Posted on 06/08/2020 1:55:19 PM PDT by OddLane
Despite many serious scholars’ denunciations, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has enjoyed phenomenal success since its publication in 1980: 2.6 million (!) copies sold, incorporation into the curricula of innumerable schools, and the achievement of almost iconic status in popular culture. Mary Grabar’s Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America performs a valuable service by examining Zinn’s polemical volume and revealing “just how distorted, manipulative, and plain dishonest” it truly is.
A tireless left-wing activist with a Ph.D. in history, Zinn (1922–2010) urged fellow historians, as Grabar relates, to eschew “disinterested scholarship” in order to bring about “a revolution in the academy.” Not all radical academics agreed with his anti-capitalist take on history. Eugene Genovese declined to review Zinn’s opus, which he privately described as “incoherent left-wing sloganizing.” Michael Kammen called it “a scissors-and-paste-pot job” that devoted too much attention to “historians, historiography, and historical polemic” and hence provided “little space for the substance of history.” Kammen acknowledged the need for “a people’s history; but not single-minded, simpleminded history, too often of fools, knaves and Robin Hoods.”
(Excerpt) Read more at claremontreviewofbooks.com ...
Communist educators trained at communist education colleges are teaching this communist history to our children.
Howard Zinn was a lying Bolshevik bum.
I was given Zinn’s book as a gift years ago. It was the only time I can remember throwing away a book.
I was an undergrad history major in the early 80’s. Even as a young skull o’ mush I was greatly disturbed by the daily multiple orgasms in the faculty lounge over this guy.
I have the book. Call it opposition research.
Bump
Howard died in his Zinns. No liar shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.
Of course it’s completely dishonest. But it fits the meme of what’s being taught in our schools for the 30-40 years. And that’s what you’re seeing on the streets and in our city council meetings.
A Communist who should have been exposed while alive.
I’m almost finished with Mary Grabar’s and I’m learning a lot from it. I’m especially thankful to her for pointing out how Zinn used ellipses to... ...excise portions of primary and secondary source materials that would have been detrimental to his narrative.
To Zinn, as with all leftists, the narrative is everything. There is no way in hell that a man so steeped in marxism and anti-americanism has any business writing a history of the US. Oh, he had that right; but there’s no way anyone should ever have taken such a tendentious polemic seriously. Notwithstanding that, this piece of filth has been required reading in almost every college in the US for the past 25 years.
Zinn, like all leftists, was an inveterate liar.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
