Posted on 04/15/2020 8:47:46 AM PDT by karpov
...
In Debunking Howard Zinn, Mary Grabar has performed the absolutely necessary task that her title promises, and has done so with admirable energy, persistence, and relentless attention to detail, leaving Zinn’s already shaky credibility in utter ruins. She brings the intensive scrutiny of a jeweler’s eye to Zinn’s work, topic by topic, and shows in no uncertain terms how flawed and unreliable it is.
But that is not all. She also shows us Zinn the man: An utter charlatan and naked partisan, an admirer of Stalin and Mao, a relentless self-promoter and self-mythologizer, and a media-savvy celebrity of the Left, immortalized in the movie Good Will Hunting—whose star, Matt Damon, grew up in Zinn’s shadow, as his young neighbor in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Howard Zinn isn’t the only person who has gotten rich off of anti-Americanism, but he is surely one of the most galling.
Properly, though, Grabar’s chief emphasis is on the book itself, and on the debunking of its claims to historical verisimilitude. Zinn, of course, explicitly and fervently denied the possibility of objectivity in history—as the title of his autobiography would have it, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train—a position that has become all too commonplace in our public culture, particularly as adopted by identity groups that claim a unique outlook to which outsiders cannot be privy. It is a book animated by an intense spirit of debunking: debunking of classic American heroes, from Columbus to FDR, and debunking of American claims to altruism or exceptional virtue.
Unlike most textbooks, Zinn’s writing was lively, and its irreverence appeals to the young. As one historian wrote, admiringly, Zinn offered a “deflation” of “the myths of standard-issue history,” and “whispered that everything I had learned in school was a sugar-coated fairy tale, if not a deliberate lie.”
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Ping. I think you’ll like this, probably already know about it.
This Marxist punk did huge damage. His BS is laced into almost every school in the country.
This America hater Marxist has brainwashed more high school and college kids than the Soviets ever hoped to.
Excellent.
I have encountered wizened punks like this who had the dark side down pat, on every historical American achievement, yet were oblivious to other countries mis adventures, which were usually 100x worse. Some kind of self loathing mental illness going on.
People like this should be kept away from young, impressionable people.
They religiously deny this.
I sent you a Freepmail.
To all, it’s interesting that McClay never cites “A Patriot’s History of the US” as the alternative to “People’s History.”
That is because he has his own US history program/book/course at Hillsdale he is promoting. Just compare his trailers with ours at www.wildworldofhistory.com
I think you’ll agree, ours is a vastly superior product. PHUSA has now sold 350,000 copies, half a million in print, in its 30th printing!
Just damn.
And I will continue to be a PHUSA cheerleader.
American history bookmark.
Read the book when it first came out. Very well researched and a solid rebuttal of that A__hole.
bump
I celebrated Zinn’s death. Yeah, I thought he was that evil.
St FDR of Alphabets was not an American hero.
When I was high school Social Studies dept. chair, I successfully banned Zinn’s book from use in the classroom. The logic was that if that book were used balance required alternative view points. I suggested Larry’s book, which had just come out.
So the commies on the staff gave up on using Zinn in the classroom but insisted we keep a department copy. I had no objection, but I made sure that to get to it they’d have to step on a poster of Che that I taped to the floor in the dept. office underneath the book shelf.
I have the book. Highly recommended. That little hit piece Zinn pulled on Columbus is laid out very nicely - he cobbled together three quotes from entirely different Columbus writings to effect an impression that Columbus was seeking suitable slaves when what Columbus was actually doing was speculating why one tribe was so aggressive toward another. Ugly lie, and difficult to catch.
“When I was high school Social Studies dept. chair, I successfully banned Zinn’s book from use in the classroom.”
Good for you! What happened after you left - are they using it now?
But US high school and college students are still indoctrinated in Zinn.
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