methane-concentrations?time=earliest..20 25-09-15

A graph showing the amount of methane in the amount of gas AI-generated content may be incorrect.

This graph shows changes in the concentration of methane (CH4) in Earth’s atmosphere from 1984 to 2024, measured in parts per billion (ppb). Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas (much more effective at trapping heat than CO2 over short time periods) and comes from both natural sources (wetlands) and human activities (agriculture, fossil fuel production). The graph reveals a steady rise in atmospheric methane over the time period, with especially notable increases in recent years. Rising methane contributes to enhanced greenhouse warming and amplifies climate change alongside carbon dioxide.

Questions

1. What does the horizontal x-axis represent?

2. What does the vertical y-axis represent?

3. When did the concentration of methane in the Earth’s atmosphere start to change?

4. What is the direction of the change?

5. What is the cause of this change?

Graph #8: Ice Sheet Mass Balance in Antarctica (2002–2020)

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ice-sheet-mass-balance

A graph showing the number of mass in the year AI-generated content may be incorrect.

This graph shows the change in the mass balance of Antarctica’s ice sheets from 2002 to 2020, measured in gigatons per year (Gt/yr). Ice sheet mass balance represents the net gain or loss of ice (positive values mean ice is being added, and negative values mean ice is being lost.) The graph demonstrates that Antarctica has been losing ice overall during this period, with increasingly negative values over time. This ice loss contributes to global sea level rise because ice previously stored on land flows into the ocean. The moving toward more negative mass balance is consistent with warming ocean and air temperatures affecting ice stability.

Questions

1. What does the horizontal x-axis represent?

2. What does the vertical y-axis represent?

3. What is the trend in the mass balance of Antarctica’s ice sheets?

4. What is the cause of this change?

More Than Meets the Axis: Helping Social Studies Students Understand Graphs

More Than Meets the Axis: Helping Social Studies Students Understand Graphs

by Marilyn DePietto

When James Baldwin wrote that “the purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions,” (Baldwin, 1963) he was not calling educators to produce agreement. He was calling us to find the courage to confront uncomfortable truths, to question what appears settled, and to resist the ease of acceptance. In today’s media-saturated world, that courage increasingly depends on a form of literacy that sits at the intersection of mathematics and social studies: the ability to critically interpret visual representations of data.

Mathematics is often framed as the domain of certainty and social studies as the domain of interpretation. Students are told that in mathematics, conclusions follow logically from established truths. In social studies, students weigh perspectives, contexts, and claims. But this division breaks down when we consider how quantitative information is used in public life. Graphs, charts, rankings, and statistics shape arguments about policy, economics, education, and justice. These representations carry the authority of mathematics while serving rhetorical purposes in ways that demand interpretation. If we teach students how to read and construct graphs but not how to interrogate them, we have only taught half the discipline.

The Myth of Neutral Numbers

There is a persistent belief among students and educators alike that numbers are inherently objective. “Numbers don’t lie” is often invoked as a shield against critique. Yet quantitative reasoning has historically been used to justify deeply flawed, oppressive, and harmful ideas. Pseudoscientific practices such as eugenics and phrenology relied heavily on measurement, classification, and statistical language to present social hierarchies as natural and inevitable. Their persuasive power depended not only on the claims themselves but on the perceived neutrality of the mathematical tools used to present them.

In contexts where numerical literacy is limited, the persuasive effect is amplified. When audiences are not equipped to question how data is gathered, represented, or framed, they are more likely to accept conclusions uncritically. The issue, therefore, is not whether the numbers themselves are “true,” but what viewers are urged to conclude from them. This distinction is crucial for both mathematics and social studies classrooms. It shifts the focus from accuracy alone to interpretation.

Why Graphs Matter

Graphs are particularly powerful tools for this kind of interdisciplinary work. They translate complex numerical information into visual form, allowing patterns and trends to emerge clearly. In a media environment dominated by images, headlines, and short-form content, graphs and charts often function as stand-alone arguments. A viewer may spend only a few seconds glancing at one before forming a conclusion.

This speed is precisely what makes graphs so potentially misleading. It is important to note that “misleading” does not mean “false.” A graph can accurately represent data while still encouraging interpretations that go beyond, or even contradict, the evidence. The “leading” in a misleading graph comes not from the data itself but from the choices made in its presentation including scale, labeling, comparison groups, visual emphasis, and omission.

Teaching students to recognize these choices is an essential component of both mathematical and civic thinking. New York State Next Generation Learning Standards in both mathematics and social studies call for students to analyze data, evaluate sources, and make evidence-based claims. Critically interpreting graphs sits squarely at the intersection of these expectations.

Seeing the Same Data Differently

One of the most effective ways to provide an entry point for this work is to present students with two graphs that display the same data in different ways (Figure 1). At first glance, students often assume that these wildly different visuals must reflect different datasets. When they discover that the underlying numbers are identical, it creates a productive moment of confusion and dissonance.

The two line graphs represent the same trend over time. In the left one, the vertical axis is truncated, which has the effect of exaggerating small changes. In the other, the axis begins at zero, making those same changes appear minimal. Technically, neither graph is “wrong.” Both accurately plot the data points. Note that in the exaggerated graph (left), the y-axis jumps from 0 to 6.9, but there is also a clearly visible break in the axis, properly indicating that part of the axis is not to scale. The break is indicated by the small zigzag line at the bottom. Yet they invite very different interpretations.

Figure 1 Source: Reconstructed from Identifying Misleading Graphs. Konst Math.

A graph of women's long jujubes AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Rather than immediately explaining the discrepancy, teachers may pose a series of questions:

  • What claim might each graph support?
  • What differences do you notice in how the data is displayed?
  • Why might someone choose to present the data this way?
  • What conclusions would go beyond what the data can actually support?

Students often begin by focusing on surface features (“This one goes up more”), but with guidance, they can move toward more sophisticated observations about scale, proportion, and visual emphasis. A common misconception is that if a graph is technically correct, it is also fair or neutral. This activity helps disrupt that assumption. The goal is not necessarily to accuse a creator of deception, but to analyze how representation shapes interpretation.

When Design Implies Argument

A graph of crime in florida AI-generated content may be incorrect.Figure 2 Source: The Society Pages   In other examples, the persuasive elements of a graph become even more apparent. Figure 2 shows a famously misleading and widely circulated news graphic from several years ago depicting trends before and after Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law was enacted. The graph includes dramatic shading and highlights a specific point in time, drawing the viewer’s attention and suggesting a causal relationship. At a glance, the message feels clear: gun deaths decreased because of this policy. Yet a closer and more critical look reveals that the y-axis is labeled in the opposite direction from established convention. Again, this graph is properly labeled, and there is nothing mathematically incorrect about it. But creating an axis that increases in the downward direction seems like an intentional effort to mislead viewers.

Furthermore, the shading, while seemingly a design choice, functions rhetorically by guiding the viewer’s eye away from the deceptive y-axis, and towards the stark drop off after 2005. If this graph were conventionally constructed, it would show a sharp upward spike after that year.

Students often struggle here with this misconception; they assume that critique requires identifying an error. When no calculation is wrong, they may conclude there is nothing to question. This is an opportunity to expand their understanding of critique. The issue is not whether the graph is accurate, but whether the conclusions it suggests are warranted. Framing questions like the following can help students move beyond correctness toward reasoning:

  • What is this graph encouraging us to believe?
  • What evidence would we need to support that claim?
  • Who designed this graph and why?

What’s Missing Matters

Another powerful example of misleading involves comparisons that appear straightforward but rest on incompatible measures. Figure 3 shows a graph that compares the cost of a college degree with annual earnings after graduation. Presented this way, the figure suggests that the cost drastically outweighs the benefit.

A graph showing the growth of a higher education AI-generated content may be incorrect.Figure 3 Source: The Atlantic   Students should be prompted to ask: Are these quantities measured over the same time frame?What happens if we consider earnings over a lifetime rather than a single year?What alternative scenarios should be included for comparison?Which quantities here occur once and which are repeated?

This last question gets to the central issue with this graph. The cost of a bachelor’s degree has indeed gone up in some cases by nearly 100%. However, this one-time cost is being compared to an annual salary, which not only repeats every year, but also increases for the earner over time.  Equally important is attending to what is omitted. If a graph argues that college is not “worth it,” what is the implied alternative? What are the earnings for individuals without a degree? What would a graph directly comparing salaries of people with and without a degree look like? What about in varied geographical areas? What other factors, like job stability, benefits, career mobility, might matter but are not represented? In both mathematics and social studies, absence is as important as presence. What is not shown can shape conclusions just as powerfully as what is. Students must be taught to courageously interrogate absences in visual representations so that their conclusions are shaped by well-contextualized facts and not a creator’s agenda.

Questioning Rankings

Ranking charts provide another rich context for critical analysis. Lists of “top” education systems, happiest countries, or most livable cities circulate widely and are often treated as objective measurements. Yet these rankings are constructed through a series of decisions: which variables to include, how to weight them, and how to aggregate results. Presenting students with two different rankings of the same phenomenon produced by different organizations, can prompt important questions:

  • Who created this ranking?
  • What criteria were used?
  • Why might those criteria have been chosen?
  • How might different choices lead to different results?

Students may initially look for which ranking is “correct.” Redirecting them to consider how each ranking reflects particular values or priorities helps shift the conversation. These are not naturally occurring facts; they are constructed representations. This kind of inquiry aligns closely with social studies practices of sourcing and contextualization, while also reinforcing mathematical ideas about measurement, weighting, and aggregation.

Teaching Students to Be Critical Thinkers

Ultimately, the goal of this work is not to turn students into the type skeptics who reject all data, but into thoughtful interpreters who engage with evidence responsibly. This skill requires explicit instruction. We cannot assume that students will naturally develop these skills simply by working with graphs in procedural ways.  One way to “wake students up” to how easy it is for graphs to be misleading is to assign them to create a graph that intentionally misleads.  This type of task is inspired by the classic 1954 book, How to Lie with Statistics. Author Darrell Huff opined, “The crooks already know these tricks; honest men must learn them in self-defense” (Huff, 1954).

An example task might include giving students a set of numerical data and a point of view that their graph or chart must suggest. Their first attempt at visually representing the data might not align with that point of view, so they should brainstorm ways of contorting the representation while still keeping it mathematically sound so that it implies a different conclusion.  Like Huff suggests, once students experience how easy it is to make a representation of data say something very different from what they initially thought, they will be more appropriately equipped to see it when other creators do it.

This practice cultivates several important habits of mind like wondering what a representation is designed to show and what it may obscure, asking who created it and for what purpose, distinguishing between what the data shows and what is being claimed, and recognizing that evidence has limits and that conclusions require justification. These habits support not only mathematical proficiency but also civic participation. In a democratic society, citizens are routinely asked to interpret data in order to make decisions about policy, voting, and public discourse. The ability to engage with that data critically is essential.

Courage in the Classroom

Baldwin’s call for courage in education is not limited to particular subjects. In the mathematics classroom, courage can take the form of resisting the comfort of neat answers and instead engaging with ambiguity, interpretation, and critique. It means acknowledging that even in a discipline grounded in logic, representations and conclusions can mislead. When we invite students to question graphs and consider alternative interpretations, we are not undermining mathematics, we are deepening it. We are showing students that mathematics is not just a set of procedures but a way of reasoning.

In a world of charts, headlines, TikTok reels, and YouTube shorts, this may be one of the most important lessons we can offer: every representation is created for an audience, for a purpose. The question students should carry with them is not simply “What does this show?” but “What is this trying to make me think, and why?” Helping students learn to ask that question, again and again, is both a mathematical responsibility and a civic one.

References

Baldwin, J. (1963). A talk to teachers. In The price of the ticket: Collected nonfiction 1948-1985. St. Martin’s Press.

Huff, D. (1954). How to lie with statistics. W. W. Norton & Company.

Konst, B. (n.d.). Identifying misleading graphs [Video]. YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETbc8GIhfHo

The Society Pages. (2014). How to lie with statistics: Stand your ground and gun deaths. Sociological Images. https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2014/12/28/how-to-lie-with-statistics-stand-your-ground-and-gun-deaths/

Thompson, D. (2012). Hey, everyone, don’t fall for this misleading graph about college costs. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/hey-everyone-dont-fall-for-this-misleading-graph-about-college-costs/258299/

Albert Einstein and the Problem of War

Albert Einstein and the Problem of War

By Lawrence Wittner

Reposted from the Peace and Health Blog of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (https://peaceandhealthblog.com/2025/10/11/albert-einstein-and-the-problem-of-war/)

Although Albert Einstein is best-known as a theoretical physicist, he also spent much of his life grappling with the problem of war. In 1914, shortly after he moved to Berlin to serve as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics, Einstein was horrified by the onset of World War I. “Europe, in her insanity, has started something unbelievable,” he told a friend. “In such times one realizes to what a sad species of animal one belongs.” Writing to the French author Romain Rolland, he wondered whether “centuries of painstaking cultural effort” have “carried us no further than . . . the insanity of nationalism.”

As militarist propaganda swept through Germany, accompanied that fall by a heated patriotic “Manifesto” from 93 prominent German intellectuals, Einstein teamed up with the German pacifist Georg Friedrich Nicolai to draft an antiwar response, the “Manifesto to Europeans.” Condemning “this barbarous war” and the “hostile spirit” of its intellectual apologists, the Einstein-Nicolai statement maintained that “nationalist passions cannot excuse this attitude which is unworthy of what the world has heretofore called culture.”

In the context of the war’s growing destructiveness, Einstein also helped launch and promote a new German antiwar organization, the New Fatherland League, which called for a prompt peace without annexations and the formation of a world government to make future wars impossible. It engaged in petitioning the Reichstag, challenging proposals for territorial gain, and distributing statements by British pacifists. In response, the German government harassed the League and, in 1916, formally suppressed it.

After the World War came to an end, Einstein became one of the Weimar Republic’s most influential pacifists and internationalists. Despite venomous attacks by Germany’s rightwing nationalists, he grew increasingly outspoken. “I believe the world has had enough of war,” he told an American journalist. “Some sort of international agreement must be reached among nations.” Meanwhile, he promoted organized war resistance, denounced military conscription, and, in 1932, drew Sigmund Freud into a famous exchange of letters, later published as Why War.

Although technically a Zionist, Einstein had a rather relaxed view of that term, contending that it meant a respect for Jewish rights around the world. Appalled by Palestinian-Jewish violence in British-ruled Palestine, he pleaded for cooperation between the two constituencies. In 1938, he declared that he would “much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state.” He disliked “the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power,” plus “the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks.”

The most serious challenge to Einstein’s pacifism came with the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933 and the advent of that nation’s imperialist juggernaut. “My views have not changed,” he told a French pacifist, “but the European situation has.” As long as “Germany persists in rearming and systematically indoctrinating its citizens in preparation for a war of revenge, the nations of Western Europe depend, unfortunately, on military defense.” In his heart, he said, he continued to “loathe violence and militarism as much as ever; but I cannot shut my eyes to realities.” Consequently, Einstein became a proponent of collective security against fascism.

Fleeing from Nazi Germany, Einstein took refuge in the United States, which became his new home. Thanks to his renown, he was approached in 1939 by one of his former physics students, Leo Szilard, a Hungarian refugee who brought ominous news about advances in nuclear fission research in Nazi Germany. At Szilard’s urging, Einstein sent a warning letter to President Franklin Roosevelt about German nuclear progress. In response, the U.S. government launched the Manhattan Project, a secret program to build an atomic bomb.

Einstein, like Szilard, considered the Manhattan Project necessary solely to prevent Nazi Germany’s employment of nuclear weapons to conquer the world. Therefore, when Germany’s war effort neared collapse and the U.S. bomb project neared completion, Einstein helped facilitate a mission by Szilard to Roosevelt with the goal of preventing the use of atomic bombs by the United States. He also fired off an impassioned appeal to the prominent Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, urging scientists to take the lead in heading off a dangerous postwar nuclear arms race. Neither venture proved successful, and the U.S. government, under the direction of the new president, Harry Truman, launched the nuclear age with the atomic bombing of Japan. Einstein later remarked that his 1939 letter to Roosevelt had been the worst mistake of his life.

Convinced that humanity now faced the prospect of utter annihilation, Einstein resurrected one of his earlier ideas and organized a new campaign against war. “The only salvation for civilization and the human race,” he told an interviewer in September 1945, “lies in the creation of a world government, with security of nations founded upon law.” Again and again, he reiterated this message. In January 1946, he declared: “As long as there exist sovereign states, each with its own, independent armaments, the prevention of war becomes a virtual impossibility.” Consequently, humanity’s “desire for peace can be realized only by the creation of a world government.”

In 1946, he and other prominent scientists, fearful of the world’s future, established the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. As chair of the new venture, Einstein repeatedly assailed militarism, nuclear weapons, and runaway nationalism. “We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking,” he said, “if mankind is to survive.”

Until his death in 1955, Einstein continued his quest for peace, criticizing the Cold War and the nuclear arms race and calling for strengthened global governance as the only “way out of the impasse.” Today, as we face a violent, nuclear-armed world, Einstein’s warnings about unrestrained nationalism and his proposals to control it are increasingly relevant.

Documenting the Debate Over the Use of Nuclear Weapons Against Japan

Einstein-Szilard Letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, August 2, 1939

Source: https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/einstein-szilard-letter/

Background: Albert Einstein was the world’s most renowned physicist and a Nobel Prize winner. He fled Germany in the 1930s and established himself in the United States. Nuclear scientists Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller, refugees from Nazi occupied Europe, persuaded Einstein to send a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him of the possibility that Germany could develop an atomic bomb. In this letter, Einstein urged Roosevelt to support a program to develop atomic weapons.

“Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. I believe therefore that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations:

In the course of the last four months it has been made probable — through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America — that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future. This phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable — though much less certain — that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air. The United States has only very poor ores of uranium in moderate quantities. There is some good ore in Canada and the former Czechoslovakia, while the most important source of uranium is Belgian Congo.

In view of this situation you may think it desirable to have some permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America. One possible way of achieving this might be for you to entrust with this task a person who has your confidence and who could perhaps serve in an unofficial capacity. His task might comprise the following:

a) to approach Government Departments, keep them informed of the further development, and put forward recommendations for Government action, giving particular attention to the problem of securing a supply of uranium ore for the United States.

b)  to speed up the experimental work, which is at present being carried on within the limits of the budgets of University laboratories, by providing funds, if such funds be required, through his contacts with private persons who are willing to make contributions for this cause, and perhaps also by obtaining the co-operation of industrial laboratories which have the necessary equipment.

I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over. That she should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on the ground that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, von Weizsäcker, is attached to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.

The Franck Report, Report of the Committee on Political and Social Problems

Manhattan Project “Metallurgical Laboratory,” University of Chicago, June 11, 1945

Sources: https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/franck-report/; https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/prominent-nuclear-scientists-did-not-recommend-the-atomic-bombings-of-japan/

Background: As the U.S. drew up plans to drop the first atomic bomb in August 1945, a group of scientists at the University of Chicago prepared a report arguing against the use of the bomb. Headed by James Franck and including notable scientists such as Leo Szilard and Glenn Seaborg, a Nobel laureate. The classified document was submitted to the Interim Committee, a group appointed by President Truman to advise him on the use of the bomb, in June 1945, one month before the Trinity test and two months before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Interim Committee rejected their recommendations.

A) “The development of nuclear power not only constitutes an important addition to the technological and military power of the United States, but also creates grave political and economic problems for the future of this country.”

B) “Nuclear bombs cannot possibly remain a ‘secret weapon’ at the exclusive disposal of this country, for more than a few years. The scientific facts on which their construction is based are well known to scientists of other countries. Unless an effective international control of nuclear explosives is instituted, a race of nuclear armaments is certain to ensue following the first revelation of our possession of nuclear weapons to the world. Within ten years other countries may have nuclear bombs, each of which, weighing less than a ton, could destroy an urban area of more than ten square miles. In the war to which such an armaments race is likely to lead, the United States, with its agglomeration of population and industry in comparatively few metropolitan districts, will be at a disadvantage compared to the nations whose population and industry are scattered over large areas.”

C) “We believe that these considerations make the use of nuclear bombs for an early, unannounced attack against Japan inadvisable. If the United States would be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon mankind, she would sacrifice public support throughout the world, precipitate the race of armaments, and prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such weapons.”

D) “Much more favorable conditions for the eventual achievement of such an agreement could be created if nuclear bombs were first revealed to the world by a demonstration in an appropriately selected uninhabited area.”

Recommendation of the Scientific Panel of the Interim Committee

Sources: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/19.pdf; https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/recommendations-on-the-immediate-use-of-nuclear-weapons/

Background: The panel that issued this report to Secretary of War Henry Stimson consisted of four prominent physicists who were part of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Director of the Los Alamos Laboratory; Enrico Fermi, lead scientist for the first nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago Met Lab; Arthur Compton, Nobel laureate and head of the Metallurgical Laboratory; and Ernest Lawrence, Nobel laureate and head of the Radiation Laboratory at UC Berkeley.

“You have asked us to comment on the initial use of the new weapon. This use, in our opinion, should be such as to promote a satisfactory adjustment of our international relations. At the same time, we recognize our obligation to our nation to use the weapons to help save American lives in the Japanese war.

(1) To accomplish these ends we recommend that before the weapons are used not only Britain, but also Russia, France, and China be advised that we have made considerable progress in our work on atomic weapons, and that we would welcome suggestions as to how we can cooperate in making this development contribute to improved international relations.

(2) The opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons are not unanimous: they range from the proposal of a purely technical demonstration to that of the military application best designed to induce surrender. Those who advocate a purely technical demonstration would wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons, and have feared that if we use the weapons now our position in future negotiations will be prejudiced. Others emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use, and believe that such use will improve the international prospects, in that they are more concerned with the prevention of war than with the elimination of this specific weapon. We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.

(3) With regard to these general aspects of the use of atomic energy, it is clear that we, as scientific men, have no proprietary rights. It is true that we are among the few citizens who have had occasion to give thoughtful consideration to these problems during the past few years. We have, however, no claim to special competence in solving the political, social, and military problems which are presented by the advent of atomic power.”

Petition to the President of the United States, July 17, 1945

Source: https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/szilard-petition/

Background: Nuclear physicist Leo Szilard, a refugee from Hungary who worked on the Manhattan Project, drafted a petition to President Harry Truman in the summer of 1945 hoping to avert the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. The petition was signed by seventy other scientists but was not seen by the President or the Secretary of War before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer were not listed as signers.

Discoveries of which the people of the United States are not aware may affect the welfare of this nation in the near future. The liberation of the atomic power which has been achieved places atomic bombs in the hands of the Army. It places in your hands, as Commander-in-Chief, the fateful decision whether or not to sanction the use of such bombs in the present phase of the war against Japan. We, the undersigned scientists, have been working in the field of atomic power. Until recently we have had to fear that the United States might be attacked by atomic bombs during this war and that her only defense might lie in a counterattack by the same means. Today, with the defeat of Germany, this danger is averted and we feel impelled to say what follows: The war has to be brought speedily to a successful conclusion and attacks by atomic bombs may very well be an effective method of warfare. We feel, however, that such attacks on Japan could not be justified, at least not until the terms which will be imposed after the war on Japan were made public in detail and Japan were given an opportunity to surrender. If such public announcement gave assurance to the Japanese that they could look forward to a life devoted to peaceful pursuit in their homeland and if Japan still refused to surrender, our nation might then, in certain circumstances, find itself forced to resort to the use of atomic bombs. Such a step, however, ought not to be made at any time without seriously considering the moral responsibilities which are involved.

The development of atomic power will provide the nations with new means of destruction. The atomic bombs at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction, and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available in the course of their future development. Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.

If after the war a situation is allowed to develop in the world which permits rival powers to be in uncontrolled possession of these new means of destruction, the cities of the United States as well as the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger of sudden annihilation. All the resources of the United States, moral and material, may have to be mobilized to prevent the advent of such a world situation. Its prevention is at present the solemn responsibility of the United States—singled out by virtue of her lead in the field of atomic power. The added material strength which this lead gives to the United States brings with it the obligation of restraint and if we were to violate this obligation our moral position would be weakened in the eyes of the world and in our own eyes. It would then be more difficult for us to live up to our responsibility of bringing the unloosened forces of destruction under control.

In view of the foregoing, we, the undersigned, respectfully petition: first, that you exercise your power as Commander-in-Chief, to rule that the United States shall not resort to the use of atomic bombs in this war unless the terms which will be imposed upon Japan have been made public in detail and Japan knowing these terms has refused to surrender; second, that in such an event the question whether or not to use atomic bombs be decided by you in the light of the consideration presented in this petition as well as all the other moral responsibilities which are involved.

A Policy for Survival: A Statement by the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists

Published in the June 1948 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Source: https://thebulletin.org/archive/a-policy-for-survival-a-statement-by-the-emergency-committee-of-atomic-scientists/

Background: The Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists was formed in May, 1946, by Albert Einstein, R.F. Bacher, Hans A. Bethe, Edward U. Condon, R. Hogness, Leo Szilard, Harold C. Urey, and V.F. Weisskopf. Their objective was to encourage and further the peaceful uses of atomic energy and to do this they would solicit private contributions in support of the work of the National Committee for Atomic Information. 

“Two years ago this month the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission was in process of formation. Now the discussions on international control of atomic energy are about to be adjourned indefinitely, perhaps never again to be resumed. One of the most fateful events in history has passed almost unnoticed. Its importance must be realized: its lesson for mankind must be made clear. To clarify the importance of the collapse of these discussions, we reiterate here our Six Point Statement published originally on November 17, 1946:

  1. Atomic bombs can now be made cheaply and in large number. They will become more destructive.
  2. There is no military defense against atomic bombs and none is to be expected.
  3. Other nations can rediscover our secret processes by themselves.
  4. Preparedness against atomic war is futile, and if attempted, will ruin the structure of our social order.
  5. If war breaks out, atomic bombs will be used and they will surely destroy our civilization.
  6. There is no solution to this problem except international control of atomic energy, and ultimately, the elimination of war.”