Debunking Howard Zinn Portland to Atlanta Speaking Tour

Posted March 10, 2020: The Dissident Prof has been doing some traveling: Portland, Oregon: St. Louis, Missouri; Dallas, Texas; and here in Georgia where she is wintering in Atlanta, Fayetteville, and Athens. Here is the video of my talk at the Constitutional Coalition/Eagle Council Educational Policy Conference in St. Louis. Notices for three events next week follow an account of my talk at Portland State University by an impressive young man I met there, Brandon Smith, a recent graduate of that university and former student of Political Science Professor, Bruce Gilley, who as President of the Oregon Association of Scholars invited me to give the talk.

Leaving Our Children a Better Worldview by Brandon Smith

My curiosity about Howard Zinn began in my young adulthood in Portland, Oregon, during the mid-2000s when I had more access to motion pictures and music than I did to substantive scholarship. Good Will Hunting and NOFX's “Franco Un-American” both seemed to endorse Zinn's work as a proper starting point for cultivating one's worldview. Being concerned with my own capacity for democratic decision-making in the aftermath of the 2000 U.S. presidential election and terrorist attacks of 9/11, I took it upon myself to read Zinn's A People's History of the United States in hope of becoming a more enlightened citizen with a deeper understanding of what brought the world to that particular point in history.

Read more: Debunking Howard Zinn Portland to Atlanta Speaking Tour

National Vietnam War Veterans Day 2020

Posted by Mary Grabar on March 30, 2020, Article by W.R. Baker, originally published at Small Wars Journal on March 29 (republished with permission): Dulce bellum inexpertis – “War is Sweet to Those Who Have Never Experienced It”

While March 29th is National Vietnam War Veterans Day, the “official” federal remembrance day (August 18th in Australia and New Zealand), each of us who went to war will probably remember not only the date we left the United States and the date we returned, but also certain events in-between that occurred in the land which President Reagan called “…100 rice paddies and jungles in a place called Vietnam.”

The individual Vietnam remembrance day might be the day you were first fired upon (perhaps shelled, mortared, or shot at) or the day wounded – occurring with those who became your closest family, who you relied upon each day, just as they did you. War has a way of throwing the best and the worst things at you all at once and Vietnam certainly proved that.

Read more: National Vietnam War Veterans Day 2020

On Grading Zinn-ers' Papers

By N. Greene, Posted by Mary Grabar, April 29, 2020; N. Greene (a pseudonym) teaches at a midwestern college.

It’s that time of the semester. Time for research papers to be turned in and graded. I look forward to this part of the semester with a mixture of hope and dread. I often read papers that demonstrate learning, inquisitiveness, and the beginnings of student scholarship. However, I get my fair share of papers from students that have been thoroughly misled by the writings of Howard Zinn. I ask my students to pick an historical topic that lends itself well to debate so that they can craft a thesis and defend it in their papers. The Zinners among them, typically fall back on Zinn’s one sided thoroughly unobjective rants against America. This is the easiest course of action; they have been thoroughly indoctrinated by the time they get to my college class and this course of action requires no real thought or examination, just the spouting of righteous indignation at the United States.

Read more: On Grading Zinn-ers' Papers