Bret Stephens has given the 1619 Project a much-needed sober factual analysis revealing that the Project is laced with ideology. To its credit, the NYT has printed Stephens’ critique. Serious historians are thus getting a well-deserved moment in the sun. Here’s an excerpt from Stephens’ article:
An early sign that the project was in trouble came in an interview last November with James McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Battle Cry of Freedom” and a past president of the American Historical Association. He was withering: “Almost from the outset,” McPherson told the World Socialist Web Site, “I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective.”
In particular, McPherson objected to Hannah-Jones’s suggestion that the struggle against slavery and racism and for civil rights and democracy was, if not exclusively then mostly, a Black one. As she wrote in her essay: “The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of Black resistance.”
McPherson demurs: “From the Quakers in the 18th century, on through the abolitionists in the antebellum, to the Radical Republicans in the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the N.A.A.C.P., which was an interracial organization founded in 1909, down through the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, there have been a lot of whites who have fought against slavery and racial discrimination, and against racism,” he said. “And that’s what’s missing from this perspective.”
In a lengthier dissection, published in January in The Atlantic, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz accused Hannah-Jones of making arguments “built on partial truths and misstatements of the facts.” The goal of educating Americans on slavery and its consequences, he added, was so important that it “cannot be forwarded through falsehoods, distortions and significant omissions.”
https://www.city-journal.org/slavery-failure-of-1619-project?fbclid=IwAR3n2GS4VtkzxwcJlaE1uGaCYWGemxx4w32nYgC11Hfn0o8mhjqroGybKwA
“I’d like to propose adding another reason to close the book on the 1619 Project: it is based on a twisted notion of American exceptionalism. America’s “brutal system of slavery [was] unlike anything that had existed in the world before,” Hannah-Jones writes. “Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently.” Brutal? Yes. Unlike anything that existed in the world before? Seeing how far this is from the truth is the only way to make sense of the contradictions and perplexing compromises of the American Founding that trouble us so much today.
In fact, slavery was a mundane fact in most human civilizations, neither questioned nor much thought about. It appeared in the earliest settlements of Sumer, Babylonia, China, and Egypt, and it continues in many parts of the world to this day. Far from grappling with whether slavery should be legal, the code of Hammurabi, civilization’s first known legal text, simply defines appropriate punishments for recalcitrant slaves (cutting off their ears) or those who help them escape (death). Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament take for granted the existence of slaves. Slavery was so firmly established in ancient Greece that Plato could not imagine his ideal Republic without them, though he rejected the idea of individual ownership in favor of state control. As for Rome, well, Spartacus, anyone?
In the ancient world, slaves were almost always captives from the era’s endless wars of conquest.”
The more serious historians examine the claims of the NYT 1619 Project, the more the 1619 Project (and the NYT) are revealed to have sacrificed solid historical facts for ideology dressed-up as history. Phil Magness was an early critic and he spells out many of his concerns about the project at this link on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/PhilWMagness/status/1317487371630379009
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One more sharp criticism of the NYT for the 1619 Project. Maybe the lesson is that one should not write “history” and then deny that it is history. Maybe one should be willing to stand behind one’s work. This excerpt if from “Factional warfare erupts in New York Times over the 1619 Project.”
There is nothing for the Times to be proud of. The 1619 Project is a travesty of both history and journalism that has humiliated the Times and undermined its self-proclaimed status as “the newspaper of record.” As for the “conversation” to which Sulzberger refers, this emerged over and against a vicious campaign waged by Hannah-Jones and Silverstein to shut down debate and smear opponents, including the World Socialist Web Site and the eminent historians whom it interviewed.
Hannah-Jones repeatedly attacked on Twitter anyone who exposed the false claims of the Project. She denounced World Socialist Web Site writers as “anti-black racists.” She rejected McPherson, a revered historian who has dedicated his life to the study of the Civil War era, as a “white historian” unqualified to write on “black history.”
None of the immense body of scholarship on the subject of slavery left any discernable trace on Hannah-Jones’ “framing essay,” which is the centerpiece of the 1619 curriculum. Every one of her arguments can be found in the work of just one historian, the late black nationalist Lerone Bennett, Jr., and his two best-known books, Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, and his discredited Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream.
To this day, the Times has not revealed its methods in producing the Project. In fact, when the 1619 Project was published it did not even bother to include a bibliography—though it immediately began sending the print version out to cash-strapped public schools.
In “The 1619 Project: An Autopsy: Rejecting the 1619 metaphor is what makes America great,”
Timothy Sandefur points to numerous gaping holes in the 1619 narrative. The United States is about much more than “white versus black.” For instance, California was always a free state and the “race” struggles were about disenfranchised people from China and Japan. Here’s an excerpt:
https://thedispatch.com/p/the-1619-project-an-autopsy
The Atlantic sponsored a round-table about the 1619 Project featuring history professor Leslie Harris (from Northwestern) and Linguist Professor John McWhorter (from Columbia University), hosted by Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic.