217. Mary Grabar on the 1619 Project, Howard Zinn, Historical Revisionism, and Pseudohistory

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 12 October 2021

⏱️ 99 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Michael Shermer speaks with Mary Grabar about her books Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America and Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America.

According to the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” America was not founded in 1776, with a declaration of freedom and independence, but in 1619 with the introduction of African slavery into the New World. According to Mary Grabar, celebrated historians have debunked this, more than two hundred years of American literature disproves it, parents know it to be false, and yet it is being promoted across America as an integral part of grade school curricula and unquestionable orthodoxy on college campuses. This is a sequel, of a kind, to Grabar’s previous book Debunking Howard Zinn, whose A People’s History of the United States sold more than 2.5 million copies, is pushed by Hollywood celebrities, defended by university professors, and assigned in high school and college classrooms to teach students that American history is nothing more than a litany of oppression, slavery, and exploitation. According to Grabar, contra Zinn:

Columbus was not a genocidal maniac, and was, in fact, a defender of Indians.
American Indians were not feminist-communist sexual revolutionaries ahead of their time.
The United States was founded to protect liberty, not white males’ ill-gotten wealth.
Americans of the “Greatest Generation” were not the equivalent of Nazi war criminals.
The Viet Cong were not well-meaning community leaders advocating for local self-rule.
The Black Panthers were not civil rights leaders.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to theurmer Show.
0:15.8	Welcome to the Michael Schurmer Show. I'm your host Michael Schurmer.
0:17.0	My guest today is Mary Graybar.
0:20.0	Her new book is debunking the 1619 project, exposing the plan to divide America.
0:26.4	Her previous book, which I read, which led me to her new book is debunking Howard
0:31.9	Zen, exposing the fake history that turned a
0:35.4	generation against America. Okay. Mary Graber was born in Slovenia when it was
0:41.0	still part of the communist Yugoslavia and grew up in Rochester, New York.
0:45.0	She earned her PhD in English from the University of Georgia in 2002 and taught at a number of colleges and universities in Georgia until 2013. While teaching, she wrote and Education Project, a nonprofit reform initiative.
1:03.7	2014, she moved to Clinton, New York and became a resident fellow at the Alexander
1:08.8	Hamilton Institute for the study of Western Civilization.
1:12.4	She taught at the college level for 20 years, most recently at
1:15.2	Emory University, and her work has been published in Federalist Town Hall Front Page magazine
1:20.3	City Journal, American Greatness and Academic Questions.
1:25.0	As you'll note, she is a conservative, conservative Christian, so actually we get into a little bit of that at the end.
1:31.0	She indulges my riffs on some of that. But the primary
1:36.5	focus of the conversation is on the 16-19 project. What are the claims that are being made?
1:41.9	And why do not just she is a conservative or
1:45.1	can at a conservative think tank is a problem but why most liberal historians of
1:50.7	that period of time the American colonial era in the of that
1:55.0	the American colonial era in the Revolutionary War, the founding fathers, the civil war,
1:58.0	all the way up to the present.
	...

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