AHI’s Mary Grabar on the Consequences of “War on History”

On August 28, 2020, Mary Grabar, Resident Fellow at The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), appeared as a featured speaker at a virtual event “The Perils of Revisionist History,” part two of the three-part virtual event series, “America’s History of Hope,” hosted by the Heritage Foundation.  On September 13, The Daily Signal, a multimedia news platform created by the Heritage Foundation, published an article by Jarrett Stepman that detailed Dr. Grabar’s’ comments at the virtual event.

In “How Radical Historian’s Revisionism and Lies Led to 2020’s Unrest,” Stepman credits Dr. Grabar with linking the social unrest in cities across the country to a “war on history,” which has as its ultimate goal the destabilization of the constitutional order. No book, as Dr. Grabar pointed out, has done more damage in that regard than Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.”  Dr. Grabar unmasked Zinn’s history as a fraud in Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America (Regnery 2019).

Zinn’s revisionist history has led a generation of young people who have been raised on his teachings to see our country’s past as nothing more than that of oppression, slavery, and exploitation and that overturning the “system” through civil disobedience is the only solution. Zinn’s narrative, Grabar argues, has helped shape and justify the organized violence “in Portland, in Minneapolis, Kenosha, and other cities across the country.” “Young people of all races, educational levels, and economic classes are in the streets. They began with statues and monuments. They have moved on to businesses and government buildings. They are harassing people in public who refuse to join them.”

Grabar’s book Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America was recently published in paperback and immediately reached number-one bestseller status in historiography on Amazon. The hardcover version has gone through three printings.