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Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America
a book by Mary Grabar
(our site's book review)
The Amazon blurb says that Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has sold more than 2.5 million copies. It is pushed by Hollywood celebrities, defended by university professors who know better, and assigned in high school and college classrooms to teach students that American history is nothing more than a litany of oppression, slavery, and exploitation.
Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has been assigned in high school and college classrooms to teach students that American history is nothing more than a litany of oppression, slavery, and exploitation
Zinn’s history is popular, but it is also massively wrong.
Scholar Mary Grabar exposes just how wrong in her stunning new book Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America, which demolishes Zinn’s Marxist talking points that now dominate American education.
Karl Marx's ideas were swiped by Howard Zinn and recycled in American education as fake history
•How Columbus was not a genocidal maniac, and was, in fact, a defender of Indians
•Why the American Indians were not feminist-communist sexual revolutionaries ahead of their time
•How the United States was founded to protect liberty, not white males’ ill-gotten wealth
•Why Americans of the “Greatest Generation” were not the equivalent of Nazi war criminals
•How the Viet Cong were not well-meaning community leaders advocating for local self-rule
•Why the Black Panthers were not civil rights leaders
American Indians were not feminist-communist sexual revolutionaries ahead of their time
Erhard Milch, Nazi war criminal, how treasonous Zinn describes the U.S.
Grabar also reveals Zinn’s bag of dishonest rhetorical tricks: his slavish reliance on partisan history, explicit rejection of historical balance, and selective quotation of sources to make them say the exact opposite of what their authors intended. If you care about America’s past—and our future—you need Grabar's book.
Grabar also reveals Zinn’s bag of dishonest rhetorical tricks: his slavish reliance on partisan history, explicit rejection of historical balance, and selective quotation of sources to make them say the exact opposite of what their authors intended
“It’s about time someone published a comprehensive answer to Howard Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States, which is the Mein Kampf of the Hate America Left…. Mary Grabar has done Americans and the freedoms they have championed a great service by writing a definitive exposure of Zinn’s 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
Howard Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States, is the Mein Kampf of the Hate America Left—it's basically a treasonous US flag burning by a treasonous man with no sense of shame
“At long last we have a comprehensive critique of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, an execrable work of pseudohistory, full of mistakes, lies, half-truths, and smears.” -- Peter A. Coclanis — Albert R. Newsome Distinguished Professor of History
“Mary Grabar has produced a devastating analysis of the lies, plagiarism, violation of academic standards, and simple-minded platitudes that characterize Howard Zinn’s best-selling A People’s History of the United States…. 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
Many history professors see Zinn’s book as a treasonous fraud
“Zinn’s 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 Zinn’s many errors and tendentious interpretations of the United States as an evil, racist empire…. 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 and The Long March
Zinn's ugly history book sees the United States as an evil, racist empire—it is one of the chief intellectual frauds of our time as well as being a con job that put a lot of wealth in Zinn's pocket
Author Mary Grabar is a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and the founder of the Dissident Prof Education Project. She taught at the college level for twenty years, most recently at Emory University, and her work has been published by The Federalist, Townhall, FrontPage Magazine, City Journal, American Greatness, and Academic Questions.
As Grabar says, "Take one example highlighted by Wineburg. In the World War II chapter of A People’s History, Zinn asks, “With the defeat of the Axis, were fascism’s ‘essential elements—militarism, racism, imperialism—now gone? Or were they absorbed into the already poisoned bones of the victors?” Here Zinn is suggesting that the United States is the moral equivalent of Hitler’s Germany. But by asking a question instead of stating a claim, Zinn has cleverly indemnified himself against the charge that he is making Americans out to be as bad as the Nazis. And no wonder. The proposition is as absurd as it is offensive.
By asking a question instead of stating a claim, Zinn has cleverly indemnified himself against the charge that he is making Americans out to be as bad as the Nazis. And no wonder. The proposition is as absurd as it is offensive
"And yet, with dozens of such outlandish suggestions and countless other grossly dishonest rhetorical tricks on nearly every page of A People’s History, Howard Zinn has succeeded in convincing a generation of Americans that the nation Abraham Lincoln truly called “the last best hope of Earth” is essentially a racist criminal enterprise built on murdering Indians, exploiting slaves, and oppressing the working man. It obviously needs to be replaced by something better. And of course, Zinn has the answer: a classless, egalitarian society. Yes, what Zinn is selling is the very same communist utopian fantasy that killed more than a hundred million human beings in the twentieth century.
Howard Zinn has succeeded in convincing a generation of Americans that the nation Abraham Lincoln truly called “the last best hope of Earth” is essentially a racist criminal enterprise built on murdering Indians, exploiting slaves, and oppressing the working man
"The dream lives on, though, for the young and the uninformed. Zinn is particularly appealing to adolescents who are typically dissatisfied with their elders, believing themselves to be wiser. . . . Zinn had . . . said that everything I had learned in school was a sugar-coated fairy tale, if not a deliberate lie."
Zinn implies that the elders have lied about communism (and everything else), which got a bad rap from the capitalists. Worse, the young people are buying this horse puckey. Over half the millenials polled prefer socialism or communism to capitalism. The hate-America campaign is a roaring success. It's in their schools as required learning so it is no wonder. People that read and believe Zinn's lies are mostly naive young people who are simply rebelling against their parents and/or other elders.
These are dark times, and Zinn did more to darken them than anyone else. His ugly tome combined with the lies and distortions of The 1619 Project to form a bible of anti-American smears, lies, and misinformation. Zinn is for Marxism and communism as much as he is against the United States of America. A bible for traitors and anti-American radicals—if only the naive young people who buy the excrement Zinn is selling would move to Cuba or China where they could experience first-hand the glorious lives lived by the believers in the commie utopia. Their eyes would finally be opened—rudely and traumatically. Maybe the United States of America would start seeming like the land of opportunity most of us experience it as.
United States flag
"No volume published during the last half century has had a more insidious influence on the way young minds understand the history of their own country than Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. The book has not only grossly distorted the record of America’s past, but has corrupted the teaching of the discipline of history itself. . . . I knew Howard Zinn was bad—a communist, a corrupt teacher, a fraudulent historian, and an anti-American agitator. I knew A People’s History of the United States was terrible. Indeed, most people, unless they are young or otherwise impressionable, can see how slanted the book is in the opening pages. . . . Yet, the “deconstruction” of Columbus Day—as evidenced not only by the toxic lessons of classrooms but by the kow-towing of government and corporate officials to leftist extremists—reverberates far and wide. . . . Simply put, Zinn’s People’s History of the United States is probably the biggest con job in American history writing ever." (Source: AHI’s Mary Grabar: Why I Wrote Debunking Howard Zinn, Mary Grabar, Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization)
Barack Obama, a famous hater of the United States of America, was—of course—a Zinn fan. One can never hate our country enough for Zinn fans and the radical leftists.
Liar Barack Obama, a famous hater of the United States of America, was—of course—a Zinn fan
"In explaining the popularity of Zinn’s book among “the young and uninformed,” Grabar emphasizes what Stanford education professor Sam Wineberg called its ability to “speak to our inner Holden Caufield,” the sneering adolescent protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, to whom “our heroes are shameless frauds, our parents and teachers conniving liars, our textbooks propagandistic slop.” “They’re all phonies,” Wineberg concluded, remains “a message that never goes out of style.” . . . The appearance of Grabar’s book would be welcome at any time, but is especially relevant now that the New York Times has reincarnated the spirit of Howard Zinn with its “1619 Project.” It describes the U.S. as a country founded as a slavocracy with racism in its very DNA, an interpretation of the American past as misguided as Zinn’s attempt to characterize all of U.S. history as a tale of class conflict. Grabar offers valuable correctives to such grossly distorted versions of the past" (Source: The Disgraceful Howard Zinn, Michael Burlingame, claremontreviewofbooks)
Schools across the country have already adopted the Times’ radical revision of history as part of their curricula. Should children be taught that our nation is a four-hundred-year-old system of racist oppression? Or should they learn that what has always made America exceptional is our pursuit of liberty and justice for all?
See 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project
"Peter Wood's 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project claims the prize as the most comprehensive response to the ill-fated 1619 Project. In a thorough review of the text, Wood accounts for every argument for and against. He appropriately honors the Project's intention to pursue a mission of redress, while nevertheless pinpointing its consistent resort to misrepresentation that cannot be dismissed as merely different interpretation. Wood identifies the heart of the matter: Surely there are ways to incorporate a forthright treatment of slavery, racism, and the black experience into the story of America's rise as a free, self-governing, creative, and prosperous nation. The key to doing that is to put the pursuit of the ideals of liberty and justice at the center of the story. The 1619 Project failed in that for the sufficient reason that its purpose was cultural shakedown, not cultural affirmation. That is made plain in this necessary work."--William Allen, emeritus dean and professor, Michigan State University