Debunking Howard Zinn Quotes

“A People’s History of the United States is intended to inspire anger of such magnitude that its readers want to overthrow the American Republic.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“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.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“The true, Communist-style revolution that Zinn wishes had happened in America actually did happen during the French Revolution just a few years later—with disastrous results: “Before his fellow French revolutionaries carted him off to be guillotined in 1794, Georges Danton had described his purpose: ‘to put on top what was below.’ ”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“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.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“According to Zinn, there’s no such thing as objective history, anyway: “the historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.” Once ideology has become a moral virtue, Zinn can discount standards of scholarship—such as those of the American Historical Association—as having to do with nothing more important than “technical problems of excellence”—standards of no importance compared to his kind of history, which consists in forging “tools for contending social classes, races, nations.”85”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“He has done this by lying, distorting and misusing evidence, hijacking other historians’ work, and falsifying the facts, as we have seen again and again. The problem is not that, as Zinn liked to pretend in his own defense, he wrote a “people’s” history, telling the bottom-up story of neglected and forgotten men and women. The problem is that he falsified American history to promote Communist revolution.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Meanwhile, real African American heroes—blacks who fought and won the battles for civil rights—don’t figure largely in Zinn’s account. The significant achievements of black labor and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, for example, are obscured by Zinn—perhaps because Randolph was an anti-communist who quit the National Negro Congress in 1940 because it “had fallen under the control” of Communist Party allies.32 There are only three mentions of Randolph in A People’s History—two of them quotations that have no bearing on what Randolph accomplished and are adduced simply to support Zinn’s picture of the black population “in the streets” and spoiling for a socialist revolution.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“The irony is that, as historian Robert Paquette, a specialist in the history of slavery, has remarked in his criticism of the use of Zinn’s history as a text in high school classrooms: 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.85”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Few women desire the kind of “equality” that Engels, Foster, and Zinn offer. Marxists may present monogamy as a capitalist trick for enslaving women, but the fact is that most women desire lifelong, monogamous marriages—which redound to their benefit, compared to any other arrangement in which men can use women and then discard them. Few women in the United States wanted to trade places with women in the Soviet Union or would want to live the life of an Indian woman. American women today have more freedom than women have ever enjoyed anywhere in the globe at any time in world history. And even in early America, women’s rights here were greater than in England, and certainly than in most places in the world.79 Women in colonial America enjoyed the benefits of chivalry and security and respect in the family. Some women were tavern-keepers, merchants, dress-makers, midwives, teachers, writers, and landed proprietors, as the 1924 study Colonial Women of Affairs: A Study of Women in Business and the Professions in America before 1776 tells us.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“What? Subjugation? Alliances? Militarism? These are supposed to be European traits! Maybe that’s why Zinn skips this page, on which Nash also notes that “the Iroquois on the eve of European arrival were feared and sometimes hated by their neighbors for their skill and cruelty in warfare.” Furthermore, “[t]heir belief in the superiority of their culture was as pronounced as that of the arriving Europeans.”55 Nash’s book—which, alas, has been updated and imposed upon innocent students in American classrooms—skims over Indian acts of cruelty while providing vivid descriptions of those by Puritans.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Unfortunately, Zinn’s attack on the historians who gave students a balanced picture of Columbus has been remarkably effective. Zinn successfully sold himself as a historian knocking down the giants who preceded him and championed the cause of the innocents oppressed by colonizers, capitalists, and Christians. Images of unspeakable cruelty against a gentle people remain in the minds of countless students who have read Zinn’s propaganda, and they now color the public discussion about Columbus. As history education professor Sam Wineburg pointed out with no little amazement, Howard Zinn’s readers believe him. Michael Kazin has noted that Zinn’s History takes on “the force and authority of revelation.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Zinn, perhaps too lazy or too busy with political agitation to do even the most basic research, has to paint a false picture of those historians with whom he disagrees. He places straw men on pedestals and then knocks them down one by one until only he is standing. A result like that would be substandard coming from a high school student writing a research paper—much less a professional historian claiming to be blazing a new trail and leaving the existing Columbus scholarship behind in the dust. Zinn’s pretense to break new ground on Columbus was nothing more than a clever marketing strategy, surpassing in chutzpah the most brazen of ad campaigns for quack tonics in our capitalistic system that he so vehemently condemns.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Zinn based his famous opening pages on a controversial book. And while Koning’s work was treated dismissively, Zinn’s transcriptions of Koning’s material to his own book are taken as groundbreaking historical revelations. And few know that they are little more than transcriptions.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“he had substituted one “monolithic reading of the past for another.” Zinn’s history was written in a manner that spoke “directly” to students’ “hearts,” but his “power of persuasion” was dangerous because it “extinguishes students’ ability to think.” A People’s History was a “history of certainty,” and whether of the Left or the Right, such histories invite a slide into “intellectual fascism,” according to Wineburg.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“It is Zinn’s book that should be put on trial. If the historian lies, there is no defense.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Zinn’s transcriptions of Koning’s material to his own book are taken as groundbreaking historical revelations. And few know that they are little more than transcriptions.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“in the court of scholarly opinion, Zinn’s book is closer to David Irving’s frauds than to an esteemed work of history. Zinn has been slammed for distortions, omissions, and factual errors by reviewers and historians on both the left and right.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“By presenting outrageous accusations against America as questions rather than assertions, Zinn attempts to evade responsibility for lying about American history. But he has in fact articulated these false claims and fixed them in his readers’ minds.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Some of the wildcat strikes were “hate strikes,” “walkouts by white workers protesting the hiring or upgrading of blacks,” which sometimes led to riots, including at shipyards in Chester, Pennsylvania; Mobile, Alabama; and Sparrows Point, Maryland. Freeman admits that “wartime racist strikes present a tricky problem for those historians who uncritically extol all militant labor action in and of itself.” They are so much of a tricky problem for Zinn that he does not mention them.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Zinn is particularly appealing to adolescents who are typically dissatisfied with their elders, believing themselves to be wiser.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“All Americans of good will, no matter their political views, should object to such perversion of the truth.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Imagine such a historian citing a book by Frederick Douglass or another abolitionist, twisting the words around so that they became arguments for slavery. But that is exactly what Zinn did with the words of Douglas Pike: Pike accused the Viet Cong of genocide, but Zinn used selective quotations of Pike’s work to make them the heroes of the Vietnamese people. Zinn, as we have seen, violated over and over the rules on which the American Historical Association prides itself and by which Richard Evans and his team showed Irving to be a historian of disrepute. Zinn did everything—misrepresented sources, omitted critical information, falsified evidence, and plagiarized. His rhetorical strategies included leading questions, logical fallacies, and ad hominem attacks.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“What Gene told me comports with David Greenberg’s description in The New Republic: For all their leftist bona fides, [Genovese and colleagues Christopher Lasch and James Weinstein] agreed with their stodgy forebears that the intellectual had to hew to the highest standards of rigor; it was by the strength of their scholarship that they might revise entrenched beliefs that gave rise to the social conditions that, as a political matter, they decried. Genovese, most vociferously, flatly rejected the siren song of “relevant” history: he, too, hoped at the time for a socialist future, but he believed that it was best served by history that was true to the evidence, valid in its interpretations, and competent in its execution.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“The letter from Daniels inspired a further attack by the professors, who accused him of misunderstanding not only “academic freedom and the work of a university” but also “Zinn’s brilliant critique of whether scholarship can be objective and disinterested.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Michael Kazin had written in 2004 that A People’s History was a “Manichean fable” suitable for “a conspiracy-monger’s Web site.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Daniels had argued that Zinn’s history “should not be accepted for any credit by the state. . . .” and had asked “how do we get rid of it before any more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?” He called A People’s History “a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page.”39 Daniels, of course, was absolutely right.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Here, again, Zinn is following the Communist script, specifically the closing words of The Communist Manifesto: “[The Communists] openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“Wood is Brown University’s Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University and, according to the Wall Street Journal, has been called the “dean of 18th-century American historians.” He has accumulated “virtually every award available to historians,” including the Bancroft Prize, Pulitzer, and the National Humanities Medal in 2010.30 But Howard Zinn simply dismisses Wood’s work as the “Great Man” version of history, in contrast to his own “people’s” history.31 One wonders if he read the page on which Wood describes the “ ‘carpenters, shoemakers, Blacksmiths’ ” who demanded a place on revolutionary committees.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“As Alexis de Tocqueville commented in the 1830s, there were no peasants in America. At that time, Europe was still filled with them, many living in “absolute slavery” with no way to escape their lot, as Lebergott demonstrates. Peasants were not only “subject to taxes by central and local governments,” but “also subject to even more rigorous charges imposed by landowners who took a substantial portion of their grain as payment for milling the rest into flour, forbidding them to do their own milling. Americans averaged less than a dollar a year in taxes. And anyone was free to set up a mill.”11 That is why millions of these impoverished “left in an unplanned exodus,” following “a handful of earnest religious leaders and believers, entrepreneurs and gold seekers, who had shown the way.” The French-American writer Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer, published in 1782, described the situation in America: “The European does not find, as in Europe, a crowded society where every place is overstocked; he does not feel that . . . difficulty of beginning. . . . here is room for everybody, in America. Has he any particular talent, or industry? He exerts it in order to procure a livelihood, and it succeeds. . . . is he a laborer, sober and industrious? He need not go many miles . . . before he will be hired, well fed . . . and paid four or five times more than he can get in Europe.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

“(In Marxist theory, the middle class is always the real impediment to a true revolution. No wonder Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said in The Communist Manifesto that the “bourgeois,” “the middle-class owner of property” must be “swept out of the way. . . .” and that the “first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class, to establish democracy” and then “centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state.”)”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America