Howard Zinn: Fake Historian

Acco rding to Mary Grabar’s Debunking Howard Zinn, to call Howard Zinn a historian is a misnomer if not a travesty. Yet this is how Zinn, the late author of the best-selling A People’s History of the United States is publicly identified. For over a quarter of a century, his book has been highly influential in shaping Americans’ understanding of the past and made him somewhat of a celebrity. By recent counts, it sold over two million copies and is used in high schools and survey American history courses in colleges throughout the country. Undoubtedly, any historian—no matter how excellent and popular his or her work is—would be jealous of that record. However, as Mary Grabar points out, Zinn had a different project in mind than most historians. As he once wrote, history is “not about understanding the past,” but about “changing the future.” Not one serious historian I know would make such a claim. Given the prominence and influence of Zinn’s book, Mary Grabar’s thoughtful and well-researched critique is most necessary and timely. After it was published in 1980, Zinn’s book slowly gained popularity among young New Left history professors. By that time, the field of social history with its focus on “history from below” was in ascendance. Unlike traditional political history with its concentration on political and business elites, this approach studied the lives of the hitherto neglected common people including slaves, farmers, industrial workers, immigrants, and women, chronicling their individual and collective struggles to achieve a better life. Read Full Article »