Mary Grabar > Quotes

“A People’s History of the United States is intended to inspire anger of such magnitude that its readers want to overthrow the American Republic.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Zinn contrasts the very real and very effective American Revolution with an imaginary egalitarian paradise in order to lure the young and ignorant to support the Marxist nightmare from which millions have fled—and by which millions who were unable to escape have been killed.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Howard Zinn was a far-left political activist—very possibly a member of the Communist Party USA. The stories he put into A People’s History of the United States weren’t balanced factual history, but crude morality tales designed to destroy Americans’ patriotism and turn them into radical leftists.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“The true, Communist-style revolution that Zinn wishes had happened in America actually did happen during the French Revolution just a few years later—with disastrous results: “Before his fellow French revolutionaries carted him off to be guillotined in 1794, Georges Danton had described his purpose: ‘to put on top what was below.’ ”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“According to Zinn, there’s no such thing as objective history, anyway: “the historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.” Once ideology has become a moral virtue, Zinn can discount standards of scholarship—such as those of the American Historical Association—as having to do with nothing more important than “technical problems of excellence”—standards of no importance compared to his kind of history, which consists in forging “tools for contending social classes, races, nations.”85”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Meanwhile, real African American heroes—blacks who fought and won the battles for civil rights—don’t figure largely in Zinn’s account. The significant achievements of black labor and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, for example, are obscured by Zinn—perhaps because Randolph was an anti-communist who quit the National Negro Congress in 1940 because it “had fallen under the control” of Communist Party allies.32 There are only three mentions of Randolph in A People’s History—two of them quotations that have no bearing on what Randolph accomplished and are adduced simply to support Zinn’s picture of the black population “in the streets” and spoiling for a socialist revolution.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Zinn based his famous opening pages on a controversial book. And while Koning’s work was treated dismissively, Zinn’s transcriptions of Koning’s material to his own book are taken as groundbreaking historical revelations. And few know that they are little more than transcriptions.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“he had substituted one “monolithic reading of the past for another.” Zinn’s history was written in a manner that spoke “directly” to students’ “hearts,” but his “power of persuasion” was dangerous because it “extinguishes students’ ability to think.” A People’s History was a “history of certainty,” and whether of the Left or the Right, such histories invite a slide into “intellectual fascism,” according to Wineburg.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Unfortunately, Zinn’s attack on the historians who gave students a balanced picture of Columbus has been remarkably effective. Zinn successfully sold himself as a historian knocking down the giants who preceded him and championed the cause of the innocents oppressed by colonizers, capitalists, and Christians. Images of unspeakable cruelty against a gentle people remain in the minds of countless students who have read Zinn’s propaganda, and they now color the public discussion about Columbus. As history education professor Sam Wineburg pointed out with no little amazement, Howard Zinn’s readers believe him. Michael Kazin has noted that Zinn’s History takes on “the force and authority of revelation.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Zinn, perhaps too lazy or too busy with political agitation to do even the most basic research, has to paint a false picture of those historians with whom he disagrees. He places straw men on pedestals and then knocks them down one by one until only he is standing. A result like that would be substandard coming from a high school student writing a research paper—much less a professional historian claiming to be blazing a new trail and leaving the existing Columbus scholarship behind in the dust. Zinn’s pretense to break new ground on Columbus was nothing more than a clever marketing strategy, surpassing in chutzpah the most brazen of ad campaigns for quack tonics in our capitalistic system that he so vehemently condemns.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Few women desire the kind of “equality” that Engels, Foster, and Zinn offer. Marxists may present monogamy as a capitalist trick for enslaving women, but the fact is that most women desire lifelong, monogamous marriages—which redound to their benefit, compared to any other arrangement in which men can use women and then discard them. Few women in the United States wanted to trade places with women in the Soviet Union or would want to live the life of an Indian woman. American women today have more freedom than women have ever enjoyed anywhere in the globe at any time in world history. And even in early America, women’s rights here were greater than in England, and certainly than in most places in the world.79 Women in colonial America enjoyed the benefits of chivalry and security and respect in the family. Some women were tavern-keepers, merchants, dress-makers, midwives, teachers, writers, and landed proprietors, as the 1924 study Colonial Women of Affairs: A Study of Women in Business and the Professions in America before 1776 tells us.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“What? Subjugation? Alliances? Militarism? These are supposed to be European traits! Maybe that’s why Zinn skips this page, on which Nash also notes that “the Iroquois on the eve of European arrival were feared and sometimes hated by their neighbors for their skill and cruelty in warfare.” Furthermore, “[t]heir belief in the superiority of their culture was as pronounced as that of the arriving Europeans.”55 Nash’s book—which, alas, has been updated and imposed upon innocent students in American classrooms—skims over Indian acts of cruelty while providing vivid descriptions of those by Puritans.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“He has done this by lying, distorting and misusing evidence, hijacking other historians’ work, and falsifying the facts, as we have seen again and again. The problem is not that, as Zinn liked to pretend in his own defense, he wrote a “people’s” history, telling the bottom-up story of neglected and forgotten men and women. The problem is that he falsified American history to promote Communist revolution.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“The irony is that, as historian Robert Paquette, a specialist in the history of slavery, has remarked in his criticism of the use of Zinn’s history as a text in high school classrooms: An assessment in a classroom of, say, the history of slavery—the peculiar institution—by a professional historian should take into consideration the fact that the institution was not peculiar at all in the sense of being uncommon, and that it had existed from time immemorial on all habitable continents. In fact, at one time or another, all the world’s great religions had stamped slavery with their authoritative approval. Only at a particular historical moment—and only in the West—did an evolving understanding of personal freedom, influenced by evangelical Christianity, emerge to assert as a universal that the enslavement of human beings was a moral wrong for anyone, anywhere.85”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Notice how Karl Marx—the inventor of the Communist political philosophy whose implementation has resulted in the murders of tens of millions—is subtly introduced as a trustworthy authority.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“While Kuklick attributed part of the failures of A People’s History to the “textbook genre,” he preferred Carl Degler’s Out of Our Past, published back in 1959: “Degler’s biases are liberal, but he brought to his task a subtlety and sophistication that Zinn doesn’t possess.” According to Kuklick, Degler’s book covers much of the same ground and should be read before Zinn’s book.82 Out of Our Past had been described on January 1, 1959, in the New York Times as a discussion of “the developments, forces and individuals that have made this country what it is” and of such subjects as “how racial discrimination began and what schools and churches have done about it.”83 Degler had the bona fides, as the headline to his obituary on January 14, 2015, in the New York Times attested: “Carl N. Degler, 93, a Scholarly Voice of the Oppressed.” The Stanford University scholar had “delved into the corners of history” and “illuminated the role of women, the poor and ethnic minorities in the nation’s evolution.” His 1972 book about slavery, Neither Black nor White, won him the Pulitzer. And Degler’s work did not suffer from Zinn’s lack of familiarity with women’s issues. As early as 1966, he had been invited by Betty Friedan “to be one of [the] two men among the founders of the National Organization for Women.” Degler had the respect of colleagues, winning praise from Princeton professor Lawrence Stone for his 1980 book At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present and from C. Vann Woodward for Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century.84 Out of Our”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Spain had one particularly pressing reason—quite apart from greed for gold—for sailing to East Asia. As Andrew G. Bostom, quoting Louis Bertrand’s 1934 book The History of Spain, pointed out in a Columbus Day 2018 post on PJ Media, “Columbus sought ‘eastern (even far eastern) alliances’ to end a millennium of Islam’s jihad-imposed tyranny against Christendom. . . . When the Spanish Christian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella recaptured Grenada on January 2, 1492, they ended almost eight centuries of jihad ravages . . . massacres, pillage, mass enslavement, and deportation” under Muslim rule.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Leftist Kazin deemed A People’s History “polemic disguised as history.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“anaphora”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“It turned American history upside down and replaced America’s origin date, and, with it, the American identity.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America

“Muslim nations’ adherence to Islamic law, which sanctions slavery (except of free Muslims), made it more difficult to eliminate. As Bernard Lewis explains, “From a Muslim point of view, to forbid what God permits is almost as great an offense as to permit what God forbids—and slavery was authorized and regulated by the holy law.” Most Muslim states did not enact slavery abolition until the years between the World Wars.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Zinn clearly hoped to exacerbate class conflict by portraying blacks as poor victims ripe for revolt against the evil capitalist system.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Here, again, Zinn is following the Communist script, specifically the closing words of The Communist Manifesto: “[The Communists] openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Let’s start with one of the “unreal” teaching jobs that he doesn’t give the details of. Zinn’s first “real”—full-time—teaching position was at Spelman College, beginning in 1956, when he was appointed as “acting chairman of the department of history and social sciences.”17 Before then, while still working on his degree in the early 1950s, Zinn was a part-time instructor at Brooklyn College and Upsala College in New Jersey.18 During those years, though, in 1951, Zinn also taught a class in Marxism at the Communist Party headquarters in Brooklyn. That’s according to his FBI file. Zinn’s Communist activities came to the attention of the FBI beginning in 1948 when an informant reported that Zinn had told him that he was a member of the Communist Party and attended meetings five nights a week. According to the file, Zinn was “a delegate to the New York State Communist Party Convention.” The memo in Zinn’s FBI file lists a number of Communist-affiliated groups with which Zinn was working, including the Henry Wallace for President campaign. A different informant told the FBI that Zinn had been a member of the CPUSA (Communist Party USA) from at least 1949 to mid-1953. While teaching at Spelman, Zinn picketed against the quarantine of Cuba with other known Communists. At the loading dock where he had worked, he had had a reputation as a Communist.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“But the real problem with The 1619 Project is not that it is in conflict with “our cherished mythologies.” It’s that, as this book will lay out in detail, The Project is in conflict with the historical facts and the actual truth about America—which, yes, we do cherish, if we have any gratitude for our lives of unexampled freedom and prosperity, and any hope to see those blessings continue into the future. Such concerns would seem to be far from the minds of The 1619 Project’s creators and promoters, judging by their continuing willingness to foment shame and hatred for America, racial division and hostility, and even violence—as copious evidence, beginning with Nikole Hannah-Jones’s unapologetic celebration of the “1619 riots,” amply demonstrates.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America

“(In Marxist theory, the middle class is always the real impediment to a true revolution. No wonder Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said in The Communist Manifesto that the “bourgeois,” “the middle-class owner of property” must be “swept out of the way. . . .” and that the “first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class, to establish democracy” and then “centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state.”)”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Through the nonprofit Zinn Education Project (ZEP)—a collaborative effort with Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change—Zinn’s book and dozens of spin-off books, documentaries, role-playing activities, and lessons about Reconstruction, the 1921 Tulsa race riot, taking down “racist” statues, the “FBI’s War on the Black Freedom Movement,” the “Civil Rights Movement” (synonymous with the Black Panthers), the Black Panther Ten Point Program, “environmental racism,” and other events that provide evidence of a corrupt U.S. regime are distributed in schools across the country. According to a September 2018 ZEP website post, “Close to 84,000 teachers have signed up to access” ZEP’s history lessons and “at least 25 more sign up every day.” Alison Kysia, a writer for ZEP who specializes in “A People’s History of Muslims in the United States” and who taught at Northern Virginia Community College, used Zinn’s book in her classes and defended it for its “consciousness-raising power.”64 ZEP sends organizers to give workshops to librarians and teachers on such topics as the labor movement, the environment and climate change, “Islamophobia,” and “General Approaches to Teaching People’s History” (with full or partial costs borne by the schools!). In 2017, workshops were given in six states, Washington, D.C., and Vancouver, Canada.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Zinn chose not to include such information, but instead limited his discussion to earlier centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. He does admit that slaves were captured “in the interior” of Africa—frequently by blacks. Yet the African slave traders are absolved of responsibility. They were “caught up in the [Atlantic] slave trade themselves.”32 And yet, Bernard Lewis quotes a ninth century writer who observed that “the black kings sell blacks without pretext and without war.”33 Far from being hapless victims lured into a new kind of commerce, the Africans’ legal system actually “fueled the Atlantic slave trade,” according to Boston University professor John Kelly Thornton in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680, published by Cambridge University Press.34 And while slaves in America and Europe “typically had difficult, demanding, and degrading work, and they were often mistreated by exploitative masters who were anxious to maximize profits,” in Africa a slave could be arbitrarily sacrificed on an altar.35”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Canadian government interned twenty-two thousand people of Japanese origin, as well.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“What Gene told me comports with David Greenberg’s description in The New Republic: For all their leftist bona fides, [Genovese and colleagues Christopher Lasch and James Weinstein] agreed with their stodgy forebears that the intellectual had to hew to the highest standards of rigor; it was by the strength of their scholarship that they might revise entrenched beliefs that gave rise to the social conditions that, as a political matter, they decried. Genovese, most vociferously, flatly rejected the siren song of “relevant” history: he, too, hoped at the time for a socialist future, but he believed that it was best served by history that was true to the evidence, valid in its interpretations, and competent in its execution.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America