Mary Grabar - 20 Aug

PRAISE FOR

DEBUNKING HOWARD ZINN

Its about time someone published a comprehensive answer to Howard Zinns bestselling A Peoples History of the United States, which is the Mein Kampf of the Hate America Left. Zinn was a lifelong communist and sycophantic admirer of Stalin and Mao and the most murderous regimes in human history. But, for Zinn, the real source of evil in the world was his own countrytolerant, inclusive, and free. Mary Grabar has done Americans and the freedoms they have championed a great service by writing a definitive exposure of Zinns treasonous life, along with a damning refutation of his dishonest, malignant, and ignorant work.

DAVID HOROWITZ, founder of Students for Academic Freedom and the David Horowitz Freedom Center and author of Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey and The Black Book of the American Left

At long last we have a comprehensive critique of Howard Zinns A Peoples History of the United States, an execrable work of pseudohistory, full of mistakes, lies, half-truths, and smears. Students and scholars alike are in Mary Grabars debt for her incisive, powerful, and timely takedown of Zinns highly popular, but utterly tendentious, study. Reasonable people, regardless of their personal politics, should laud the publication of Debunking Howard Zinn .

PETER A. COCLANIS , Albert R. Newsome Distinguished Professor of History and director of the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Mary Grabar has produced a devastating analysis of the lies, plagiarism, violation of academic standards, and simple-minded platitudes that characterize Howard Zinns bestselling A Peoples History of the United States . That Zinn is taken seriously as a historian is sad commentary on the teachers who rely on his fantasies and a terrible disservice to the students who are forced to read it. And, as Grabar demonstrates, it has contributed to a serious and potentially disastrous misunderstanding of American history and society.

HARVEY KLEHR, professor emeritus of politics and history at Emory University and author of The Communist Experience in America

At last! Mary Grabar tells the truth about Howard Zinns bestselling anti-American textbook, A Peoples History of the United States. Zinns book has probably done more to poison the minds of high school students than any other work of history. Grabar provides an overdue anatomy of Zinns many errors and tendentious interpretations of the United States as an evil, racist empire. Her bookwhich should be required readingis a much-needed antidote to one of the chief intellectual frauds of our time.

ROGER KIMBALL, editor and publisher of the New Criterion and author of Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education and The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

Copyright 2019 by Mary Grabar

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To Robert Paquette, fighter for truth in history

T here is no historian like Howard Zinn. His cultish following continues to grow nearly forty years after the publication of his A Peoples History of the United States , the nations bestselling American history survey book as both a trade book and textbook.

A Peoples History is more than another left-wing interpretation of American history. Long before it appeared on bookstore shelves in 1980, historians were writing American history from a liberal, leftist, and even Marxist perspective. In fact, Zinn leans on these histories for much of his material. But their names have largely been forgotten, and Zinns stature grows.

Certainly no other history book has taken the place of the Bible at the swearing-in of an elected official. But in April 2019, A Peoples History was the sacred object on which newly elected Oklahoma City council member JoBeth Hamon chose to place her hand for her oath of office.

Nearly a decade after Zinns death, a new generation of readers is picking up his book and experiencing the feeling their parents felt in the 1980s and 1990s of having the wool pulled away from their eyes. These members of Generation Z seem undisturbed by Zinns use of archaic 1960s lingo like The Establishment and The System. They identify with the oft-mentioned struggle, a staple of communist writing. In an age of racial hypersensitivity, no one seems bothered by Zinns continual references to Negroes, a term that has been considered offensive since the 1960s.

Zinn is often blamed for the decline in history writing, teaching, and knowledge. Conscientious historians seek to replicate the appeal of Zinns book while presenting a more balanced and positive view of American history. Thus, a recent Wall Street Journal column about Land of Hope , a new book by Wilfred McClay, is titled, Reclaiming History from Howard Zinn. Previous attempts to provide an appealing corrective include William J. Bennetts three-volume America, the Last Best Hope in 2006, and in 2004 Larry Schweikarts and Michael Allens A Patriots History of the United States.

Historians on the Left, too, present their books as more respectable alternatives to Zinn. Harvard history professor Jill Lepore positioned her 2018 book These Truths: A History of the United States as a response not only to the American triumphalism of popular history but also to Zinns Marxist reckoning with American atrocity. Before that was Eric Foners The Story of American Freedom , published in 1996.

Neither such books nor the many critical assessments of A Peoples History seem to have decreased the books popularity. In fact, controversies only increase sales for the evergreen title that sells incredibly well year after year.

Stanford University education professor Sam Wineburg accounted for the books preternatural shelf life by the fact that Zinn shrewdly recognized that what might have been common knowledge among subscribers to the Radical History Review was largely invisible to the broader reading public.... It took Zinns brilliance to draw a direct line from the rapier Columbus used to hack off the hands of the Arawaks, to the rifles aimed by Andrew Johnson to give the Creek Nation no quarter, and to the 9,000-pound Little Boy that Paul Tibbets fatefully released over Hiroshima in August 1945. (Actually, as will be demonstrated in the following pages, Columbus did not hack off the hands of the Arawaks with a rapier.)

Wineburg noted that A Peoples History is as radical in its rhetoric as in its politics. In fact, Zinns rhetorical strategies are more than radical. They are fundamentally and grossly dishonest. Wineburg pointed out the unusual way Zinn used questionsnot as the rare shoulder-shrugging admissions of the historians epistemological quandary so much as devices that shock readers into considering the past anew. In one chapter, Wineburg counted twenty-nine [b]ig in-your-face questionsquestions presenting two stark choices.