Debunking Howard Zinn

by Mary Grabar

  Chapter Three: Howard Zinn’s “Usable Indian”

  1. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 11; Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 194–95.

  2. Zinn, A People’s History, 11.

  3. Albert Marrin, Aztecs and Spaniards: Cortes and the Conquest of Mexico (New York: Atheneum, 1986), 88, 94; Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 212.

  4. Marrin, Aztecs and Spaniards, 151.

  5. Hanson, Carnage, 211–12.

  6. Zinn, A People’s History, 12.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America, (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Pearson, 1974), 32.

  9. Zinn, A People’s History, 12.

  10. Ibid., 12–13.

  11. Ibid., 12; Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 73–74.

  12. Larry Gragg, “Powhatan Wars” in American Indian History, vol. 2, ed. Carole E. Barrett (Pasadena, California: Salem Press, 2003), 424–26.

  13. Bert M. Mutersbaugh, “Metacom’s War” in American Indian History, vol. 1, ed. Carole E. Barrett (Pasadena, California: Salem Press, 2003), 365 vol. 2, ed. Carole E. Barrett 70.

  14. Ibid., 14.

  15. Thomas E. Woods Jr., The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2004), 7–9.

  16. Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians 1620–1675, 3rd ed. (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995,), xiii–xiv, xix.

  17. Zinn, A People’s History, 14.

  18. Suzanne Riffle Boyce, “Tuscarora War,” in American Indian History, vol. 2, ed. Carole A. Barrett (Pasadena, California: Salem Press, 2003), 566–69.

  19. Harold D. Tallant, “Yamasee War,” in American Indian History, vol. 2, ed. Carole A. Barrett (Pasadena, California: Salem Press, 2003), 608–9.

  20. C. George Fry, “Pequot War” in American Indian History, vol. 2, ed. by Carol Barrett (Pasadena, California: Salem Press, 2003), 409–12.

  21. Zinn, A People’s History, 14–15.

  22. “Captain John Underhill’s History of the Pequot War,” News from America, London, 1638, Massachusetts Historical Society, 7–8.

  23. Ibid., 12.

  24. Ibid., 15.

  25. Ibid., 15, 26.

  26. Shannon E. Duffy, “The Pequot War: 1636-1638,” The Routledge Handbook of American Military and Diplomatic History, the Colonial Period to 1877, ed. Antonio S. Thompson and Christos G. Frentzos (New York: Routledge, 2015) 26–32.

  27. Zinn, A People’s History, 15.

  28. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975), ix.

  29. Oscar Handlin, Truth in History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 397–98.

  30. Zinn, A People’s History, 14–16; Duffy, “The Pequot War.”

  31. Zinn, A People’s History, 16.

  32. Richard R. Johnson, “The Search for a Usable Indian: An Aspect of the Defense of Colonial New England,” Journal of American History, Vol. 64, No. 3, (December 1977), 623–51.

  33. Ibid.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Zinn, A People’s History, 16–17.

  36. Ibid., 17.

  37. Ibid., 17–18.

  38. Ibid., 18.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Ibid., 20.

  41. Handlin, Truth in History, 398.

  42. Zinn, A People’s History, 20; Edna Kenton, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1954), 219–24; Nash, Red, White, and Black, 20.

  43. Zinn, A People’s History, 20.

  44. Nash, Red, White, and Black, 20.

  45. Zinn, A People’s History, 20.

  46. Nash, Red, White, and Black, 21.

  47. Ibid.

  48. Zinn, A People’s History, 20.

  49. Morgan, American Slavery, 52.

  50. Zinn, A People’s History, 20.

  51. Nash, Red, White, and Black, 21.

  52. Zinn, A People’s History, 20.

  53. Ibid., 21; Nash, Red, White, and Black, 23.

  54. Zinn, A People’s History, 21.

  55. Nash, Red, White, and Black, 25.

  56. Ibid., 93–94.

  57. Zinn, A People’s History, 20.

  58. Ibid., 21.

  59. Ibid.

  60. Karim M. Tiro, “Iroquois Ways of War and Peace,” in Cadwallader Colden, The History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the Province of New-York in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017), xviii–xxviii.

  61. Abraham D. Lavender, “Indian Slave Trade,” American Indian History, vol. 1, ed. Carol A. Barrett (Pasadena, California: Salem Press: 2003), 220–24.

  62. Francis Parkman, The Parkman Reader: From the Works of Francis Parkman, sel. and ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1955), 33.

  63. Ibid., 36.

  64. Carole A. Barrett, “World Wars” in American Indian History, vol. 2, ed. Carol A. Barrett (Pasadena, California: Salem Press: 2003), 593–98.

  65. Michael V. Namorato, “Code Talkers,” in American Indian History, vol. 1, ed. Carol A. Barrett (Pasadena, California: Salem Press: 2003), 105–8; Benny Johnson, “Navajo Code Talker Breaks Silence After Trump Pocahontas Comment,” The Daily Caller, November 28, 2017, http://dailycaller.com/2017/11/28/navajo-code-talker-breaks-silence-after-trump-pocahontas-comment-what-he-says-wow/.

  66. William Brandon, The Last Americans: The Indian in American Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 6–7.

  67. Peter Wood, email to author, October 30, 2018.

  68. Brandon, The Last Americans, 6–7.

  69. Tristram Hunt, Introduction in Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, (London: Penguin Classics, 2010), 3.

  70. Ibid., 5–7.

  71. Ibid., 11.

  72. Zinn, A People’s History, 103.

  73. Ibid., 504.

  74. Ibid., 103.

  75. Ibid., 103–4.

  76. Hunt, Introduction, 17–18.

  77. William Z. Foster, Outline Political History of the Americas (New York: International Publishers, 1951), 40, 31.

  78. Ibid., 30–31.

  79. Larry Schweikart, 48 Liberal Lies About American History (New York: Penguin, 2008), 81.

  80. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 85–86; Elisabeth Anthony Dexter, Colonial Women of Affairs: A Study of Women in Business and the Professions in America before 1776 (Boston: Houghton Miflin Company, 1924).

  Chapter Four: America the Racist

  1. Fred Siegel, “History and Politics: A Common Fate,” Academic Questions, (December 1991), 32–36.

  2. Arna Bontemps, “Dark Odyssey,” (review of They Came in Chains by J. Saunders Redding) Saturday Review, September 2, 1950, 16.

  3. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 23.

  4. Ibid., 29.

  5. Robert Paquette to the author, March 3, 2018.

  6. P.C. Emmer, The Dutch Slave Trade: 1500–1800 (New York: Berghan Books, 2006), 39–40.

  7. Zinn, A People’s History, 27.

  8. Ibid., 27–28.

  9. Robert Paquette email to author, February 23, 2018.

  10. Zinn, A People’s History, 28.

  11. Ibid., 38.

  12. Ibid., 198.

  13. Robert L. Paquette and Mark M. Smith, “Introduction: Slavery in the Americas” in The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the America. ed. Robert L. Paquette and Mark M. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3–17.

  14. Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 3.

  15. Ibid.r />
  16. Allan Gallay, “Indian Slavery” in The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas, ed. Robert L. Paquette and Mark M. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 312–35.

  17. Robert L. Paquette and Mark M. Smith, “Introduction: Slavery in the Americas” in The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas, ed. Robert L. Paquette and Mark M. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3–17.

  18. Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, 99.

  19. Zinn, A People’s History, 24.

  20. Zinn, A People’s History, 30–31.

  21. Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 17.

  22. William G. Clarence-Smith and David Eltis, “White Servitude” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Volume 3, AD 1420–AD 1804, vol. 3, ed. David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 132.

  23. Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, 92, 94.

  24. Ibid., 97.

  25. Ibid., 78.

  26. Ibid., 12.

  27. Ibid., 77.

  28. Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America: A History, (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 185.

  29. Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, 73.

  30. Ibid., 76.

  31. Ibid., 78–79.

  32. Zinn, A People’s History, 28.

  33. Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, 51.

  34. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 76.

  35. Ibid., 87–88; Robert Paquette to the author, March 3, 2018.

  36. Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America, 186.

  37. Thornton, Africa and Africans 175, 183–84.

  38. Ibid., 175, 183–84; Paquette and Smith, “Introduction: Slavery in the Americas,” The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 15, note 13.

  39. Zinn, A People’s History, 180.

  40. Ibid., 180.

  41. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845 edition, in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 352.

  42. Ibid. 337–40, 350–352.

  43. Ibid. 362–69.

  44. Ibid.

  45. Edgar J. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse University Press, 2001), ix–x, 11–12, 47–48.

  46. Lorena S. Walsh, “Slavery in the North American Mainland Colonies” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Volume 3, 407-430.

  47. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York, 157–58.

  48. Ibid., 152.

  49. Zinn, A People’s History, 72.

  50. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery,168–69.

  51. Abdi Latif Dahir, “Africa is now the world’s epicenter of modern-day slavery,” Quartz Africa, July 23, 2018. https://qz.com/africa/1333946/global-slavery-index-africa-has-the-highest-rate-of-modern-day-slavery-in-the-world/.

  52. Seif Kousmate, “The Unspeakable Truth about Slavery in Mauritania,” Guardian, June 8, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jun/08/the-unspeakable-truth-about-slavery-in-mauritania.

  53. Zinn, A People’s History, 172.

  54. Ibid, 173.

  55. Ibid., 172.

  56. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, 140.

  57. Zinn, A People’s History, 172.

  58. Ibid. 172–73.

  59. Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 259.

  60. Zinn, A People’s History, 182–83.

  61. Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 264.

  62. Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Teaching American History.org, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july/; “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Conservapedia, https://www.conservapedia.com/What_to_the_Slave_is_the_Fourth_of_July%3F.

  63. Zinn, A People’s History, 187.

  64. Ibid. 186.

  65. Thomas E. Woods Jr., The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2004), 58–59.

  66. Zinn, A People’s History, 171.

  67. Ibid., 188–89.

  68. Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 667–68.

  69. Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 302.

  70. Zinn, A People’s History, 189.

  71. James M. McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (New York: Penguin, 2008) 20–21.

  72. Zinn, A People’s History, 191–92.

  73. James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: Norton, 2013), 343.

  74. McPherson, Tried by War, 107–8.

  75. Ibid., 127–28.

  76. Zinn, A People’s History, 188–89.

  77. James McPherson, Tried by War, 107.

  78. Zinn, A People’s History, 191–92.

  79. James McPherson, Tried by War, 129–30.

  80. Debra Sheffer, “Abraham Lincoln: Diplomacy and Emancipation” in The Routledge Handbook of American Military and Diplomatic History, the Colonial Period to 1877 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 307–8.

  81. Zinn, A People’s History, 187.

  82. Oakes, Freedom National, xviii.

  83. Frederick Douglass, “What the Black Man Wants,” Teaching American History.org. http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/what-the-black-man-wants/.

  84. Zinn, A People’s History, 171.

  85. Robert Paquette, “Mitch Daniels v. Howard Zinn, Part 2,” See Thru Edu, August 25, 2013, seethruedu.com/updatesmitch-daniels-v-howard-zinn-part-2/.

  86. Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863, Teaching American History, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/gettysburg-address/. Accessed October 12, 2018.

  Chapter Five: Casting a Pall on the Finest Hour

  1. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 407–8.

  2. Ibid., 417.

  3. Thomas A. Bailey, The American Pageant, second edition (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1961), 863.

  4. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Second Fireside Chat, May 7, 1933, the American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=14636.

  5. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life (New York: Viking, 2017), 160.

  6. Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 587.

  7. Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won (Basic Books, 2017), 62–63.

  8. Zinn, A People’s History, 407; William Henry Chamberlin, America’s Second Crusade (Henry Regnery, 1950), republished Liberty Fund Books, no date), 185. In this book, published five years after the war, Chamberlin states that “a people’s war” was the “fashionable” term.

  9. Zinn, A People’s History, 407–8.

  10. Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 15.

  11. Zinn, A People’s History, 409.

  12. George S. Schuyler (1895–1977), the famous black anticommunist columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier, often bitterly commented on the discrimination against blacks even as Hitler’s crimes were being denounced. Schuyler was chairman of Negroes Against War, a founding member of the New York State Conservative Party, and then a member of the John Birch Society.

  13. Richard Bernstein, “Doubts Mar Film of Black Army Unit,” New York Times, March 1, 1993, B1.

  14. “Black Soldiers Honored,” New York Times, April 21, 1978, A15.

  15. Jo
e Wilson Jr., The 761st “Black Panther” Tank Battalion in World War II (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1999), 192.

  16. Zinn, A People’s History, 409.

  17. Ibid., 408.

  18. Ibid., 408-9.

  19. Ibid., 409.

  20. Ibid., 410.

  21. Ibid., 410-411.

  22. Thomas A. Bailey, Presidential Saints and Sinners (New York: The Free Press, 1981), 219–20.

  23. Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 582–83, 596.

  24. Zinn, A People’s History, 411.

  25. “Radhabinod Pal,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radhabinod_Pal, citing Norimitsu Onishi, “Decades After War Trials, Japan Still Honors a Dissenting Judge,” New York Times, August 31, 2007 and Timothy Brook, “The Tokyo Judgment and the Rape of Nanking,” Journal of Asian Studies, August 2001.

  26. Richard H. Minear, Victors’ Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971), 152.

  27. Hanson, The Second World Wars, 48.

  28. Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012), 42.

  29. Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 592–93.

  30. Zinn, A People’s History, 411.

  31. Bailey, The American Pageant, 877.

  32. Ibid.

  33. “Parley at the White House,” New York Times, November 26, 1941, 8.

  34. “Stimson Assails Telling War Plan,” New York Times, December 6, 1941, 3.

  35. Zinn, A People’s History, 415.

  36. Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938–1945 (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1970), xiii, 9.

  37. Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 626.

  38. Zinn, A People’s History, 415.

  39. Ibid., 29.

  40. Ibid., 416.

  41. Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 608.

  42. Allison Michelle Maher, “The Internment of Japanese-Canadians: A Policy Founded on Racism, Not on National Security,” Concord Review 2: 4 (1990), 139–54. I would like to thank Concord Review editor Will Fitzhugh for bringing this paper to my attention.

  43. Ken Masugi, “Lessons from the WW II Japanese Relocation,” Law and Liberty, May 8, 2013, http://www.libertylawsite.org/2013/05/08/lessons-from-the-ww-ii-japanese-relocation/; Richard B. Frank, “Zero Hour on Niihau,” World War II, July 2009, republished at http://www.historynet.com/zero-hour-on-nihau.htm.