Howard Zinn’s American Holocaust

If anyone wonders why youngsters today are less patriotic and more inclined toward socialism, they need look no further than the most popular “history” textbook in the United States, Howard Zinn’s  A People’s History of the United States — a one-sided work written from the perspective of a Communist activist that contains a plethora of distortions and outright lies.  In 2012, the director of the American Textbook Council noted that Zinn’s text had sold two million copies and was the “best-selling survey of American history.”  By 2018, it was estimated that the book had sold more than 2.6 million copies.

Mary Grabar’s new book, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America (Regnery History) does us the service of exposing  the mendacious,  non-scholarly character of this work that was praised to the hilt by Zinn’s former Cambridge neighbor,  Matt Damon.  In Good Will Hunting the film’s protagonist exclaims, “It will knock your socks off!”  making an even greater rock star of Zinn and solidifying for impressionable teens the bona fides of a propaganda tome composed in a scant year.  Even a sympathetic leftist historian, Michael Kammen, called the book “simpleminded” and a “scissors-and-paste-pot job.”  The well-known liberal scholar Arthur Schlesinger was even more critical, labeling Zinn “a polemicist, not a historian.”  Grabar herself notes that after his graduate school book on Fiorello La Guardia, Zinn produced not a single piece of historical scholarship until decades later he slapped together his People’s History — a work that relies overwhelmingly on secondary sources and for which “there is no evidence that Zinn ever actually made extensive notes,” as he claimed, in preparation for its writing.  READ MORE…