Wilfred McClay, the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, calls Mary Grabar’s Debunking Howard Zinn (Regnery, 2019) “a book for which every American should be grateful.” Dr. McClay reviewed the book for The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a non-profit organization, located in Raleigh, North Carolina, devoted to improving the quality of higher education.
In “A Radical Pseudo-Historian Meets His Match,” McClay begins by acknowledging “the singular success” of a polemic, passing as historical scholarship, written by a radical left-wing activist who was not a professional historian at all. Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States continues to exert an enormous influence over the educational establishment at multiple levels. Professional historians, McClay observes, remained largely silent in criticizing Zinn’s text. He mentions that Eugene D. Genovese (1930-2012), a charter member of The Alexander Hamilton Institute’s board of academic advisers, proved to be one of the notable exceptions.
Dr. Grabar’s book, McClay concludes, “has performed the absolutely necessary task that her title promises, and has done so with admirable energy, persistence, and relentless attention to detail, leaving Zinn’s already shaky credibility in utter ruins. She brings the intensive scrutiny of a jeweler’s eye to Zinn’s work, topic by topic, and shows in no uncertain terms how flawed and unreliable it is.”
Mary Grabar is Resident Fellow of The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI). In 2011, she founded the nonprofit education reform initiative, Dissident Prof Education Project, Inc. (www.DissidentProf.com). She traveled widely in 2019 speaking to audiences across the country on her best-selling book, Zinn’s charlatanry, and the “educational” industry that promotes it. She is working on a biography of George Schuyler, an understudied conservative intellectual. She can be reached at Mary@theahi.org
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