PragerU, a non-profit media corporation, “promote[s] American values through the creative use of educational videos that reach millions of people online.” Dennis Prager, co-founder of the company, invited Mary Grabar to PragerU to inform the public about the nefarious work of Howard Zinn, a Marxist activist whose People’s History of the United States (1980) has had an outsized and undeserved influence in history classrooms throughout the country.
Dr. Grabar, Resident Fellow of The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), published a best-selling book Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America (Regnery 2019). In the Prager video, “Howard Zinn and the Book That Poisoned a Generation,” she points out that although mothers and fathers “may never have heard of Zinn . . . I assure you a history teacher at your local high school or college has and probably teaches his text or ideas.”
Grabar followed the Zinn exposé by composing another best-seller Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America (Regnery 2021). In a recent article published November 17 in FrontPage Magazine, an online website produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, she discusses the recent debate between historians Woody Holton and Gordon Wood on the merits of the 1619 Project’s attempt, courtesy of the New York Times, to rewrite American history. The debate turned ugly, as she observed. “[T]he 62-year-old Holton,” turning from history to political activism, “attempted to force the 87-year-old Wood,” one of the most distinguished historians of his generation, “to make a retraction,” of his criticism of the 1619 Project and of its architect Nikole Hannah-Jones. Holton appeared to want Wood to perform penance, blaming him, quite unfairly, for inciting the barrage of (justifiable) criticism directed at the 1619 Project by conservatives.
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