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| -Great Cultural Revolution | |
| The Disgraceful Howard Zinn | |
| 2022-01-10 | |
| [CLAREMONTREVIEWOFBOOKS] 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."
Eric Foner disapproved of Zinn’s "deeply pessimistic vision of the American experience" that emphasized how "stirring protests, strikes and rebellions never seem to accomplish anything." Zinn’s approach to "history from the bottom up" was "necessary as a corrective" but was "as limited in its own way as history from the top down." Michael Kazin credited Zinn "with virtuous intentions" but concluded that his book was little more than a "Manichean fable" and a "polemic disguised as history," a book "grounded in a premise better suited to a conspiracy-monger’s website than to a work of scholarship" and "unworthy of [the] fame and influence" it won. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., regarded Zinn as "a polemicist, not a historian." In a 2012 survey conducted by the left-leaning History News Network, asking readers to identify the "least credible history book in print," A People’s History won second place (just behind David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies [2012]). Some respondents condemned Zinn’s work as "cheap propaganda" and "the historians’ equivalent of medical malpractice." * * * Grabar’s book systematically reviews A People’s History, comparing it unfavorably to reputable scholars’ works. Born in Slovenia but raised in the U.S., Grabar earned a Ph.D. in English and taught at a number of colleges and universities in Georgia before becoming a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. She starts with Zinn’s influential account of Christopher Columbus, much of it plagiarized from Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth (1976), a crude work written for high schoolers by his friend and fellow activist Hans Koning. The leftist London Guardian described Koning’s work as "a highly polemical biography" that told "a dark story of exploitation and fanaticism" tantamount to genocide. Zinn also plagiarized from Edward Countryman, a fellow radical historian. In addition to copying without attribution from secondary sources, Zinn cited primary sources like Bartolomé de Las Casas’s 16th-century History of the Indies, from which he quoted passages in a disingenuous manner that misrepresented their significance. Zinn maintained that Columbus thought the tribe he first encountered (the TaÃno, whom Zinn calls the Arawaks) was fit for slavery, when in fact the explorer speculated that the wounds sustained by the Bahamian island’s natives had been inflicted by mainlanders who sought to enslave them. Zinn ascribed the impulse behind Columbus’s mission to greed, ignoring the strong religious motivations of both Columbus and his royal sponsors. He anachronistically depicted the tribes that Columbus encountered on his four voyages—and, in addition, North American tribes that interacted with European settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries—as peaceful feminists, environmentalists, democrats, and communists avant la lettre. | |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #2 Tom Lehrer lyrics: "When correctly viewed, Everything Is Lewd!" |
| Posted by: magpie 2022-01-10 15:07 |
| #1 Clownshow. History as left-wing comic book-cum-morality play |
| Posted by: Merrick Ferret 2022-01-10 00:06 |