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

by Mary Grabar

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has sold over 2.5 million copies and is still required reading in some high school and college classrooms. But its polemic rewriting of American history as a story of oppression is an agenda-driven fairy tale that has no place in academia. In Debunking Howard Zinn, Mary Grabar unmasks Howard Zinn's lies and traces the damage his mega-bestseller has done to American education, culture, and politics. 

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, American History, Education, Audiobook, American

402 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 20, 2019

About the author

Mary Grabar, the author of “Debunking Howard Zinn,” earned her PhD from the University of Georgia and taught college English for 20 years. She is now a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization in Clinton, New York. Her writing can be found at DissidentProf.com and at marygrabar.com.

Reviews

[Michael Perkins · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[Anthony Murawski · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Jeanette · Rating 4 out of 5]

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".

[Bob Barker · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[Peter Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Jennifer Snow · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[DH · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poorly sourced hack job by Koch-funded "scholar." Yuck.

[Mike (the Paladin) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Look, it doesn't need me to explain it or try to tell you what it says if you read the book. Just read it.

If you can be honest with yourself.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been wondering why it is that our youth of today have developed such hatred for America, their own country, the same country that tens and hundreds of thousands of people from around the world risk their lives to immigrate to. Has no one told these wanna be immigrants what a horrible place America is, full of racists, misogynists, homophobes, bigots, etc, etc? One reason is Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States (which I have actually read) that is defended by (mostly leftist) university professors who know better, and is assigned as mandatory reading in high school and college classrooms to teach students that American history is nothing more than a litany of oppression, slavery, and exploitation. It has thoroughly infected our classrooms and essentially turned them into indoctrination centers for popular socialist/communist doctrine that puts a trendy populist spin on American history but reads more like a collection of leftist propagandist talking points. According to Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America, Scholar Mary Grabar, exposes just how wrong Zinn is in this stunning new book as she takes on and demolishes his Marxist talking points that now dominate American education. She uses facts and reference materials from real historians to dispel much of the opinions pushed by Zinn as facts (Nazis always said to make lies big and repeat often and people will start to believe them as truth). When you peel away all of Zinn's distortions you will realize what people around the world understand about America that our kids are being re-educated into forgetting and why these foreigners still want to come here. The author also reveals Zinn’s bag of dishonest rhetorical tricks like his use of 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 true past—and the promise of our future—you need to read this book.

[Susan · Rating 1 out of 5]

After the first bit, I ended up skimming the rest. This book shows the importance both in the author being aware of their own biases and in the reader identifying the author's biases. I've also not read Howard Zinn's history, so I can't speak about his work really. I therefore won't say that some of the criticism of his work isn't justified. After the first few pages, I looked up the author and found that she's an English professor who was born in a Communist country and then came to America. Given that, her dislike of any criticism of America is more understandable. That said, I think it is good to criticize our past where we have done wrong, to help us to be better and live up to the ideals in our Declaration and Constitution. Grabar is right that the Japanese internment camps weren't as bad as Nazi concentration camps, for example, but that doesn't mean we get a pass, either. It is also important to note that our history books tell the story not just of what was, but of what is at the time of writing, since our perception of history is colored by our own present.

[Audrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Howard Zinn proves how easy it is to manipulate young people. Just tell them that their parents and/or teachers have been telling them lies their whole lives, but you think they can handle the truth, no matter how unpopular, because you treat them like adults. They are special and smart and one of the few truly informed. This technique is used over and over and never fails.

Zinn was a communist activist who wrote a popular “history” book forty years ago. Because his rhetoric is appealing, it’s become widespread and is even used as a textbook, despite the fact that it has very few sources (let alone reliable ones), selective quotations, anecdotal data, rhetorical questions that imply untruths, and outright lies.

This book seeks to set the record straight, especially regarding Columbus and the discovery of the Americas, the founding of America, the Civil War, and the Vietnam War. Here are tons of sources and clear explanations about how and why Zinn is wrong.

It’s easy to read and may make your blood boil or your head explode in outrage. A must-read.



Clean content. (Possible strong language in quotes; I can’t remember for sure.)

=======================================================

Zinn’s highly selective quotations from Columbus’s log are designed to give the impression that Columbus had no concern for the Indians’ spiritual or physical well-being—that the explorer was motivated only by a “frenzy for money” that drove him to enslave the natives for profit when he wasn’t hunting them down with dogs because they couldn’t supply him with large quantities of gold from supposed mines whose very existence was “part fiction” created by Columbus himself. ... 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.

Zinn’s book is the real “grand romance”—about himself. Zinn is the swashbuckling historian rescuing the forgotten story—the one covered up by all previous historians who lack his compassion and moral vision. Here he is, the crusader-historian, the knight in shining armor rushing to the rescue of the oppressed.

According to Zinn, there’s no such thing as objective history, anyway. ... Once ideology has become a moral virtue, Zinn can discount standards of scholarship —such as those of the American Historical Association—as having nothing more important than “technical problems of excellence”—standards of no importance compared to his kind of history.

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.

His account of the Age of Discovery is the same morality tale he has already told about Columbus: Europeans bad, Indians good. “The Aztec civilization of Mexico” is glorious, with “the heritage of the Mayan, Zapotec, and Toltec cultures.” It “built enormous constructions from stone tools, and human labor, developed a writing system and a priesthood.” (The Aztecs did not have the wheel or an alphabet, and much of the “human labor” was slave labor. Zinn acknowledges that the Aztecs perpetrated “the ritual killing of thousands of people as sacrifices to the gods.” (This “ritual killing” included children, slaves, and prisoners of war whose hearts were cut out of them while they were still alive as five priests held them down.) But for Zinn, the “cruelty of the Aztecs … did not erase a certain innocence.”

Zinn, however, is not concerned with such details; he is happy to lump all Indians into one group. In Zinn’s scheme, individuals don’t matter so much as the group to which they belong: Indian or European, good guy or bad guy.

While Zinn goes further than most in depicting the Indians as the peaceful, blameless victims, the cliche was already a well-known trope that Richard R. Johnson—in 1977, three years before the publication of A People’s History of the United States—identified as “the usable Indian”: the Native American as a prop in furtherance of a predetermined agenda. Just as the caricature of the savage Indian was convenient to some in earlier times, the caricature of the innocent, generous, pacifist Indian was convenient to collectivists of the 1960s and beyond.

The campaign to abolish slavery was a Western thing, and a relatively new thing at the time. As the late great Orientalist historian Bernard Lewis put it, “The institution of slavery … had been practiced from time immemorial. It existed in all the ancient civilizations of Asia, Africa, Europe, and pre-Columbian America. It had been accepted and even endorsed by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as other religions of the world.” And it was not only African peoples who were enslaved. Slavery was “a ubiquitous institution” in the early modern period, writes Allan Gallay. “Contemporary to the rise of African slavery in the Americas, millions of non-African peoples were enslaved.” These included “over a million Europeans … in North Africa, and perhaps more in the Ottoman Empire,” as well as the European settlers taken in captivity in the New World by Indians—not to mention the enslavement of Indians by other Indians of other tribes.

The North was charged with “‘a hostile invasion of a Southern state to excite insurrection, murder and rapine.’ ... South Carolina added, ‘They have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted the open establishment among them’ of abolition societies, and ‘have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.’”

The fact is, Zinn will do anything to make America look bad; he simply cannot allow his reader to give the first Republican elected president credit for freeing the slaves—and for going about it in a principled and prudent manner. That would mean giving the American people credit for abolishing slavery, and it would undermine Zinn’s picture of America as a uniquely racist country.

Historian Robert Paquette: “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.

Howard Zinn’s account of World War II is a pacifist fantasy riddled with conspiracy theories. The tone is set on the first page of his chapter of the war, where he opens with a long quotation from “a skit put on in the United States in the year 1939 by the Communist party” suggesting that America fought World War II for “imperialist” reasons.

The Allied victory was due in large part to an American workforce that worked with resolve and to a free market system that supported industrial output and innovation by the so-called arms merchants, including Nebraskan Andrew Jackson Higgins, a builder of “fishing and pleasure boats,” who designed the “Higgins boats”—the landing craft that made D-Day possible. After the war, President Eisenhower, who was certainly in a position to know, said that Higgins was “the man who won the war.” Military historian Victor Davis Hanson credits the American free enterprise system: “In critical areas such as transport planes, merchant ships, locomotives, food supplies, medicine, oil production, and metals production,” the Allies far “outproduced” the Axis powers, who often relied on “coerced” workers.

Zinn—surprise, surprise—provides no statistics for his claim, and the reality is the opposite. Blacks were less supportive of Communists than whites because African American leaders believed, correctly, that the Communist Party was exploiting them. Black newspapers warned their readers.

In downplaying the role of the NAACP in the battle for civil rights and exaggerating that of the Communist Party, Howard Zinn was, once again, following the Communist Party propaganda line.

Apparently, Zinn, who presents the Communist Party as the only hope for African Americans, wasn’t disturbed by the bloodshed. Journalists and members of the NAACP spoke out against the Communists’ recklessness with black lives, but of course Zinn doesn’t quote their statements of protest. George Schuyler … charged “the Communist racketeers” with giving “the murderous Neanderthals the very opportunity and excuse they are looking for to commit additional homicide.” Two weeks later, he accused the Communists of wanting “electrocutions, massacres and savage sentences in order that they may have concrete cases on which to base their propaganda.” He charged, accurately, that the CPUSA’s purported help to American blacks was undertaken at the behest and for the benefit of the Kremlin.

If there ever was a good candidate to be one of the overlooked “people” whose history Zinn claimed to be writing, it would be E. D. Nixon. But Zinn has little time for the stories of African Americans who worked on peaceful campaigns for civil rights, especially when they did it without the help of Communists. Zinn clearly hoped that “the frightening explosiveness of the black upsurge” could be useful in bringing about some kind of socialist revolution or other radical transformation of America.

As usual, blacks suffered the brunt of the violence that Zinn’s heroes—the “black militants” so useful to him as mascots for the socialist revolution—fomented. As we have already seen, most African Americans did not side with these violent troublemakers; they wanted them punished to protect their communities. George Schuyler railed against the white radicals who inspired black troublemakers to riot and then blamed police. Citing polls of blacks, he went so far as to quip, “They want more police brutality.”

The Pentagon Papers obscured what had been accomplished between May 1968 and June 1971, giving the American public the false impression that the war was unwinnable. Left-wing journalists exploited the “revelations” in the Pentagon Papers and distorted the material in them, thus contributing to defeat in Vietnam. In doing so, they were following a line of propaganda that would successfully undermine the American public’s support for the war and thus prove instrumental in our defeat—and ultimately to the subjection of millions of East Asians to bloody Communist tyrannies.

Zinn and his political allies bear a large measure of responsibility for the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese “boat people” who risked drowning to escape the horrors of Communism in the 1970s—many of whom died. To anyone not seeing the Vietnamese Communists through rose-colored glasses, the tragic results were predicable from the beginning. ... Ultimately, over a million Vietnamese fled the north. ... In Zinn’s telling, the Communists are the popular good guys. All the problems are caused by the evil, capitalist imperialists—especially the Americans.

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.

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. He is uninterested in the ideas that undergird our American republic—which have made America so attractive to those fleeing totalitarian regimes. He’s not satisfied with America’s uniquely successful constitutional system of checks and balances. In fact, even pure democracy won’t do. ... No revolution (certainly not the American Revolution) and no system of government (certainly not our Constitution) will satisfy Zinn until what he calls “the division of society into rich and poor” can somehow be made to vanish away. Those who know history know what this Marxist siren song leads to. The only way to disguise it is to ignore the more than one hundred million corpses that it produced in the twentieth century and to present the United States, the freest nation in world history, as a tyrannical, murderous, and imperialistic regime—which is exactly what Zinn has done in his History.

[Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grabar tries to set the record straight regarding Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” which has become disturbingly ubiquitous in high school and college curricula. Zinn claims to have written a history from the “bottom up,” focusing on the marginalized peoples rather than the winners that are otherwise believed to write the history that is taught in schools. Although that may seem a laudable goal, Grabar’s contention is that Zinn’s “history” is falsified and more appropriately described as propaganda designed solely to stoke the flames of resentment to the point of igniting a communist revolution. Strong words, but does she make her case?

Chapters 1 and 3 concentrate on Zinn himself and his motives. I suppose it’s important to know that Zinn had no intention to write an “objective” history (he thought it was impossible to be objective thus justifying overt bias), and that he wasn’t really an historian, but was primarily a political activist and communist sympathizer. He seems to believe the ends justify the means as long as he is on the right (that is, left) side. Still, I think these chapters are a bit overdone, and if not exactly ad hominem attacks, they do border on strident Bulverism. Instead, the important questions are: is Zinn’s history true? Is his book historically accurate? Are his conclusions well-founded?

Well, the short answer to all these questions is a resounding “No.” Most of the rest of the book examines Zinn’s historical claims. Grabar details how consistently inaccurate Zinn’s accounts of history are. He plagiarizes some authors (typically leftist activists rather than historians) that agree with him, while he misquotes others to give the impression that they believed the exact opposite of what they wrote. He omits facts that would demonstrate that his views are erroneous. He tells half-truths to leave readers with a false impression about some events, and flat-out lies about others. The correction of all these historical inaccuracies comprises the bulk of this book. It is thorough and, quite frankly, exhausting.

It’s sad to think that a student reading Zinn’s book, because it has been assigned by an instructor, or because the genius in “Good Will Hunting” gives it a glowing recommendation, would have no idea that much of the book is factually false. It is also distressing that professors continue to use this book as a teaching tool despite Zinn’s failure to follow the principles of the American Historical Association. They would never allow a book in their classrooms with such shoddy scholarship and obvious political bias if the political goals did not align with their own. They should be ashamed.


Here’s a couple better reviews:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Aitor · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have read through half of Zinn’s book so far and I think I have found relatively easy to guess what his biases are, as he himself explains in the preface and doesn’t hide where he comes from.

I have just read the preface of Mary Grabar’s book and already found several signs of dishonesty: the use of ad-hominem arguments and guilt by association (he is communist, communism has killed one zillion people) have kept me alert, but there’s a part of this introduction that definitely makes me think that the rational process of this writer is defective.

She states, utterly worried, that more people think positively of communism than of capitalism and she attributes this merit to Zinn’s work. How dishonest is this reasoning? Do current poverty and inequality levels have nothing to do with this? Does she take into account what an automation-driven capitalist society has to offer young people nowadays?

Only the first 9 pages of this book have warned me of what lies ahead. But still, I am determined to go on and have both Zinn’s and Grabar’s arguments and see which convince me more. I hope I have the stomach...

[Drtaxsacto · Rating 4 out of 5]

If Historians had an errors and omissions policy - to cover inadvertent or purposeful distortions of history - Howard Zinn's policy would long have lapsed based on the number of payouts. Zinn was an activist called a People's History of the United States; in reality it is a far left of center interpretation of our history - distorted through Zinn's political biases. Zinn distorted almost all of American history - from restating the argument first made by Charles Beard (that the Constitution was a clever attempt to keep the ruling class in power) to the notion that Columbus rather than being an intrepid explorer was a racist and pillager. Zinn's lens on American history saw through a constant view of conspiracy and oppression.

Zinn did some odd things including discounting the role of the NAACP in Civil Rights in favor or SNCC or even the Panthers. He presents a history of our involvement in Vietnam which discounts any reason for US involvement (although after the fall of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos - the domino theory seems to have been proven correct).

Grabar's book goes through the errors and omissions of Zinn's work but in a way that is in itself polemic. If you separate out her rhetoric she shows his selective use of facts, his distortions of quotes and other errors that most professional historians would reject. And her larger point is that Zinn's presentation is ultimately negative for our common understanding of heritage.

History should include nuances. Zinn's work clearly disagreed with that. But in one sense so does Grabar's - but as a result of the widespread adoption of Zinn materials in US history courses - the greater damage comes from Zinn not Grabar.

[Caroline Kelemen · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read A People's History of the United States a few years ago and it enjoyed it, but I try to read a diversity of opinions to avoid an echo chamber. However, this book was not very rigorous. The first few chapters called Howard Zinn a communist, Marxist, Maoist, anarchist, Stalinist, socialist and anti-war activist. I'm not sure how you can be all of those things, but it sure made Zinn seem pretty cool. Then the book went into what seemed like a bunch of Nazi dog whistles like, did you know some Japanese Americans liked internment camps, actually? This book is a pretty easy skip.

[Rick Harsch]

No stars for propaganda.

[Mirjam · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't like Howard Zinn either, but man, if you're gonna claim to be debunking him, at least use some actual facts.

[Richard Munro · Rating 5 out of 5]

very important book and well-researched. Will have more to say later. Zinn was a disgrace. Zinn was a plagiarist, Zinn was dishonest and distorted history. Grabar documents everything word for word. And yes, he was probably a Communist.

[Maynard Nordmoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review: Debunking Howard Zinn by Mary Grabar Feb. 23, 2020
If you think that Christopher Columbus was a rapacious adventurer and a genocidal maniac out for gold and slaves, chances are you have been heavily influenced by Howard Zinn and his popular book, A People’s History of the United States. Zinn (1920-2010) was a charismatic and non-conformist professor who wrote a number of books but none so popular as A People’s History that appeared in 1980. Mary Grabar has done us all a great favor by raising the curtain on Zinn to reveal him to be the Marxist propagandist that he is all the while he pretends to be a serious historian. Any attentive reader should easily come to that conclusion in reading his book for he provides ample rope to hang himself at every turn. Grabar’s counter is entitled The Debunking of Howard Zinn, Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America. She has done the heavy lifting combing through reams of thorough research to counter the egregious lies, plagiarism, and mis-information abounding in Howard Zinn’s work. Grabar’s book is not especially easy or fun reading for all the footnoting, quotes, and counter-quotes, but it is essential and a treasure if one is to combat this pernicious polemic. Plus, it will make you downright mad to see the twisted viewpoints on American history parading themselves as facts throughout Zinn’s work. One must come to Zinn with the understanding that he is a thorough-going Marxist, and he sees all history through the eyes of Karl Marx. The American revolution was fomented by rich white men to amass more wealth. Indians were feminist-communist sexual revolutionaries ahead of their time. The Civil War was fought to perpetuate a racist capitalistic state. Americans of the “greatest generations” were no better than the Nazi war criminals they fought against. The Viet Cong were well-meaning community leaders advocating for local self-rule. The Black Panthers were virtuous civil rights leaders. America invented racism. These and other themes portray all the evils of the world as a result of capitalistic oppression of the working class. Zinn is a champion of all who call for revolution and the abolition of capitalism. As such, his People’s History is carefully designed to polarize and incite anger.
Why and how Zinn’s work has become so popular and how it has infiltrated all of higher academia and even into public high schools is the most troubling question after reading Grabar’s book. Zinn definitely appeals to our cynical nature that wants to believe the worst of anyone and anything. And we always want to blame someone for the ills and injustices of society. How much also do we find the novel and unorthodox attractive for it sets us apart and gives us a feeling of superiority similar to the ancient gnostics with their special and secret wisdom. Similar movements gathered strength in Britain in the late 1800’s when cynicism became fashionable amongst the educated young who tired of the patriotic jingoism of the British Empire and poo-pooed the whole idea of king and country. Britain’s Empire began its steady decline at that point. Are the educated elite of our country just so weary and tired of America’s success, prosperity, and power that they wish to embrace a whole new and dark view of our uniqueness? Or is the lure of a Utopian, one-world community and economy where nations dissolve their borders and live together in peace and equanimity still alive and well? In that case, patriotism and nationalism are the enemy and the sooner we trash our romantic notions of American exceptionalism the better.
The stakes are high for our young are being imbued with a whole other way of viewing our heritage as a people. I must agree with Grabar when she says, “When historians lie, there is no defense.” And that, to me, is downright scary.
Maynard Nordmoe
M.Ed, M.A. (History)

[Jason E. Fort · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zinn, the awful activist (and his history sucked, too!)

Wow! Where do I begin? First of all, the author put a lot of work into this, and is to be commended for all her hard research. Secondly, it was refreshing to read from such a scholarly author for once, and NOT read how bad my own country is. On the contrary, she points out the fact that although someone like Howard Zinn liked to point at all our flaws (in quite inaccurate or incomplete manner), there have been some very noble deeds and values brought to this world by the good ol' USA.
And if you have wondered how our education system... and just about all historical references and depictions in pop culture have steered entire generations far left - look no further than this inside look at the mind of a disgruntled political activist, who unfortunately influenced all the wrong people in all the wrong places, for all the wrong reasons. I praise Mary for her courage in going against the elite educational grain. This is an easy five stars from me.

[Brett T · Rating 3 out of 5]

To say that Howard Zinn's 1980 book A People's History of the United States has detractors undersells the widespread work of polemicists, opinion writers and historians right and left who question its scholarship, aims and the honesty of its author. Zinn was a political science professor at Boston University when he wrote the book that would define the rest of his life. He said he intended it to counter the kind of historical narrative that only focused on the powerful, political and economic elites and the winners. He wanted a history that told the stories of the people that those traditional narratives overlooked.

Almost immediately, the book would draw rabid praise and cold-eyed criticism. As expected, conservative-leaning intellectuals dismissed Zinn's class-struggle based iconoclasm. But a number of centrist and left-leaning historians also pointed out that Zinn had only inverted the hero-villain narratives of the histories he disliked rather than corrected them. The vision of history in People's History was just as simplistic, they said, and Zinn's zeal to lift up what he saw as oppressed classes led him to omit information that might suggest a more nuanced history.

Nevertheless, excellent publicity and strong financial support have kept Zinn's book and his work at the forefront of academic debate -- its use in high school classes is frequently targeted even today. That's why 2019 can see something like Mary Grabar's Debunking Howard Zinn, a 350-page fisking of Zinn's 40-year-old book. Grabar, a longtime English professor who now works with the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, takes a couple of chapters to outline the popularity of People's History before diving into its text and errors.

Although not herself a historian, Grabar is a scholar and mostly follows standard academic practice in Debunking. She extensively footnotes her work and relies on a wide range of attributed sources -- something Zinn himself did less well at. It's certainly a book that Zinn detractors and folks interested in more honest history should keep for ready access. Grabar's meticulous dissection makes it easy to point out what the professor got wrong, where he may very likely have plagiarized other work and where he ignored clear evidence from his own cited works that says the opposite of what he says it does.

But as a work in its own right, Debunking's polemic tone begins to take on the air of a rather heated PowerPoint presentation. Fisking is fun at first but since Zinn isn't all that creative in his errors Grabar is also stuck repeating herself. The world will be a better place when People's History winds up in the dustbin of the same and scholars like Mary Grabar can turn their attention to more interesting topics.

Original available here.

[Paul Sand · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]

I happened upon an article from Michael Huemer while reading this book. Huemer asks: Can Teaching the Truth Be Racist? He proposes a thought experiment:

Suppose you learned that there was a school staffed mainly by right-leaning teachers and administrators. And at this school, an oddly large number of lessons touch upon, or perhaps center on, bad things that have been done by Jews throughout history. None of the lessons are factually false – all the incidents related are things that genuinely happened and all were actually done by Jewish people. For example, murders that Jews committed, times when Jews started wars, times when Jews robbed or exploited people. (I assume that you know that it’s possible to fill up quite a lot of lessons with bad things done by members of whatever ethnic group you pick.) The lessons for some reason omit or downplay good things done by Jews, and omit bad things done by other (non-Jewish) people. What would you think about this school?

I hope you agree with me that this is a story of a blatantly racist and shitty school. It would be fair to describe the school as promoting hatred toward Jewish people, even if none of the lessons explicitly stated that one should hate Jews. I hope you also agree that no parent or voter should tolerate a public school that operated like this.

Now, what if the school’s right-wing defenders explained that there was actually nothing the slightest bit racist or otherwise objectionable about the school, because it was only teaching facts of history? All these things happened. You don’t want to lie or cover up the history, do you?

I hope you agree with me that this would be a pathetic defense.

Author Mary Grabar convinces me that Howard Zinn was up to that sort of thing throughout his career, especially in his famed book A People's History of America: presenting carefully selected "facts" that leave his readers seriously misinformed, some ready to man the barricades with pitchforks and tumbrels.

Except when it comes to the "facts" part. Zinn wasn't above making up his own as well. In addition, Grabar shows, his methods included out-of-context quoting, omitting relevant details if they complicated his narrative, plagiarism, and overall dishonesty in service of his primary thesis, namely the unsurpassed evil of the United States and free-market capitalism. Unsurprising, because Zinn was no traditional historian. Despite his academic positions over his lifetime, he was every inch the hard-left activist, preferring propaganda and advocacy over traditional scholarship.

And (boy) was he ever adored for it. Grabar notes his citation in the movie Good Will Hunting from writer/star Matt Damon where he tells Robin Williams that the People's History was a "real history book" that would "knock you on your ass".

Must be true, because Damon's playing a genius. And then he eventually moved on to plugging cryptocurrency in slick TV ads.

Grabar takes on the People's History chapter by chapter, providing her own counter-narratives to Zinn's on Christopher Columbus, Native Americans, civil rights, the Founding Fathers, World War II, Vietnam, and the "Red Scare". I'm pretty sure if Zinn had said somewhere that the sky was blue, Grabar would respond "Of course, Zinn conveniently forgets to mention the nighttime sky, which is mostly black." But she scores enough points to (at least) convince the fair-minded reader that you get a story from Zinn, but not the whole story. And you should turn your skepticism filter up to eleven.

Unfortunately, at a number of spots, Grabar's rhetoric becomes sarcastic and strident. That's likely to turn off otherwise persuadable readers.

(FYI: I found Huemer's quoted article above via Bryan Caplan's Substack post on the "mainstream media", Worse Than Silence, also worth reading if you're interested in that.)

[Isaac · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll try to keep this review short. Howard Zinn's 'A People's History of the United States' is Marxist propaganda, nothing more. Zinn lies to his readers repeatedly, pretending that he's really just telling history from the perspective of 'the oppressed'. That way he can continually dismiss more 'mainstream' (in this case accurate) views as representing the views of 'the oppressors', which are, of course, morally illegitimate in his opinion. Zinn provides his readers with the morally legitimate opinion.

It's convenient how 'the oppressed', in Zinn's telling, always seem to think like Marxists and how their stories always seem to conform to Marxist propaganda about class and capitalism. According to Zinn, Native Americans were basically peaceful proto-communists and proto-feminists, European settlers (capitalists) were bloodthirsty mass-murderers, Communists were at the forefront in fighting for civil rights in the 1960s, the Vietcong were freedom-fighters, and capitalism (free markets) are the source of most of the world's ills today.

That is BS. Mary Grabar's book shows why it is BS. So, you should read Mary Grabar's book. It's not perfect, and it is rather partisan toward American conservatism (with neo-conservative leanings). However, as competent left-wing historians seem reluctant write a full-length expose of Zinn's deceptions (perhaps because Zinn is so popular on the American left), this is the best book available for that purpose.

I would have given this book 5/5, except for two reasons:

(1) the 'debunking' format is awkward, with the narrative lurching from one period to another, and generally does not make for good history writing,

(2) the author occasionally makes personal attacks on Zinn that are not relevant to his 'scholarship'. That he was a Communist and a radical activist are relevant, as this exposes his extreme political biases, as well as his personal investment in some of the events he describes, and explains why he's more interested in writing propaganda than good history. However, his sexual misconduct and infidelity are much less relevant and deserved less attention than they got.

Despite these flaws, I highly recommend this book.

P.S. For those looking for competent histories of the U.S., I'd recommend either Jill Lepore's 'These Truths' (left-wing, liberal perspective) or William J. Bennett's 'America: The Last Best Hope' (right-wing, conservative perspective).

[Brian Fiedler · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent survey of selected epochs in American history. The book can be read independent of any personal need to debunk your personal reading of Zinn's book. There is no need to have a copy of Zinn at hand, or to even have read it. The important quotes from Zinn are delivered to you.

Given the wide popularity of Zinnism, you have undoubtedly been exposed to it. Your brain may have at least a low grade infection of Zinnism. You will appreciate the relief this book brings.

What allowed Zinnism to become so virulent? That's also explained in the book.

Thank you Mary Grabar.

[Sugarpunksattack Mick · Rating 1 out of 5]

Grabar’s lack of historical training and open disdain is glaringly obvious and betrays any pretense of objectivity. Zinn’s book is written from the perspective of ‘history from below’ and relies heavily on primary sources. When discussing Columbus, for example, Zinn quotes directly from Columbus’s own diary. If one disagrees with Zinn’s ultimate assessment, I recommended read the primary sources material because Graber’s book is ironically little more than poorly written propaganda.

[Josef · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sad that so many see this debate as a political matter. It seems that many are stuck in a Cold War stance.
I have read both books and have mixed feeling about both books.
I have read Athe logbooks from Columbus's voyages. I have read Bartoleme de Las Casas. Cc was a murdering profiteer in service to greedy European monarchy.
As an American student I was not taught about his atrocious acts.
I was not taught about the Tulsa Massacre.
I was not taught about the Sandy Hook Massacre. What I was taught was all about Manifest Destiny and the "brave settlers" who "built our nation".
We ALL know that "all men are created equal" was NEVER meant to apply to ALL men.
We ALL know that "liberty and justice for all was NEVER meant to apply to ALL.
The US is a great country. As someone who has lived all over the world (lived not just travelled) I an attest to that. It is, however, no where near perfect founded as it is in systemic racism and white supremacy. One can make all of the excuses in the world ...they so not change the fact.
Zinn pointed this out in his admittedly flawed style and has gotten much attention for it..good and bad.
If Zinn's book can so easily be dismissed by SOME as left-wing propaganda the this book is just, if not moreso dismissible as right-wing reactionary defensive drivel.
America's foundation is and has always been rotten. It needs to be fixed and it will never be fixed as long as it's people continue to pretend that it's not rotten.
I love my country but because it IS mine I and Zinn have every right to walk around in it and point out that the foundation is rotten ...that the windows are broken out and the roof need repair.
That is not hating America...that is wanting to FIX America.