Mary Grabar

I know some folks who have gotten very irate at The 1619 Project; they claim that The 1619 Project has been "debunked". I started this book wanting to understand what is "debunkable" and get to a better understanding of what each side is arguing. I didn't finish this book, because it didn't seem to have any content -- it was almost exclusively repeated manifestations of "the mythos we were teaching in the mid-20th century is the right mythos", peppered with minor quibbles that seemed to me like missing the forest for the trees. Since I already know the mid-20th century mythos inside out, this book didn't deliver any of the stretch I was hoping for. I'm disappointed that all I got from this book is "hmm, do my favorite polemics also just feel this weak to non-believers".… (más)

Better than her book debunking Howard Zinn, and more timely. Grabar highlights many of the errors and misinterpretations of the 1619 Project. As part of this, she must show that Hannah-Jones is a Marxist, with all that entails, and pro-reparations. The purpose of the 1619 Project is not to highlight something that has never been highlighted (I've been teaching 1619 for decades), it's centering it for the purposes of destroying the Constitution and its limited government federalist system and destroying capitalism. Then the communist revolution! Grabar makes the point that this is the true purpose of the 1619 Project. Thus Grabar dissects the 1619 Project, pointing out its problems, both historical and interpretational. To be read in conjunction with Magness's The 1619 Project: A Critique and Wood's 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project. Those are more deeper and detailed, Grabar's book is written for a wider audience. Cited with endnotes, index. Could have used a bibliography of further readings.… (más)

This is a good book. Zinn needs to be taken down at least a peg, if not all the pegs. His "history" is merely a Marxist screed against America from start to finish. Read it. Read it and then ask why if America sucks so bad so many people still want to immigrate here, come here, live here, thrive here. Look through the pages of Zinn's mis-named A People's History of the United States and find him mention any real success stories. Any people who have made it. Who have succeeded despite all the hardships America has had to offer. American history shouldn't be rosy, Zinn and his ilk are right, but nor should it be the vilest black. Zinn's history is just as ideologically bad as the supposedly rosy, bougeois historians he lambastes.

But, as professor Mary Grabar here points out in a note, an intro, and nine chapters (on Columbus, Zinn, Indians, Racism, World War II, Communism in the Cold War, Black Power, Vietnam, and the Founders), Zinn not only has an ideological ax to grind, he paraphrases to the point of plagiarism, selectively quotes to bend sources to his will, and roundly ignores whole counter-arguments to his ideas. It's bad history. As Grabar points out in the introduction, if the AHA applied its rules for historians to Zinn's opus, it would fail. But nobody does because many leftist historians sympathize with Zinn, even if they disdain his methods. Thus (see pp. 253-256) even historians who pointed out bad history in Zinn, like Sam Wineberg and Michael Kazin, jumped to his defense when a rascally Repubwican Mitch Daniels dared to suggest Zinn not be used in Indiana public colleges or K-12 schools. Then the same liberal/leftist historians who questioned Zinn became his stoutest defenders.

The problem with a book like this, published by rightist outfit Regnery, is that it is primarily preaching to the choir. I'm sure only conservative historians like me will read it and appreciate it. Leftists won't even bother to pick it up. And if they did, they would find it philippic and unconvincing. It may change the minds of a few moderates, but this book is mainly fodder for the minds of conservatives to attack Zinn for his historiographic and methodological sins (and perhaps actual sins too... but what are sins to a communist?).

There are, unfortunately, too many typos and errors in the text. The copyeditor should be fired. Hire me. No images or maps. Endnotes. No bibliography, which would have been nice: selected readings to counter Zinn. Index.

Anyway. A good book to understand Zinn's abject, propagandistic, Marxist, hateful, anti-American failings.… (más)