217. Mary Grabar on the 1619 Project, Howard Zinn, Historical Revisionism, and Pseudohistory

Michael Shermer speaks with Mary Grabar about her books Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America and Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America.

According to the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” America was not founded in 1776, with a declaration of freedom and independence, but in 1619 with the introduction of African slavery into the New World. According to Mary Grabar, celebrated historians have debunked this, more than two hundred years of American literature disproves it, parents know it to be false, and yet it is being promoted across America as an integral part of grade school curricula and unquestionable orthodoxy on college campuses. This is a sequel, of a kind, to Grabar’s previous book Debunking Howard Zinn, whose A People’s History of the United States sold more than 2.5 million copies, is pushed by Hollywood celebrities, defended by university professors, and assigned in high school and college classrooms to teach students that American history is nothing more than a litany of oppression, slavery, and exploitation. According to Grabar, contra Zinn:

• Columbus was not a genocidal maniac, and was, in fact, a defender of Indians.
• American Indians were not feminist-communist sexual revolutionaries ahead of their time.
• The United States was founded to protect liberty, not white males’ ill-gotten wealth.
• Americans of the “Greatest Generation” were not the equivalent of Nazi war criminals.
• The Viet Cong were not well-meaning community leaders advocating for local self-rule.
• The Black Panthers were not civil rights leaders.