Ever wonder why 31-year old pro-quarterback Colin Kaepernick and other young people became so alienated from the freest, most generous nation in the world? Could recent generations be “learning” things that just aren’t so? The answer is “yes.”
As the New Criterion’s estimable Roger Kimball wrote, Howard Zinn’s “‘A People’s History of the United States’… has probably done more to poison the minds of high school students than any other work of history.”
In “Debunking Howard Zinn,” Mary Grabar takes on an icon of the left who has sold 2.5 million copies of his wildly distorted book. Zinn’s one-sided polemic against the United States has been used as a text in countless universities and high schools. The predictable result — many American youth soured on their country.
Ms. Grabar dissects her subject analytically, quoting him accurately and demonstrating that Zinn rarely returned that favor when writing about his targets. Columbus Day is being “de-celebrated” nowadays, in part because of Zinn’s tendentious presentation of the explorer’s supposedly genocidal interactions with native peoples. Ms. Grabar proves the opposite, pointing to Columbus’ diaries, revealing what Zinnomitted.
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