The Attack on Honest History

Jesse Hagopian’s African ancestors survived the Middle Passage and enslavement on plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana. Hagopian is a Seattle educator, an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine, a founding steering committee member of Black Lives Matter at School, and a member of the leadership team of the Zinn Education Project. He is the author of the forthcoming book from Haymarket Books, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education, editor of More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High Stakes Testing, and the co-editor of the books Teaching for Black Lives, Black Lives Matter at School, and Teachers Unions and Social Justice. Hagopian’s writing has appeared in The Seattle Times, The Nation, and The Progressive, and his commentary on education and politics has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, The New Yorker, HBO’s “Problem Areas” with Wyatt Cenac, NBC’s “Education Nation,” The PBS News Hour with Gwen Ifill, Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal (on TBS), The Dan Rather Report, and Democracy Now! You can connect with Jesse Hagopian on IG, @jessehagopian, or through his website, www.IAmAnEducator.com.

Paul Ortiz is a professor of labor history at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Between 2008 and 2024, he was a professor of history and director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. He was a National Archives Distinguished Fellow in Latinx History from 2021 to 2023, and the 2023–24 Robert L. Hess Scholar-in-Residence at Brooklyn College. A PEN Award-winning author, Paul’s book An African American and Latinx History of the United States was identified by Fortune Magazine in 2020 as one of the “10 books on American history that actually reflect the United States.” He is a consultant and narrator for John Leguizamo’s American Historia docuseries on Latino history that will air on PBS this fall. Paul was a consultant and narrator for Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song, which premiered on PBS in 2021. His book Emancipation Betrayed was the recipient of the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Book Prize.

Ellen Schrecker is an American historian known for her research on McCarthyism, political repression, and American higher education. Her latest book, edited with Valerie C. Johnson and Jennifer Ruth, is The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing War on Academic Freedom (2024). Among her most important works are The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (2021); Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998); and No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1986). She has also published many other books, edited collections, and articles in both scholarly and general interest publications. A retired professor of history at Yeshiva University, she serves on the steering committee of Historians for Peace and Democracy. She is former editor of Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors, and is now a member of the AAUP Committee A on Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance.