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Reconstructing the Reconstruction By John Marquardt on Sep 26, 2019 A book condemning the left-wing bias of one of the most widely read and educationally used histories of the United States was recently written by Mary Grabar who received her Ph.D in English from the University of Georgia and went on to teach at various Georgia institutes of higher learning, including Emory University in Atlanta. The focus of her book, Debunking Howard Zinn : Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America, is Zinn’s 1980 work, A People’s History of the United States, as well as the Zinn...

Last week, Democrats held their first true presidential debate. With the field winnowed down to 10 candidates -- three of them actual contenders for the nomination -- only one moment truly stood out. That moment came not from Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders but from a candidate desperate for attention: Beto O'Rourke. O'Rourke ran in 2018 for a Senate seat in Texas and lost in shockingly narrow fashion to incumbent Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. But his persona at the time was more Biden than Bernie: He ran as a unifying quasi-moderate, an Obama-esque figure determined to bring Americans...

This Saturday teachers will gather at the Smithsonian (specifically the National Museum of the American Indian) for a continuing education class about Christopher Columbus. They will get lessons using Howard Zinn’s Marxist A People’s History of the United States, and produced by the Zinn Education Project. Breaking publishing records, Zinn’s book has sold over 2.6 million copies since it was first published in 1980. Sales grow each year.ZEP was started by one of Zinn’s adoring Boston University students-turned-wealthy-capitalist. By 2018, 84,000 teachers had downloaded their lessons. School districts pay for ZEP organizers to give workshops to teachers and librarians on such things...

As a senior in high school, I dated a gorgeous girl. On our first date, she was sitting on my lap. I thought, "My life is now perfect!" Then she started spouting some Marxist gibberish. I began disputing with her. No more kisses. I stood up and walked off her porch, never to see her again! That was at the end of the 1950s. Fast-forward about forty years to 1997. I had transferred into a high school for gifted students in New York City, one of those specialized high schools with high Asian and white enrollments, and ever diminishing black...

Historian Wilfred McClay aspires to be the antidote to Zinn, whom he accuses of “greatly oversimplifying the past and turning American history into a comic-book melodrama in which ‘the people’ are constantly being abused by ‘the rulers.’ ” Mr. McClay’s counterpoint, which comes out next week, is titled “Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.” He says . . . he’s seen too many students drawn to Zinn because the standard textbooks are visionless and tedious. “Just as nature abhors a vacuum,” Mr. McClay says, “so a culture will find some kind of grand narrative of itself...

A new Advanced Placement American history textbook is raising red flags because of its anti-Trump language and its suggestion that Trump supporters are racist. By the People: A History of the United States is the newest edition of a Pearson Education history book that could be made available to high school students if school districts opt to use it. The book has not yet been distributed to students but has been introduced to teachers to see if they would want to use it as part of their curriculum in the next couple of years. Tarra Snyder, a student at Rosemount...

William & Mary Police are investigating after a statue of James Monroe was graffitied with the words “slave owner” late last month. A crime log the school sent out Monday says a “non-student” was detained for writing on a statue at 1:36 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 29 outside Tucker Hall. University spokeswoman Erin Zagursky said William & Mary Police have identified and spoken to a suspect, but no charges had been sought as of Monday afternoon.

Scott Kelly, a retired American astronaut with multiple space flights under his belt, apologized Sunday after quoting Winston Churchill and calling the 20th century British prime minister "one of the greatest leaders of modern times." "Did not mean to offend by quoting Churchill. My apologies. I will go and educate myself further on his atrocities, racist views which I do not support. My point was we need to come together as one nation. We are all Americans. That should transcend partisan politics," Kelly wrote on Twitter in the evening.

In understanding the fake news that pervades every day life, it is important to understand the fake history which is fueling it. The problem here, is the mistaken belief that all fake history can be sourced back to Howard Zinn's publication of A People's History of the United States. The critical flaw with this is that Zinn's book was published in 1980, and even those who claim that all of our ills can be traced back to the 1960's can't make this timeline work. The progressives, however, have been manipulating the historical record in a major way since 1913. Preceding...

Bashing Christopher Columbus has long been de rigueur among the liberal elite. Today, it has infiltrated our nation’s classrooms and poisons our public discourse. You know the mantra: Columbus was a greedy and egomaniacal villain who brought slavery, disease, “genocide,” and ecological ruin to a previously undisturbed land. Rather than honor this legacy of “hate,” the argument goes, Americans should celebrate the peaceful indigenous peoples who populated this hemisphere long before their lands were stolen by European explorers. The war against Columbus is cloaked in the lexicon of “diversity” and the rhetoric of “inclusion.” But what many of its foot...

The American Thinker has an interesting piece today about Howard Zinn, in which the claim is made that: "Zinn, more than any other man, turned our history books on their heads, and in a way, changed the contemporary course of history." Honestly, I'm not sure that's true. In comparing Zinn to Charles Beard, one of the main issues is the simple expanse of time. Sure, Zinn is more acute in the lies he has written, but Beard has had over a century for his poison to become foundational thinking. Here's the thing: Howard Zinn never knew the real America, so...

This may sound like it, but it’s not a journal of winetasting. It’s about the undue, horrific influence of a man named Howard Zinn. He became a famous, or accurately infamous, historian. Zinn, more than any other man, turned our history books on their heads, and in a way, changed the contemporary course of history. “Who controls the past, controls the future.” He excelled at this task. He was somewhat wispy and vulnerable looking in spite of being tall. He could not debate well and he spoke slowly, as if he was in a mildly drugged high. He had a...

This is an audio excerpt from the book, "Seven Miracles That Saved America: Why They Matter and Why We Should Have Hope" (http://tinyurl.com/j2x2pym) detailing some of Howard Zinn's anti-American views. An audio snippet of Noam Chomsky can also be found here: https://youtu.be/CZfS_p4ZEVk Likewise, one should visit my tribute to Zinn at his passing [now updated somewhat]: http://tinyurl.com/ovgxoz7

--SNIP--As the 55 distinguished members of the National Association of Scholars explained this week, the teaching of American history faces “a grave new risk.” So-called “reforms” by the College Board, which holds a virtual monopoly on AP testing across the country, “abandon a rigorous insistence on content” in favor of downplaying “American citizenship and American world leadership in favor of a more global and transnational perspective.” The framework eschews vivid, content-rich history lessons on the Constitution for “such abstractions as ‘identity,’ ‘peopling,’ ‘work, exchange and technology,’ and ‘human geography’ while downplaying essential subjects, such as the sources, meaning and development...

At Accuracy in Academia, we have long complained of academic historians who ignore primary sources in favor of secondary ones. What gets lost in that process from the former approach to the latter one is, well, history. Never have I found myself tripping over a professor at the Library of Congress in 30 years as a regular there. In an article which appeared on the academe blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Peter N. Kirstein helpfully shows us part of the origin of this revisionist history. Kirstein himself is a professor of history at Saint Xavier...

Gerardo Hernandez, a spy for Communist Cuba and the man responsible for the murder of four humanitarian workers (three of whom were American citizens) over international waters, was freed from prison last year by the Obama administration, due in part to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). This was revealed at a February 6, 2015, celebration of Hernandez’s release, along with two of his fellow Cuban agents (collectively known as the “Cuban 5.. At the beginning of the event, an IPS official thanked all who who took part in the 17-year campaign and singled out a number of organizations that...

Among the news items at the radical Zinn Education Project this month is a post highlighting the work of Alison Kysia, author of “A People’s History of Muslims in the United States: What School Textbooks and the Media Miss,” part of the Zinn Education Project If We Knew Our History series. The Zinn Education Project supports the use of revisionist historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States in middle and high school classrooms throughout the nation. Like Zinn’s A People’s History, the Zinn Project emphasizes “the role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social...

Oklahoma lawmaker seeks to do away with AP history courses, says they emphasize ‘what is bad about America’ Lawmakers argue that AP courses are similar to Common Core and that they violate legislation since Common Core was repealed last year.

Larry Schweikart recently spoke at the Heritage Foundation about the newly released 10th anniversary edition of the book he co-authored with Michael Allen, “A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to America’s Age of Entitlement.” “A Patriot’s History” had a rather unusual journey from publication to fame; becoming a No.1 New York Times bestseller six years after its publication.Schweikart, a history professor at the University of Dayton, wrote the book in response to what he calls a lack of textbooks that “dealt accurately and fairly with American history.” Many of the existing classroom materials, he said,...

In “2016: Obama’s America” - the second highest grossing political documentary of all-time – Dinesh D’Souza prognosticated Barack Obama would foster runaway debt, redistribute American wealth on an unprecedented scale, and weaken our foreign influence while emboldening our enemies. Despite being dismissed by liberal pundits and a Praetorian media as a partisan fabrication, time and our President have proven his unwavering predictions inexorably correct. Therefore, if you haven’t had the privilege of watching the compelling filmmaker’s newest work, “America”, you’re not only missing out on a masterful piece of investigatory and expository journalism, but perhaps the most impactful indictment on...