“Claremont Review of Books” Praises Mary Grabar’s “Debunking Howard Zinn”

The spring 2020 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, a highly regarded quarterly journal of politics and intellectual thought, contains high praise for Mary Grabar’s Debunking Howard Zinn (Regnery 2019). In a review essay, “The Disgraceful Howard Zinn,” Michael Burlingame, the Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois, Springfield, describes Grabar’s book as a systematic demolition of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

Burlingame, a prize-winning historian noted for his work on Abraham Lincoln, credits Grabar with exposing Zinn’s text, which has sold millions of copies, as little more than Marxian agitprop. The book has widely infiltrated high school and college history courses. Zinn’s sins, as Burlingame notes, range widely, from disingenuousness to plagiarism.  “The appearance of Grabar’s book,” he observes, “would be welcome at any time, but is especially relevant now that The New York Times has reincarnated the spirit of Howard Zinn with its ‘1619 Project.’”

Dr. Grabar, Resident Fellow at The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), is completing a biography of George Schuyler, an understudied African American journalist who moved from left to right during his career.