Howard Zinn wants teachers to bring in whatever materials they want to your child’s class room. He wants them to use their own judgement to teach whatever they think is appropriate. He wants them to subvert the rules regarding the approved curriculum at the school you are paying for. Of course, if Zinn’s advice is followed, there is nothing keeping a teacher from bringing materials related to Holocaust denial, or 9/11 conspiracies or creationism into the class room, as well. Unless Zinn is recommending only HIS enlightened view of history should be secretly brought into the classroom.

There are some very important people in our country who have aligned themselves with Zinn. With his philosophy. With his view of history. With his view of the United States. And, with his strategy for getting his message into the public schools outside of the legal construct of School Boards and State Departments of Education.

They made a film of his book.  They walked the red carpet and they posed with the man they admired.  He was the inspiration for their film and they spoke of him glowingly, almost like he was a hero.  They began their film with him striding out alone onto a stage in a theatre full of admirers.  It was his way of taking a curtain call (a standing ovation, by the way) before the show even began. (more…)

In a classic episode of the Sopranos, Tony tries to excite his two children about their Italian-American ancestry and the upcoming Columbus Day parade.  Tony’s son A.J., eager to show up his fuddy-duddy dad, invokes Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States as proof that Christopher Columbus was bad.  “My teacher told us that.  It must be true,” he says.  “You finally read a book,” Tony fires back, “and it’s all [baloney].”  Only he didn’t say “baloney.”

What Tony Soprano knows the History Channel doesn’t.   Howard Zinn isn’t a great historian.  He’s not even a good one.

How, then, to explain his widespread popularity, and the History Channel’s willingness this weekend to give Zinn an even larger megaphone?  After having visited scores of K-12 schools and working with thousands of history and social studies teachers in national civic education programs, one of which I direct for Hillsdale College, I have concluded that Zinn is popular because he tells a great story.  The only problem is that his story is not true.  This inconvenience has not stopped school administrators from commending Zinn to their teachers.

Several years ago, in a meeting of the Ann Arbor public school system, home to Michigan’s largest high school, the superintendent, distressed at his district’s lack of progress in closing the racial “achievement gap,” held up a copy of A People’s History.  “Have you heard of Howard Zinn?” he asked the throng of thousands of district teachers and employees, gathered for a large “in-service” assembly.  In fact, they had, and many teachers already taught from the text the administrator prescribed as the cure for what ailed the district. Instead of helping, many teachers told me, the book had contributed to the malady, for Zinn’s basic message is one of division, not unity. (more…)

“Objectivity is impossible,” self-styled “peoples’ historian” Howard Zinn once remarked, “and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.”

History serving “a social aim,” rather than chronicling the past in a detached manner, is what readers get in A People’s History of the United States. With any luck, “The People Speak,” the History Channel documentary based on the book that premieres this Sunday, will be, like so many Hollywood productions, unfaithful to the original. Given A People’s History of the United States’ infidelity to facts, this might be the only chance viewers have of seeing anything resembling an accurate retelling of history.

Through Zinn’s looking-glass, Maoist China, site of history’s bloodiest state-sponsored killings, transforms into “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.” The authoritarian Nicaraguan Sandinistas were “welcomed” by their own people, while the opposition Contras, who backed the candidate that triumphed when free elections were finally held, were a “terrorist group” that “seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua.” Admitting some human rights abuses, Zinn writes that Castro’s Cuba “had no bloody record of suppression.”

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Twelve years ago in his breakout performance as an arrogant young genius in Good Will Hunting, struggling fresh-faced actor Matt Damon sneered at his Boston psychiatrist for “surrounding yourself with all the wrong f__kin’ books. You wanna read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll f__kin’ knock you on your ass.”

The political left loves shout-outs, and this was a direct one to Zinn himself, whom Damon actually lived next-door to as a child, and whose book apparently knocked the actor on his own behind. “Ben (co-screenwriter Affleck) and I were laughing our asses off writing that,” he recalls. (What is it with Damon and the word “ass”?) ”We liked it that the smartest guy in Boston was reading Howard Zinn.”

Self-proclaimed radical historian Howard Zinn, 87, is arguably the most popular proponent of the “history from below” school of historiography, which explores past events from the perspective of everyday people as opposed to the so-called “Great Men” theory, which actor Josh Brolin, another Zinn devotee, calls mere “propaganda.” The Boston University professor wasn’t the first academic to pioneer this approach, but he is no doubt the first to dispense with tedious scholarly ballast like footnotes and citations, and to have pop culture powerhouses like Damon, Brolin and Pearl Jam running interference for his openly politicized agenda. His 1980 book A People’s History of the United States, one of the best-selling history books of all time thanks partly to Damon’s shout-out, is a litany of oppression and exploitation on the part of America’s white ruling class, a “raggedly conceived Marxist caricature” of American history, as David Horowitz calls it in Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left. (more…)

Children are uniquely malleable beings, readily convinced of magically colorful tales – Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are the first that come to mind. This innocence is beautiful, but it is a quality that can easily fall victim to radically foreign ideas if taught consistently and pervasively at an early age. One need only look at the birth of fascism or socialism to see a recipe for how radical ideas become ubiquitous among a nation’s youth.

Enter Howard Zinn – an author, professor and American historian – who, with the help of Hollywood and the History Channel, intends to change the way our pre-K through high school children learn American history. His current curriculum suggestions, like introducing three-year-olds to the lynching of African-Americans, or quizzing seven-year-olds on which Presidents owned slaves, should be a red flag to parents.

Zinn has spent a lifetime teaching college students about the evils of capitalism, the promise of Marxism, and his version of American history – a history that has, in his view, been kept from students. His controversial 1980-book The People’s History of the United States paints traditional American history as a façade – one that has grotesquely immortalized flawed leaders and is based on principles that victimize the common man. In 2004, Zinn wrote a companion book entitled Voices Of A People’s History Of The United States, which includes speeches and writings from many of the people featured in The People’s History.

These two books have now become the basis for a new documentary, entitled The People Speak, to be aired December 13th at 8pm on the History Channel. The trailer portrays the documentary as a collage of compelling one-person readings, told through the words of “ordinary” people who have struggled throughout American history against oppression. Produced by Zinn, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, and Chris Moore, the documentary appears to be cloaked, ironically (given Zinn’s admitted socialist agenda), in many of the traditional ideas that were behind our founding. The verdict is still out on the doc, but it is not for the books that inspired the film as well as the educational initiative associated with it. (more…)

Don’t believe for a second that the History Channel — which should now be called The Revisionist History Channel — will be the end of Matt Damon and Howard Zinn’s cinematic ode to trashing America. The obvious next step for the adaptation of Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” will be taken up by nitwit, pseudo-intellectual, America-loathing teachers and professors everywhere – many of them paid by the taxpayers of GodDamnAmerica – who are no doubt panting in anticipation for their first chance to screen this toxic mix of guilt and victimization in classrooms everywhere stocked with young, captive, impressionable minds. 

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And the film’s producers are showing academia the way with “The People Speak College Tour,” which launched at Boston University November 4th and ends right here at UCLA this coming Friday.

Turning Zinn’s textbook poison into an even more powerful brew of sound and fury has been a goal of producer Damon’s for going on a decade now. When I first heard that this skewed, leftist dwelling on America’s sins (some real, most imagined, all delivered without historical context) had received the seal of approval from the History Channel it was a shocker – until I remembered the History Channel is owned by NBC – a network now working like a propaganda war machine to boost every leftist cause imaginable. (more…)