Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America : Grabar, Mary: Amazon.com.au: Books

Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America : Grabar, Mary: Amazon.com.au: Books
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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.

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, which demolishes Zinn's Marxist talking points that now dominate American education.

In Debunking Howard Zinn, you'll learn, contra Zinn:
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

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 this book.

352 pages
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Product description

About the 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.
Product details
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Regnery History (28 July 2020)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1684511526
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1684511525
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.24 x 2.54 x 22.86 cmBest Sellers Rank: 350,738 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)158 in Historical Study & Teaching
358 in Historiography (Books)
1,110 in Political Conservatism & LiberalismCustomer Reviews:
4.7 out of 5 stars 724 ratings
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5.0 out of 5 stars images and videos more helpful than text alone.Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on 30 August 2019
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Robert C.
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Expose' of Zinn's Intentionally Misleading "History"Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 23 August 2019
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The author does an excellent job at exposing the numerous falsehoods replete throughout Zinn's "People's History of the United States." Zinn saw the United States through the lens of Marxism and hated what he perceived. He sees everything in terms of oppressors (white men) and victims (everybody else). Zinn purposely rejected the concept of objective history.

Ms. Grabar goes to Zinn's sources and reveals that he mainly cribbed his material almost verbatim from other Leftist's criticisms of America. She also shows that Zinn even omitted passages from his sources that ran counter to his theme. Zinn also selectively edits quotations of historical figures in order to put words in the mouths of his designated villains. If that wasn't sufficient, he would just create a Big Lie (such as WWII was white-race civil war) and then deflect by then either disclaiming "some disagree" or "just asking questions" (all while implying he was informing his readers of what REALLY happened). In Zinn's Marxian viewpoint, the root of all evil is the concept of property and the un-equitable distribution of wealth, and the United States is the manifestation of that evil. Unsurprisingly, Ms. Grabar reveals that Zinn managed to parlay his fame into a nice income. (Collectivists always seek to do great things with your money, not their's).

Howard Zinn was a charismatic Marxist demagogue that hated the United States. It is a tragedy that his polemic has gained so much undeserved praise and regard. Hopefully, Ms. Grabar's work will be the beginning of consigning Zinn to the dust-bin of history and repairing the damage he and his acolytes have done to the national psyche. Anyone interested in an honest appraisal of American history should read this book in order to be better able to discuss why Zinn's "People's History" is such a fraudulent book.

I hope that Ms. Grabar is considering adapting this book into a version more suitable for children.
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Greg Gauthier
4.0 out of 5 stars Exceptionally well researched, but occasionally polemicalReviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 11 June 2020
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Grabars book is not simply a catalogue of Howard Zinn's academic sins (and there are many), it is also an argumentative thesis: Zinn isn't just a bad historian, he is a disingenuous communist radical who abused history to propel his ideological goals. Though her case is convincing on first read, because of the depth of her own research into Zinn, I also could not help but notice Grabar's own occasional lapses into partisan polemics.

Mary does an excellent job of comparing Zinn's assertions about historical events to more scholarly opinions of the same events, often exposing numerous places where Zinn does indeed seem to have engaged in disingenuous cherry-picking and context pruning. But sometimes, the argumentation seems to go too far. For example, in the case of the chapter on the Viet Nam war, Grabar at times makes her own independent defense of the American decision to enter the war. Similarly, she makes a point of independently defending the anxiety over communism during the Cold War, not so much as a "debunking" of Zinn's partisan position, but taking a partisan position in opposition to it.

This opposition is not without good grounds. Grabar is a sharp witted author. But those lapses seem to be a digression from the main focus of her thesis, which is that Zinn had an obligation to present the history in a more even handed way. She seemed to want to provide that balance herself at times, rather than leaving it up to the reader to go find alternatives.

In any case, there is so much good information packed into this book, that at a minimum, I would recommend it as a bibliographic companion to "A People's History".
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smudge
5.0 out of 5 stars Real historyReviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 3 January 2022
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This is REAL historical analysis rather than the ideological driven polemic which is the subject of her excellent, and sourced, chapter by chapter debunking. Mary Grabar does all students of history a great service in this wonderful book. A must read.
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Graeme K. White
5.0 out of 5 stars InsightfulReviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 20 December 2021
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Shines a light on the lies of the left.
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Mr K.
5.0 out of 5 stars BrilliantReviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 29 August 2019
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Read it and you will find out why this book is an overdue scholarly rebuttal to Zinn's stale, immature and simplistic interpretation of history. Required reading on any syllabus wherever Zinn is taught.

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Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

Mary Grabar
3.96
416 ratings113 reviews

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. 

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, which demolishes Zinn’s Marxist talking points that now dominate American education. 

In Debunking Howard Zinn, you’ll learn, contra Zinn: 
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
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 this book.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published August 20, 2019

This edition

Format

352 pages, Hardcover

Published

August 20, 2019 by Regnery History

ISBN

9781621577737 (ISBN10: 1621577732)

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Kindle EditionRegnery

Michael Perkins 

6 books · 323 followers

April 20, 2021

I'm a trained historian. The author of this book is an English professor. If you're properly trained you learn the historical method.

For a book I was working on, I researched Columbus. I had no political agenda. I was simply trying to learn what happened in the first voyage that ended in the shipwreck of the Santa Maria.

I read the entire text of Columbus' first voyage log book. From his own words, it's clear he was a not an explorer. He mistakenly thought he had landed in East Asia instead of the West Indies. He was commissioned by the Spanish Crown to find gold. He was surprised by the people there, the Arawaks, whom he referred to as "talking animals." He ruthlessly pursued the search for gold, though there was very little there.

The late Harvard historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, was an expert on Columbus and wrote a bio of him that was essentially hagiography, "Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus," which I've read. But even in this book, the author admits that Columbus perpetrated genocide in the New World, but with only one sentence.

What followed Columbus was the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors and missionaries. The Arawak were enslaved and made to work on what the Spanish called encomienda. This is documented in the books of the Dominican missionary, Bartolomé de Las Casas, who originally attempted to convert the Arawaks until he saw how wretchedly they were being treated by their conquerors. Las Casas became an advocate for the people that included an audience with the Pope and a meeting with the Spanish crown. Both agreed with Las Casas, but the New World was too far away to enforce the law.

All of this is covered in Zinn's book and properly documented, but typically we want to sweep this under the rug.

And might I add that the removal of Columbus statues is obviously quite justified.

overrated

Jeanette

3,112 reviews · 534 followers

November 11, 2019

It's fully 4.5 stars for the immense research done in the historical method that is valid. Not polemic, not occluded, and especially not bias to theory and origin of sources as Zinn demonstrates. Also without any plagiarism.

The first few chapters citing the experts' opinions who do history within method and evidence- are 5 star excellent.

How bottom up history can be distorted in order to inspire blame, hatred, identity self-hate- all given their purposes. Zinn's life biography and very active until 87 purposes and methods described by witness and record. Objective to convert youth to Communism was never much hidden or denied, as I've read it was. What his own education and past work was to BEING an historian with credentials is also a 5 star section.

How words of the past are "read" now and how their meanings so much differ in what is "heard"- that is also 5 star. For instance gold was not only the physical element but had a spiritual, Catholic meaning. Double meanings are always taken as "singular" and pointing to a fake onus/ history for influence of turning a young generation against America itself. It's core beliefs from the Revolution to the cultural and moral relativity factors of today. Up is down and down is up; good is evil and evil good. And certain periods are left out, while others get 2/3rds of the copy for 1/10th or 1/5th of the time by years. Occlusion and cause/effect conflation are the keys in nearly all of Zinn. As are quoting sources out of context and meanings that change the onus of the words nearly 180 degrees from their original speaker. He does this continually, and with Columbus constantly, for instance.

These are the chapters after the Life of Zinn and each evaluation is detail exact:

Howard Zinn's "Usable Indian"

America the Racist

Casting a Pall on the Finest Hour

Writing the Red Menace Out of History

Black Mascots for a Red Revolution

Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! Howard Zinn and the Commies Win

Howard Zinn, the Founders, and Us

It's far, far beyond Columbus slander disdaining. The lies and plagiarism (he lifted entire sentences/ paragraphs out of former "historians" who were also plagiarists ironically) recorded from published "verse"; that is noted as well. Garbar following those "copy" habits- it's dense with asides and resource naming- difficult reads in parts of this book. Especially as how this original 1980 Zinn book was played up and used in the 1980-1999 period (who touted it and who publicized the PR ) without being questioned and having so many celebs of no education whatsoever quoting it as "real facts" since for decades. It is not. And it, Zinn's very language, also uses language/ prose group titles and concepts that in PC culture of post 2015 is not considered either appropriate or unoffensive. That's ironic, btw.

Before I knew this book by Grabar existed, I fought to get Zinn's book thrown out of our university history sources as it was so proven erroneous with light of any other actual, true research depth attempted. Not only in the theory overview either. But in timing sequences that are highly provable by record to be contrary or opposite. So reading it now, it gives me satisfaction that I could issue a disclaimer validly with each "reference" given.

It amazes me that even in 2019, some people who are learned in vast other avenues of information- do not understand historical method or the pure untruths cored in occlusions within Zinn. And can not recognize propaganda named as "history".

Anthony Murawski

29 reviews

September 21, 2019

The title should be "An Ad Hominem Diatribe Against Howard Zinn By A True Believer In U.S. Government SAnctioned Mythology."

Even in the introduction, the author repeatedly makes false and histrionic accusations against Zinn, such as the remarkable accusation that he equated the United States with Nazi Germany because he used the Socratic Method and accurately noted that the United States has carried out a systematic foreign policy of overthrowing democratic governments in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, etc. and installing supposedly more "stable" and therefore more "reliable" fascist military dictatorships in their place. This was the official rationale behind our foreign policy. As documented in Inevitable Revolutions by Walter LaFeber:

QUOTE
In March 1950, the State Department's expert on Soviet Affairs, George Kennan, flew to Rio de Janeiro to meet with U.S. ambassadors in South America. ...Kennan outlined how Latin America fit into U.S. foreign policy:

INTERNAL QUOTE
1. The protection of our [sic] raw materials [note: "sic" was inserted by LaFeber];
2. The prevention of military exploitation of Latin America by the enemy [my note: to enable the U.S. to continue exploiting Latin America unhindered]; and
3. The prevention of the psychological mobilization of Latin America against us \[my note: more accurately, these policies guaranteed that Latin America's citizens would mobilize against a colonial empire that actually believed it owned the raw materials (and labor) of the people in Latin America].

*****

The final answer might be an unpleasant one, but...we should not hesitate before police repression [my ote: i.e., death squad murders and torture of advocates for democratic reforms]. This is not something shameful since the Communists are essentially traitors... [my note: stated exactly as a Bolshevik would word it, substituting the word "Communist" for "Western imperialist." ]]. It is better to have a strong regime [my note: i.e., a fascist, military dictatorship] in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists [my note: having served on the Board of Directors of the Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA, I can tell you that in military dictatorships installed and maintained by the United States, "Communist" was and still is defined as anyone who criticizes the U.S.-backed dictatorship. According to the U.N. Truth Commission, Guatemalan military and paramilitary forces trained and armed by the U.S. murdered 250,000 civilians--primarily children and women, between 1979 and 1996].

END INTERNAL QUOTE
END QUOTE

That internal quote was classified for decades, because it reveals the beastly motives of U.S. foreign policy in much of. the world over the past 69 years.

Based on what I just wrote, the author of this cheap attack on Zinn would accuse me of equating the U.S. with the Nazis. As a child of a Holocaust survivor, I find this sort of propagandistic ad hominem attack outright nauseating.

Peter Bradley

861 reviews · 49 followers

October 25, 2019

Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...

We have just gone through another Columbus Day (2020) where Americans have been shamed about the Great Navigator: still more cities have renamed Columbus Day "Indigenous Peoples' Day" Somehow, magically for those of us who graduated school in a different era, it seems that Columbus has been definitively declared a racist, rapist, murderer who is not worthy of recognition for his role in an event that literally changed the course of history.

How that happened is the subject of this book and an important lesson for anyone who wants to live in a non-Orwellian world where history is not retconned to suit the power of the moment.

How it happened is Howard Zinn. This book cogently anatomizes how the Marxist partisan Howard Zinn made an end run around scholarship and into education and popular culture. It is weird beyond belief that actor Matt Damon's family knew Howard Zinn such that Damon was able to give such a propaganda boost to Zinn's respectibility in "Good Will Hunting." It just goes to show how small the elite circles are, even in America, and how it is the connections we don't suspect that are most effective.

Author Mary Grabar demonstrates the dodgy sources and selective editing of sources that Zinn engaged in to poison the well against Columbus. I've demonstrated similar problems in other partisan books of alleged scholarship, so this is an all too common phenomenon.

We are in the age of Orwell, where there has been an ideological take-over of the conduits of acculturation. For people who have an old-fashioned desire to know truth and see that truth be known, the creation of "pseudo-history" is offensive, particularly when it comes with malicious slander of great men. Grabar points out:

"But literally the explorer’s first concern—the hope that he expressed in the initial comment about the natives in his log—was for the Indians’ freedom and their eternal salvation: “I want the natives to develop a friendly attitude toward us because I know that they are a people who can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith more by love than by force.” Even Koning had quoted this passage—though only to make the discoverer of America out to be a shameless hypocrite. He immediately undercut what Columbus actually said by warning his readers about what he supposedly “said and did later.”41 According to Koning:

Even in that religious and bigoted age, Columbus stood out as a very fierce Catholic. When he discussed his westward voyage, he always dwelt on its religious aspects. . . . He must himself have believed that his Enterprise was Christian, if only to ensure God’s help; and the priests who came west later were, with one or two glorious exceptions, as quick as he was in forgetting those pious intentions. (In a similar way, modern corporations used to capture oil fields and mines in underdeveloped nations while telling us and themselves that their main interest in these enterprises was to protect those unhappy countries from communism.)42

Zinn just entirely omits the passage in which Columbus expresses his respect and concern for the Indians."

Likewise:

"Columbus and his two brothers had little control on Hispaniola, in part because the Spaniards despised them for being Genoese.92 Nonetheless, Columbus did prevent many abuses and crimes against the Indians. He instructed his men to treat the natives with kindness93—a fact that both Zinn and Koning somehow fail to mention. And on the return trip from Columbus’s second voyage to the New World when the men were desperate for food, some of them proposed eating the captive Indians “starting with the Caribs, who were man-eaters themselves; thus it wouldn’t be a sin to pay them in their own coin! Others proposed that all the natives be thrown overboard so that they would consume no more rations. Columbus, in one of his humanitarian moods, argued that after all Caribs were people and should be treated as such.”

Omitting the other side is one tool of the Black Art of Propaganda. Missing from Zinn's work is anything that distracts the reader from a simple black and white reading of history. History is complicated, and much more interesting because it is complicated. Unfortunately, most people like simplicity, and, like Matt Damon in "Good Will Hunting," they like feeling smart in their Dunning-Krueger condition. Thus, there is nothing in Zinn's work that suggests that the native Americans were real people who looked to Columbus and the Spaniards as tools for their internecine wars or give them agency in their dealings with the Spaniards.

Zinn enjoyed the protection of fellow partisans. Zinn plagiarized extensively from another leftist, but this partisan showed good party discipline by not blowing the whistle:

"Countryman told Zinn that he had “no intention of going public” on his charge because that “would be petty and uncomradely.”49 Koning apparently never complained either. As a fellow leftist, he was 100 percent on board with Zinn’s project to destroy the reputation of Columbus in order to turn future generations of young Americans against Western civilization, capitalism, and America."

Zinn's hatred of the West extended to misrepresenting all of American history. The reader can certainly expect America to be excoriated for slavery and the Cold War to be blamed exclusively on America, but Zinn goes to great lengths to condemn America for World War II.

History is interesting because it is complicated. Grabar provides an example of such an interesting complexity in the internment of the Japanese. She writes:

"One now oft-forgotten part of this history is related by political science professor Ken Masugi, whose parents were interned first at Tule Lake (until it became “a segregation center to house ethnic Japanese who proved troublemakers in other camps”) and then at the Minidoka Center in Idaho. According to Masugi, “Any honest study of the relocation or WWII will discuss the Niihau episode.” This event occurred on the afternoon of December 7, 1941, hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when a Japanese fighter-bomber landed on the remote Hawaiian island of Niihau. A native Hawaiian, Hawila Kaleohano, approached the pilot and grabbed his gun and papers. He then brought back two American-born inhabitants of Japanese heritage to act as interpreters. These two, a farmer and his wife—after they learned about the earlier attack on Pearl Harbor—decided to help the pilot and claim “the island for the Emperor.” Once the Hawaiians learned about their plot, a battle ensued, ending with the deaths of both the Japanese farmer and the pilot at the hands of the Hawaiians. The incident was included in the Roberts Commission Report released on January 24, 1942; understandably, it inspired alarm. Masugi comments, “Here was a simple farmer, neither agent nor nationalist, joining the cause of Japan in its moment of glory. . . .”43

I'd never heard this, but it does offer a nuance to the internment. The internment may have been wrong and/or bad policy, but it was not entirely irrational in light of the actual experience of the people making the decision at the time. We hope we will make a better decision if we are ever faced with the same situation again, but if we don't know the facts of the situation, we can't learn. If in the future, we have a similar situation, then, perhaps, we will need to weigh partisan actions by isolated individuals differently, but we won't do it if we have been led to believe that our ancestors were irredeemable racists making racist decisions whereas we are obviously beyond racism.

Zinn's project is fundamentally dishonest. His book is justified on the grounds that it looks at history from the perspective of those overlooked by historians. But that is a lie. Zinn was telling a Marxist history that was more than willing to overlook the perspective of those who are non-persons to Marxists:

"Like others around the globe, the Vietnamese suffered greatly at the hands of the Communists. The South Vietnamese armed forces had “lost 275,000 killed in action.” Nearly twice as many Vietnamese civilians—465,000 men, women, and children—had lost their lives, “many of them assassinated by Viet Cong terrorists or felled by the enemy’s indiscriminate shelling and rocketing of cities,” wrote Sorley. A million became boat people; many died at sea in their desperate flight from Communist oppression. “Perhaps 65,000 others were executed by their liberators. As many as 250,000 more perished in brutal reeducation camps. Two million, driven from their homeland, formed a new Vietnamese diaspora.”132

In a book that claims to celebrate the overlooked masses and the downtrodden, there is no mention of the Vietnamese refugees who were streaming to the United States when Zinn was writing his book in the late 1970s. But the only “people” Zinn was interested in were—as always—Communists, and people who can help the Communists win...."

This is an important book. We are going to be confronted by historical nonsense. If we ignore it as nonsense, we will be doing a disservice to objective truth because, unfortunately, there are many who don't know better.

Read this book. Educate yourself.

Resist.

Amora

177 reviews · 136 followers

March 8, 2022

My history class is currently using Howard Zinn’s book so I couldn’t have chosen a better time to read this. Zinn’s sources are often selectively quoted or have trouble themselves. On top of that, Zinn engaged in plagiarism while writing his book. As Grabar points out, it’s wild how someone like Zinn gets a pass while academics like David Irving don’t even though both of them selectively quote sources and plagiarize. This has come in very handy for my history class.

history

Louis

152 reviews

May 3, 2020

It’s not everyday that I can say that I read a book that was so foolish I couldn’t put it down. When I read People’s History it made me want to understand more and find information on the topics discussed in the book. In other words I didn’t want a white washing of American history that painted everything with rose colored glasses. Along comes Mary Grabar to make sure those rose colored glasses stay on and don’t come off.

How arrogant can someone be that they simply can’t handle the other point of view in a discussion? How can someone argue with a straight face that Columbus wasn’t responsible for the slaughtering of an untold amount of people? Or that the Black Panthers responded how they did not because they were fed up with the way the entire black race was stomped on over and over but because they were thugs with no regard for laws? Or defending the actions of the all White Founding Fathers who in their desire to start a country founded on liberty and freedom in turn did so by building it on the backs of slaves? Forcing some of those slaves via rape into having children even those as young as 14(hello Mr Jefferson).

Considering Mrs. Grabar’s track record of defending the Tea Party, a group of predominantly white citizens who suddenly became concerned about national deficits when a black man was elected president but have miraculously vanished into thin air when a white man is back in office, her arguments are flimsy at best.

“The love of wisdom is being replaced by the love of grievances” was a comment made by Mrs. Grabar in 2010 as she railed against a changing academic climate that was stopping white washing and looking at the other avenues that shaped our view of our national history and how it was being taught. It’s not lost on me that she has written a book that is determined to make sure that white washed version of history stays at the forefront of education. It shouldn’t be lost on you either.

conservative-garbage

Mark

23 reviews · 1 follower

October 2, 2019

I had to read Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" during my AP US History course in High School. The book is a rebellion on the traditional wisdom, turning everything we were taught about the history of the United States on it's head. If this is the only "history" book you ever read you will come away disenfranchised and ashamed to be an American. Zinn's book challenged my understanding of American history. Since then I have answered that challenge and reclassified Zinn's "history" as propaganda.

Mary Grabar levees a scathing rebuke to the now ubiquitous "A people's history of the United States" by Howard Zinn, which is required reading for students around the country. Grabar holds Zinn's book to the principles established by the American Historical Association (AHA) and shows that throughout "A people's history of the United States" Zinn misrepresents sources by taking statements out of context or omitting factual evidence that would contradict his claims. History is complex and nuanced and requires in depth analysis. Boiling it down to class struggle as Zinn does, is not history, it's propaganda.

Tom

119 reviews · 3 followers

October 2, 2019

Zinn gained prominence despite an utter lack of actual and honest scholarship because his "People's History" undermined and "unmasked" the (frankly, true) history shared by Americans prior to his book and "shocked" those who accepted the old versions. If those who love Zinn are truly interested in history,they will consider this book which does to Zinn what he did to Columbus -- only this one does it with facts.

This book carefully picks apart Zinn's dishonest "scholarship" -- omitting from quoted sources material that completely contradicts his thesis, ignoring facts contemporaneous with his writing of the book, and many other "techniques" -- in his hack job on Columbus, the American Indian, racism, World War II, Vietnam, race relations, and Communism in the US. Grabar provides the full quotes, the contemporaneous facts.

In the end, the book demonstrates exhaustively how Zinn utterly fails as an historian. "Zinn did everything -- misrepresented sources, omitted critical information, falsified evidence, and plagiarized." Zinn should be banished from American schools.

Dave

2,912 reviews · 307 followers

June 20, 2020

In a time when the deeds of the great explorers and even those of the fathers of our country, it is important to understand where the criticism has come from and whether it has a strong historical basis. Much of the impetus behind the new rewrite of history seems to stem from Howard Zinn's A People's History, a book that states its purpose of providing a bottom up view of history from the point of view of those victimized. Mary Grabar boldly steps into this debate, declaring that Zinn's Marxist-inspired history is inherently flawed, fails to present all the facts, lacks any nuance, and is focused solely on presenting a political point of view rather than an honest historical record.

Her well-researched critique begins with exploring how Zinn's book became so popular and influential and who he was. His credentials are quite uninspiring for someone so widely read. Then, Grabar turns to refuting each of Zinn's chapters, beginning with Columbus and the explorers, arguing that the historical record does not support the view that Columbus was a bad man or that he ever intended harm to the Native Americans. And Cortez apparently took on an Aztec Empire for whom human sacrifice of other tribes was a frequent event. Indeed, the records of the contacts between New World settlers and the Natives were far more complex and nuanced than apparently Zinn would ever admit.

Grabar gives a similar critique of Zinn's treatment of the founding fathers, the Civil War, World War 2, the Cold War, and Vietnam. Grabar shows how Zinn's book simplified and caricatured events and people to divide people into oppressors and the oppressed without regard for historical accuracy, the greater picture of the world at the time, or the intricacies involved.

In many instances where historical figures have been critiqued, rather than simply dismissing them as irredeemably flawed, Grabar posits that it is perhaps more accurate to see them in historical context and their work as critical founding building blocks - though flawed by today's values - but which promised liberty, justice, and equal treatment under the law for all, a promise which unfortunately took a civil war and even a civil rights movement a hundred years later to fulfill.

Grabar offers up a fascinating study that should make readers eager to do their own research and rethink the propaganda they've been taught. Being a critique of another book, it's not always an easy read, but quite worthwhile.

edelweiss-books history history-social-science 

Jennifer Snow

37 reviews · 7 followers

September 23, 2019

Mandatory

A detailed look at what can only be called Communist propaganda disguised as history and it's unfortunate and long-range effects on education in America, replacing respect with misplaced blame.

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