March 16, 2021
Dear Friends and Family,
Segment 5 of the Nihilism series is the second of four examples of an historical rewrite to reflect a minority viewpoint. The 1619 Project, sponsored by The New York Times is the most politically charged of the four examples. It consists of ten different essays about the legacy of slavery the authors of which were predominantly black. The 1619 Project was initially published in December 2018 and took the world by storm. Hundreds of thousands of copies were shipped to libraries and museums. The introductory essay written by Nikole Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. But its revisions of history were highly controversial and were challenged by a cadre of historians, as well as by the President of the United States. The challenges by the historians led to the New York Times pulling the publication from further distribution in October 2020. The challenge by the President led to the creation of the 1776 Commission and Project, both of which were rescinded by a President Biden Executive Order in his first few days in office.
The excerpts only contain two of the ten essays contained in the Project. They are the two essays of controversy. Additionally, the excerpts contain a short history of the controversy surrounding the 1619 Project by a Washington Post writer, excerpts from the book Project 1619: A Critique by Phillip W. Magness (2020), the genesis of the 1776 Commission in reaction to the 1619 Project by President Trump.
A six-page addendum at the end of the PDF attachment contains three additional essays that were featured in the 1619 Project Podcast transcript. It’s a shame that the first two essays led to the demise of the entire project and as a result the tainting and obscuring of the remaining essays. These three essays provide some pertinent insight into Black History in terms of slavery conditions, music and blackface, and black healthcare. I found them most interesting. I have been unable to locate the remaining five essays.
My Takeaways:
Challenges to Traditional Beliefs:
Next:
Next week’s segment 6 is the third example of revisionist history. Here, Jarrett Stepman in his book The War on History summarizes new revisionist beliefs for seven aspects of American History – Christopher Columbus, the Pilgrims, Thomas Jefferson and the Founders, Andrew Jackson, Civil War, Teddy Roosevelt and the assimilation of immigrants and 20th century America.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Segment 5 of the Nihilism series is the second of four examples of an historical rewrite to reflect a minority viewpoint. The 1619 Project, sponsored by The New York Times is the most politically charged of the four examples. It consists of ten different essays about the legacy of slavery the authors of which were predominantly black. The 1619 Project was initially published in December 2018 and took the world by storm. Hundreds of thousands of copies were shipped to libraries and museums. The introductory essay written by Nikole Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. But its revisions of history were highly controversial and were challenged by a cadre of historians, as well as by the President of the United States. The challenges by the historians led to the New York Times pulling the publication from further distribution in October 2020. The challenge by the President led to the creation of the 1776 Commission and Project, both of which were rescinded by a President Biden Executive Order in his first few days in office.
The excerpts only contain two of the ten essays contained in the Project. They are the two essays of controversy. Additionally, the excerpts contain a short history of the controversy surrounding the 1619 Project by a Washington Post writer, excerpts from the book Project 1619: A Critique by Phillip W. Magness (2020), the genesis of the 1776 Commission in reaction to the 1619 Project by President Trump.
A six-page addendum at the end of the PDF attachment contains three additional essays that were featured in the 1619 Project Podcast transcript. It’s a shame that the first two essays led to the demise of the entire project and as a result the tainting and obscuring of the remaining essays. These three essays provide some pertinent insight into Black History in terms of slavery conditions, music and blackface, and black healthcare. I found them most interesting. I have been unable to locate the remaining five essays.
My Takeaways:
Challenges to Traditional Beliefs:
- One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery – preserving slavery was a cause of the Revolutionary War.
- The entire premise of the Times 1619 Project is that America is at root a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable.
- Faced with the choice of being a country of the ideals they put on paper (equality for all) or maintaining slavery, the founders decided they were going to try to have it both ways, and they baked that contradiction into the Constitution, both codifying and protecting the institution of slavery but never actually mentioning the word.
- Slavery was the primary driver of American economic growth in the 19th century.
- Slavery created a culture in American capitalism that was and is incredibly brutal.
Next:
Next week’s segment 6 is the third example of revisionist history. Here, Jarrett Stepman in his book The War on History summarizes new revisionist beliefs for seven aspects of American History – Christopher Columbus, the Pilgrims, Thomas Jefferson and the Founders, Andrew Jackson, Civil War, Teddy Roosevelt and the assimilation of immigrants and 20th century America.
Happy Learning,
Harley
NIHILISM: GOOD OR BAD? -- SEGMENT 5
1619 PROJECT – EXCERPTS
“HOW THE 1619 PROJECT TOOK OVER 2020”: Initially published in December 2018; by July 2019 the 1619 Project had expanded to include a broadcast section of the newspaper, a podcast series and a collaboration with the Pulitzer Center to develop a free school curriculum. Hundreds of thousands of extra copies were shipped to libraries and museum. The issue had ten essays about the legacy of slavery, most penned by Black writers. The night before publication, a standing-room only audience crowded into a 378-seat auditorium at the Times. “What if I told you,” Hannah-Jones began, “that the year 1619 is as important to the American story as the year 1776.” Jake Silverstein, the New York Times Magazine editor in chief was no less bold in his editor’s note” The barbaric system that would endure in the United States for 250 years after the White Lion’s arrival “is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that,” he wrote. “It is the country’s very origin.” The 1619 Project was an immediate sensation. Hannah-Jones, who would win a Pulitzer Prize for her introductory essay, needed an assistant to handle all the speaking requests. Silverstein recalls the rapturous crowds that would deliver a “laying of hands” as she walked into their midst.
Sean Wilentz, the Princeton historian was intrigued to see an issue of the magazine devoted to slavery. But then he started reading Hannah-Jones essay. “I threw the thing across the room, I was so astounded,” he recalled. The passage that so enraged Wilentz, she asserted that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery” at a time when “Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution.” This Wilentz argues is patently false. Leslie Harris, a history professor at Northwestern who has written extensively about colonial slavery, was contacted by a Time’s fact-checker asking if preserving slavery was a cause of the Revolutionary War. “Immediately, I was like, no, no, that doesn’t sound right,” Harris recalled.
After six months of defending the 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones and Silverstein received an email that convinced them that they had a problem. Other scholars had weighted in since Wilentz – notably a group of Civil War historians who echoed his concerns about the description of Lincoln’s views and disputed another essay’s linkage of slavery with capitalism. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in July 2020 proposed a bill to bar federal funds from schools that used the 1619 curriculum- “a radical work of historical revisionism aiming to indoctrinate our kids to hate America.” He said, “the entire premise” of the Times project is that America is at root a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable. Last week, the National Association of Scholars doubled down by calling on the Pulitzer board to revoke Hannah-Jones prize taking particular aim at “surreptitious efforts” to alter its post-publication. Then on Friday evening came the most stunning slam of all: “For all its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize,” wrote columnist Bret Stephens, “the 1619 Project has failed.”
Source: The Washington Post 1619 Article by Sarah Ellison, Oct. 13, 2020.
NOTE: On October 29, 2020 I went to Amazon.com to purchase a copy of the 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones. Its price was $375. So, I went to the New York Times website where it stated, “1619 is now sold out and is not expected to return.” Then by luck I found a transcript of the 1619 Podcast online.
Excerpts from the 1619 Project Podcast follows:
The Fight for a True Democracy by Nikole Hannah – Jones
In 1776 the nation was founded on the ideal of democracy. In 1619, when enslaved Africans first arrived in what would become the United States, black people began the fight to make that ideal a reality. Thomas Jefferson, at the very young age of 33 years, had been tasked with drafting the document that is going to declare to the world why the British North American colonies want to break off from the British Empire. He drafts the Declaration of Independence. So, 150 years have passed since those first Africans were sold into Virginia. The enslaved population has grown from 20 to now 500,000 people. Fully one-fifth of the population is now enslaved. You now have generations of black people who have never known a day of freedom and who will never know a day of freedom. So, as Jefferson is drafting the declaration, he includes a passage where he actually blames the king of England for introducing slavey into the colonies. He calls slavery a crime, and he says that the king of England committed this crime, it’s not our fault. So, he brings this document to the Continental Congress, and it doesn’t take long before delegates from the Carolinas and from Georgia look at that language about slavery. And they say that there is no way that they are going to sign this document as long as that passage about slavery remains. And so, it is struck, and the 13 colonies sign the declaration, and the declaration goes out into the world without mentioning slavery at all, and we start the Revolutionary War.
These 13 scrappy colonies manage to defeat one of the most powerful empires in the world, and we become a new nation. And so, the colonists have a choice to make. Are they going to be the country of their ideals, the ideals that they were putting to paper, a county based on the idea that all men were created equal? And if they were going to be that country, then they were going to have to abolish the institution of slavery. Or were they going to be wedded to the institution of slavery because they depended so heavily on the wealth that was being generated from it? And in that case, they can’t really write the document that they want to write. And so, what they do is they decide that they are going to try to have it both ways, and they bake that contradiction right into the Constitution, both codifying and protecting the institution of slavery but never actually mentioning the word. And so, they have written what is perhaps the most radical constitution in the world, and from the beginning, they knew they were going to violate its most essential principles. The call this new country a democracy, but it wasn’t one, net yet.
We are taught to think of Abraham Lincoln as the great emancipator, and he was. But the truth is, like many white Americans, he was opposed to slavery because it was a cruel and unjust institution in opposition to this nation’s ideals, but he was also opposed to black political and social equality. As he said in a speech that he gave in 1853, he considered black people a “troublesome presence,” and that they were incompatible with a democracy that was designed for white people. On August 14, 1862 Lincoln invited five free black men to the White House for a meeting. The Civil War is not going well and he’s feeling like he might have to do something drastic. He’s considering taking a radical step of liberating all of the enslaved people who are in the Confederate States, as a war tactic. As those five black men stood in the White House, I wonder what it must have felt like. These men had been fighting for the liberation of millions and had waited for this moment, only to be told that once they were granted their freedom, they were going to be asked to leave the country of their birth. And to make it even worse, Lincoln then told them that it’s their fault that the country is fighting a civil war at all. That’s why, the president said, “it is better for us both to be separated.” So, Lincoln ends the meeting, and one of the men tells him that they will go back and consider his proposal.
The Economy That Slavery Built by Matthew Desmond
In 1790, we had just shy of about 700,000 enslaved workers on these shores. By 1850, that number is three million, and cotton is driving most of that growth. And what took hold in America was a new kind of economic system, one that was relentlessly focused on increasing cotton productivity. Complicated workforce supervision techniques were developed for making sure people met their quotas by the end of the day. Behind all this capitalistic rationality, was violence. Because overseers were tracking everyone’s haul, if you fell short of that quota, you were often beat. If you fell below your quota, you could be subject to torture. These techniques of supervision were developed by folks trying to squeeze as much productivity out of their enslaved workforce as possible. And violence worked.
Planters, to expand their operations and make more money, needed more capital. For enslavers, mortgaging their workforce was easier than mortgaging their homes or their land. They mortgaged enslaved workers to buy more enslaved workers. This allowed global markets to get into the business of slavery. So, at the height of slavery, the combined value of enslaved workers exceeded that of all the railroads and all the factories in the nation. When you think of that comparison, how does that make you feel? The enslaved workforce in America was where the country’s wealth resided. Cotton prices started to plummet in 1834 causing a recession, which has been known as the Panic of 1837. Investors and creditors started calling in their debts, but plantation owners were totally underwater. They couldn’t sell their enslaved workforce, and they couldn’t sell their land to pay off their debts. So that debt was toxic. And so basically, they did nothing. Because cotton slavery was too big to fail. It sounds familiar, right? Its not hard to draw these parallels between what happened in the 1830s in America and what happened in the 2000s, when the banks were bailed out after 2008.
So, this is a story about American capitalism, about the foundation of American capitalism, about the American economy. And it was an economy that got started in brutality. Slavery allowed this poor, fledgling nation to turn into a colossal powerhouse in the global economy. But what slavery also created was a culture in American capitalism that was incredibly brutal. It’s tolerance for inequality. The level of poverty that we have here, compared to other industrialized societies. It’s a culture that brought us the Panic of 1837 the stock-market crash of 1929, the global financial crisis in 2008. And if the American capitalist way is uniquely brutal compared to other kinds of capitalist societies in the world, it may have to do with how capitalism started on these shores and the plain fact that we haven’t shook this kind of shadow of slavery from our economic life.
Source: 1619 Project Podcast Transcript, 2020.
1619 PROJECT CRITIQUE: The historians’ criticism of the 1619 Project focuses almost entirely on the two articles that are most directly pertinent to their own areas of expertise. The first is the lengthy introductory essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Times journalist who edited the project. The second is a contentious essay on the relationship between slavery and capitalism by Princeton University sociologist Matthew Desmond.
First Essay: Was the American Revolution Fought in Defense of Slavery? Hannah-Jones argues that British colonial rule presented an emerging threat to the continuation of slavery, thereby providing an impetus for slave-owning Americans to support independence. The American Revolution, she contends, was motivated in large part to “ensure slavery would continue.” The five historians vigorously dispute this claim. It is also entirely unrealistic to speculate that Britain would have imposed emancipation in the American colonies had the war for independence gone the other way. We know this because Britain’s own pathway to abolition in the remaining colonies entailed a half-century battle against intense parliamentary resistance. Curiously enough, a British victory in the American Revolution would have almost certainly delayed the politics of this process even further. With the American colonies still intact, planters from Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia would have likely joined their West Indian counterparts to obstruct any measure that weakened slavery from advancing through parliament.
First Essay: Was Abraham Lincoln a Racial Colonizationist or Exaggerated Egalitarian? In her essay, Hannah-Jones pointed to several complexities in the political beliefs of Abraham Lincoln to argue that his reputation as a racial egalitarian has been exaggerated. She points specifically to Lincoln’s longstanding support for the colonization of freed slaves abroad as a corollary feature of ending slavery, including a notorious August 1862 meeting at the White House in which the President pressed this scheme upon a delegation of free African Americans. The historians contest this depiction, responding that Lincoln evolved in an egalitarian direction and pointing to his embrace of an anti-slavery constitutionalism. Hannah -Jones, they contend, has essentially cherry-picked quotations and other examples of Lincoln’s shortcomings on racial matters and presented them out of context from his life and broader philosophical principles.
Second Essay: Did Slavery Drive America’s Economic Growth and the Emergence of American Capitalism? Matthew Desmond’s 1629 Project contribution has been at the center of the firestorm since the day it was published. The main thrust of this article holds that slavery was the primary driver of American economic growth in the 19th century, and that it infused its brutality into American capitalism today. The resulting thesis is overtly ideological and overtly anti-capitalist, seeking to enlist slavery as an explanatory mechanism for a long list of grievances he has against the Republican Party’s position on healthcare, taxation, and labor regulation in the present day. The five historians directly challenged the historical accuracy of Desmond’s thesis. In short, Desmond was weaponizing the history of slavery to attack modern capitalism.
In sum, certain 1619 Project essayists infused this worthy line of inquiry with a heavy stream of ideological advocacy. Times reported that Nikole Hannah–Jones announced this political intention openly, pairing progressive activism with the initiative’s stated educational purposes. Signs of the blurred lines between scholarship and activism appears in several, though not all, of its essays.
Source: The 1619 Project: A Critique by Phillip W. Magness, March 2020.
THE 1776 PROJECT:
Recently, President Trump spoke about American history, how he desired all schoolchildren to know that they are “citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.” The implication is that the 1619 Project teaches the opposite, which prompted Trump to start the 1776 Commission. Trump’s executive order speech:
1619 PROJECT – EXCERPTS
“HOW THE 1619 PROJECT TOOK OVER 2020”: Initially published in December 2018; by July 2019 the 1619 Project had expanded to include a broadcast section of the newspaper, a podcast series and a collaboration with the Pulitzer Center to develop a free school curriculum. Hundreds of thousands of extra copies were shipped to libraries and museum. The issue had ten essays about the legacy of slavery, most penned by Black writers. The night before publication, a standing-room only audience crowded into a 378-seat auditorium at the Times. “What if I told you,” Hannah-Jones began, “that the year 1619 is as important to the American story as the year 1776.” Jake Silverstein, the New York Times Magazine editor in chief was no less bold in his editor’s note” The barbaric system that would endure in the United States for 250 years after the White Lion’s arrival “is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that,” he wrote. “It is the country’s very origin.” The 1619 Project was an immediate sensation. Hannah-Jones, who would win a Pulitzer Prize for her introductory essay, needed an assistant to handle all the speaking requests. Silverstein recalls the rapturous crowds that would deliver a “laying of hands” as she walked into their midst.
Sean Wilentz, the Princeton historian was intrigued to see an issue of the magazine devoted to slavery. But then he started reading Hannah-Jones essay. “I threw the thing across the room, I was so astounded,” he recalled. The passage that so enraged Wilentz, she asserted that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery” at a time when “Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution.” This Wilentz argues is patently false. Leslie Harris, a history professor at Northwestern who has written extensively about colonial slavery, was contacted by a Time’s fact-checker asking if preserving slavery was a cause of the Revolutionary War. “Immediately, I was like, no, no, that doesn’t sound right,” Harris recalled.
After six months of defending the 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones and Silverstein received an email that convinced them that they had a problem. Other scholars had weighted in since Wilentz – notably a group of Civil War historians who echoed his concerns about the description of Lincoln’s views and disputed another essay’s linkage of slavery with capitalism. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in July 2020 proposed a bill to bar federal funds from schools that used the 1619 curriculum- “a radical work of historical revisionism aiming to indoctrinate our kids to hate America.” He said, “the entire premise” of the Times project is that America is at root a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable. Last week, the National Association of Scholars doubled down by calling on the Pulitzer board to revoke Hannah-Jones prize taking particular aim at “surreptitious efforts” to alter its post-publication. Then on Friday evening came the most stunning slam of all: “For all its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize,” wrote columnist Bret Stephens, “the 1619 Project has failed.”
Source: The Washington Post 1619 Article by Sarah Ellison, Oct. 13, 2020.
NOTE: On October 29, 2020 I went to Amazon.com to purchase a copy of the 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones. Its price was $375. So, I went to the New York Times website where it stated, “1619 is now sold out and is not expected to return.” Then by luck I found a transcript of the 1619 Podcast online.
Excerpts from the 1619 Project Podcast follows:
The Fight for a True Democracy by Nikole Hannah – Jones
In 1776 the nation was founded on the ideal of democracy. In 1619, when enslaved Africans first arrived in what would become the United States, black people began the fight to make that ideal a reality. Thomas Jefferson, at the very young age of 33 years, had been tasked with drafting the document that is going to declare to the world why the British North American colonies want to break off from the British Empire. He drafts the Declaration of Independence. So, 150 years have passed since those first Africans were sold into Virginia. The enslaved population has grown from 20 to now 500,000 people. Fully one-fifth of the population is now enslaved. You now have generations of black people who have never known a day of freedom and who will never know a day of freedom. So, as Jefferson is drafting the declaration, he includes a passage where he actually blames the king of England for introducing slavey into the colonies. He calls slavery a crime, and he says that the king of England committed this crime, it’s not our fault. So, he brings this document to the Continental Congress, and it doesn’t take long before delegates from the Carolinas and from Georgia look at that language about slavery. And they say that there is no way that they are going to sign this document as long as that passage about slavery remains. And so, it is struck, and the 13 colonies sign the declaration, and the declaration goes out into the world without mentioning slavery at all, and we start the Revolutionary War.
These 13 scrappy colonies manage to defeat one of the most powerful empires in the world, and we become a new nation. And so, the colonists have a choice to make. Are they going to be the country of their ideals, the ideals that they were putting to paper, a county based on the idea that all men were created equal? And if they were going to be that country, then they were going to have to abolish the institution of slavery. Or were they going to be wedded to the institution of slavery because they depended so heavily on the wealth that was being generated from it? And in that case, they can’t really write the document that they want to write. And so, what they do is they decide that they are going to try to have it both ways, and they bake that contradiction right into the Constitution, both codifying and protecting the institution of slavery but never actually mentioning the word. And so, they have written what is perhaps the most radical constitution in the world, and from the beginning, they knew they were going to violate its most essential principles. The call this new country a democracy, but it wasn’t one, net yet.
We are taught to think of Abraham Lincoln as the great emancipator, and he was. But the truth is, like many white Americans, he was opposed to slavery because it was a cruel and unjust institution in opposition to this nation’s ideals, but he was also opposed to black political and social equality. As he said in a speech that he gave in 1853, he considered black people a “troublesome presence,” and that they were incompatible with a democracy that was designed for white people. On August 14, 1862 Lincoln invited five free black men to the White House for a meeting. The Civil War is not going well and he’s feeling like he might have to do something drastic. He’s considering taking a radical step of liberating all of the enslaved people who are in the Confederate States, as a war tactic. As those five black men stood in the White House, I wonder what it must have felt like. These men had been fighting for the liberation of millions and had waited for this moment, only to be told that once they were granted their freedom, they were going to be asked to leave the country of their birth. And to make it even worse, Lincoln then told them that it’s their fault that the country is fighting a civil war at all. That’s why, the president said, “it is better for us both to be separated.” So, Lincoln ends the meeting, and one of the men tells him that they will go back and consider his proposal.
The Economy That Slavery Built by Matthew Desmond
In 1790, we had just shy of about 700,000 enslaved workers on these shores. By 1850, that number is three million, and cotton is driving most of that growth. And what took hold in America was a new kind of economic system, one that was relentlessly focused on increasing cotton productivity. Complicated workforce supervision techniques were developed for making sure people met their quotas by the end of the day. Behind all this capitalistic rationality, was violence. Because overseers were tracking everyone’s haul, if you fell short of that quota, you were often beat. If you fell below your quota, you could be subject to torture. These techniques of supervision were developed by folks trying to squeeze as much productivity out of their enslaved workforce as possible. And violence worked.
Planters, to expand their operations and make more money, needed more capital. For enslavers, mortgaging their workforce was easier than mortgaging their homes or their land. They mortgaged enslaved workers to buy more enslaved workers. This allowed global markets to get into the business of slavery. So, at the height of slavery, the combined value of enslaved workers exceeded that of all the railroads and all the factories in the nation. When you think of that comparison, how does that make you feel? The enslaved workforce in America was where the country’s wealth resided. Cotton prices started to plummet in 1834 causing a recession, which has been known as the Panic of 1837. Investors and creditors started calling in their debts, but plantation owners were totally underwater. They couldn’t sell their enslaved workforce, and they couldn’t sell their land to pay off their debts. So that debt was toxic. And so basically, they did nothing. Because cotton slavery was too big to fail. It sounds familiar, right? Its not hard to draw these parallels between what happened in the 1830s in America and what happened in the 2000s, when the banks were bailed out after 2008.
So, this is a story about American capitalism, about the foundation of American capitalism, about the American economy. And it was an economy that got started in brutality. Slavery allowed this poor, fledgling nation to turn into a colossal powerhouse in the global economy. But what slavery also created was a culture in American capitalism that was incredibly brutal. It’s tolerance for inequality. The level of poverty that we have here, compared to other industrialized societies. It’s a culture that brought us the Panic of 1837 the stock-market crash of 1929, the global financial crisis in 2008. And if the American capitalist way is uniquely brutal compared to other kinds of capitalist societies in the world, it may have to do with how capitalism started on these shores and the plain fact that we haven’t shook this kind of shadow of slavery from our economic life.
Source: 1619 Project Podcast Transcript, 2020.
1619 PROJECT CRITIQUE: The historians’ criticism of the 1619 Project focuses almost entirely on the two articles that are most directly pertinent to their own areas of expertise. The first is the lengthy introductory essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Times journalist who edited the project. The second is a contentious essay on the relationship between slavery and capitalism by Princeton University sociologist Matthew Desmond.
First Essay: Was the American Revolution Fought in Defense of Slavery? Hannah-Jones argues that British colonial rule presented an emerging threat to the continuation of slavery, thereby providing an impetus for slave-owning Americans to support independence. The American Revolution, she contends, was motivated in large part to “ensure slavery would continue.” The five historians vigorously dispute this claim. It is also entirely unrealistic to speculate that Britain would have imposed emancipation in the American colonies had the war for independence gone the other way. We know this because Britain’s own pathway to abolition in the remaining colonies entailed a half-century battle against intense parliamentary resistance. Curiously enough, a British victory in the American Revolution would have almost certainly delayed the politics of this process even further. With the American colonies still intact, planters from Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia would have likely joined their West Indian counterparts to obstruct any measure that weakened slavery from advancing through parliament.
First Essay: Was Abraham Lincoln a Racial Colonizationist or Exaggerated Egalitarian? In her essay, Hannah-Jones pointed to several complexities in the political beliefs of Abraham Lincoln to argue that his reputation as a racial egalitarian has been exaggerated. She points specifically to Lincoln’s longstanding support for the colonization of freed slaves abroad as a corollary feature of ending slavery, including a notorious August 1862 meeting at the White House in which the President pressed this scheme upon a delegation of free African Americans. The historians contest this depiction, responding that Lincoln evolved in an egalitarian direction and pointing to his embrace of an anti-slavery constitutionalism. Hannah -Jones, they contend, has essentially cherry-picked quotations and other examples of Lincoln’s shortcomings on racial matters and presented them out of context from his life and broader philosophical principles.
Second Essay: Did Slavery Drive America’s Economic Growth and the Emergence of American Capitalism? Matthew Desmond’s 1629 Project contribution has been at the center of the firestorm since the day it was published. The main thrust of this article holds that slavery was the primary driver of American economic growth in the 19th century, and that it infused its brutality into American capitalism today. The resulting thesis is overtly ideological and overtly anti-capitalist, seeking to enlist slavery as an explanatory mechanism for a long list of grievances he has against the Republican Party’s position on healthcare, taxation, and labor regulation in the present day. The five historians directly challenged the historical accuracy of Desmond’s thesis. In short, Desmond was weaponizing the history of slavery to attack modern capitalism.
In sum, certain 1619 Project essayists infused this worthy line of inquiry with a heavy stream of ideological advocacy. Times reported that Nikole Hannah–Jones announced this political intention openly, pairing progressive activism with the initiative’s stated educational purposes. Signs of the blurred lines between scholarship and activism appears in several, though not all, of its essays.
Source: The 1619 Project: A Critique by Phillip W. Magness, March 2020.
THE 1776 PROJECT:
Recently, President Trump spoke about American history, how he desired all schoolchildren to know that they are “citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.” The implication is that the 1619 Project teaches the opposite, which prompted Trump to start the 1776 Commission. Trump’s executive order speech:
Marxist doctrine holding that America is a wicked and racist nation, that even young children are complicit in oppression, and that our entire society must be radically transformed. Critical race theory is being forced into our children’s schools, it’s being imposed into workplace trainings, and it’s being deployed to rip apart friends, neighbors, and families … Teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words. American parents are not going to accept indoctrination in our schools.
He concluded with: “Our youth will be taught to love America with all of their heart and soul.”
These two poles, one emphasizing the exceptionalism of American history and the other its exploitation, seem incompatible. And the battle continues.
Source: The 1619 Project vs. the 1776 Project by Sam Heath of Medium Sept. 20, 2020.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
These two poles, one emphasizing the exceptionalism of American history and the other its exploitation, seem incompatible. And the battle continues.
Source: The 1619 Project vs. the 1776 Project by Sam Heath of Medium Sept. 20, 2020.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 5_nihilism_long_1619_project_--_segment_5.pdf |