Additionally - and probably more importantly - I think it’s an attempt to see the history from the point of view of the oppressed. The stuff in US history classes usually has a “how did this impact those of european ancestry” slant to it - even if not directly stated.
Also, it reminds the student that this shit happened in the past and that its lingering effects are still felt by some Americans today. According to the theory.
An interesting slant on some news from the Formerly Seceded State of Georgia:
One commenter’s comment:
The people of Georgia have ever been willing to stand by this bargain, this contract; they have never sought to evade any of its obligations; they have never hitherto sought to establish any new government; they have struggled to maintain the ancient right of themselves and the human race through and by that Constitution. But they know the value of parchment rights in treacherous hands, and therefore they refuse to commit their own to the rulers whom the North offers us. Why? Because by their declared principles and policy they have outlawed $3,000,000,000 of our property in the common territories of the Union; put it under the ban of the Republic in the States where it exists and out of the protection of Federal law everywhere; because they give sanctuary to thieves and incendiaries who assail it to the whole extent of their power, in spite of their most solemn obligations and covenants; because their avowed purpose is to subvert our society and subject us not only to the loss of our property but the destruction of ourselves, our wives, and our children, and the desolation of our homes, our altars, and our firesides. To avoid these evils we resume the powers which our fathers delegated to the Government of the United States, and henceforth will seek new safeguards for our liberty, equality, security, and tranquillity.
Approved, Tuesday, January 29, 1861
[The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States | American Battlefield Trust]
If only the white men who comprised the “people of Georgia” produced any sort of historical records that the Georgia State Board of Education could examine to bolster or disprove their assertions.
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Bump.
George Will has an article about this, but it’s at WaPo, and I don’t subscribe. Could someone flout the law and C&P it here? Thanks in advance.
Mainly, I want to read exactly what he thinks is inaccurate.
I don’t see how other countries also engaging in slavery somehow lessens the importance of slavery in American history.
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Those darned Egyptians, too.
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Mainly, it is one complaint about the claim that the Revolution was driven by worry about British abolitionists.
Having made a case against that one claim, Will then goes on to extrapolate a bunch. I don’t know if that is really valid, because I haven’t read the 1619 articles. And, Will seems to be talking about opinions that superceed the 1619 project.
The New York Times is like God, who, if Genesis reported Creation correctly, beheld His handiwork and decided “it was very good.” The Times is comparably pleased with itself concerning its creation, “The 1619 Project.”
This began in August 2019 as a special edition of the paper’s Sunday magazine. Now it has become a book by which the Times continues attempting to “reframe” U.S. history. In the Times, an advertisement for the Times’s book describes it as “a dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism.” That description damages journalism’s reputation for respecting facts, which the 2019 writing that begot this book did not do. The 1619 Project’s tendentiousness reeks of political purpose.
The Times’s original splashy assertion – slightly fudged after the splash garnered a Pulitzer Prize – was that the American Revolution, the most important event in our history, was shameful because a primary reason it was fought was to preserve slavery. The war was supposedly ignited by a November 1775 British offer of freedom to Blacks who fled slavery and joined British forces. Well.
That offer came after increasingly volcanic American reactions to various British provocations: After the 1765 Stamp Act. After the 1770 Boston Massacre. After the 1773 Boston Tea Party. After the 1774 Coercive Acts (including closure of Boston’s port) and other events of “The Long Year of Revolution” (the subtitle of Mary Beth Norton’s “1774”). And after , in 1775, the April 19 battles of Lexington and Concord, the June 17 battle of Bunker Hill and George Washington on July 3 assuming command of the Continental Army.
Writing history is not like doing physics. But event A cannot have caused event B if B began before A.
Addressing the American Council of Trustees and Alumni last month, Gordon S. Wood, today’s foremost scholar of America’s Founding, dissected the 1619 Project’s contentions. When the Revolution erupted, Britain “was not threatening to abolish slavery in its empire,” which included lucrative, slavery-dependent sugar-producing colonies in the Caribbean. Wood added:
“If the Virginian slaveholders had been frightened of British abolitionism, why only eight years after the war ended would the board of visitors or the trustees of the College of William & Mary, wealthy slaveholders all, award an honorary degree to Granville Sharp, the leading British abolitionist at the time? Had they changed their minds so quickly? … The New York Times has no accurate knowledge of Virginia’s Revolutionary culture and cannot begin to answer these questions.” The Times’s political agenda requires ignoring what Wood knows:
“It was the American colonists who were interested in abolitionism in 1776. … Not only were the northern states the first slaveholding governments in the world to abolish slavery, but the United States became the first nation in the world to begin actively suppressing the despicable international slave trade. The New York Times has the history completely backwards.”
Wood’s doctoral dissertation adviser in 1960 to 1964 was Bernard Bailyn, the title of whose best-known book, “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” conveys a refutation of the 1619 Project’s premise that the Revolution originated from base economic motives. When Bailyn died a year after the 1619 Project was launched, the Times’s obituary noted that he had challenged the “Progressive Era historians … who saw the founders’ revolutionary rhetoric as a mask for economic interests.” Actually, the rhetoric gave momentum to ideas that were the Revolution.
The 1619 Project, which might already be embedded in school curricula near you, reinforces the racial monomania of those progressives who argue that the nation was founded on, and remains saturated by, “systemic racism.” This racial obsession is instrumental; it serves a radical agenda that sweeps beyond racial matters. It is the agenda of clearing away all impediments, intellectual and institutional, to — in progressivism’s vocabulary — the “transformation” of the nation. The United States will be built back better when it has been instructed to be ashamed of itself and is eager to discard its disreputable heritage.
The 1619 Project aims to erase (in Wood’s words) “the Revolution and the principles that it articulated – liberty, equality and the well-being of ordinary people.” These ideas are, as Wood says, the adhesives that bind our exceptional nation whose people have shared principles, not a shared ancestry.
The Times says “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional” flows from “slavery and the anti-black racism it required.” So, the 1619 Project’s historical illiteracy is not innocent ignorance. Rather, it is maliciousness in the service of progressivism’s agenda, which is to construct a thoroughly different nation on the deconstructed rubble of what progressives hope will be the nation’s thoroughly discredited past.
I thought the people who built the pyramids were paid and buried next to the pyramids, or something?
Thanks.
Not much there, as you note.
Not “ignited”; I’d say instead rekindled and spread to the South, whose rich landowners had it made as long as slavery existed.
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From 2006, here is a book that discusses America’s “unification over the preservation of slavery.”
My local liberry doesn’t have it, so I’ll be ignorant for now.
I think part of the argument is whether the US is essentially racist. For example, did the revolution want liberty, but also paradoxically choose to fight for slavery in the southern colonies, and eventually enshrine slavery in the constitution through the 3/5 rule? Or are just fooling ourselves that we can imagine a slightly different revolution that did not support slavery?
I remember reading something a while ago which seemed to argue that kant’s philosophy was essentially racist because kant himself was racist, or wrote racist things. I see a similarity between this kind of argument, and the one about america.
I don’t know whether the 1619 project actually makes the argument that america is essentially racist. I haven’t read it. But a lot of conservatives seem to treat it like it does.
From the link:
In 1787, about the time Benjamin Franklin proposed the first affirmative action plan, negotiations over a new Constitution ground to a halt until the southern states agreed to allow the prohibition of slavery north of the Ohio River. The resulting Northwest Ordinance created the largest slave-free area in the world.
On the other side, Southerners insisted on the 20 year protection of the foreign slave trade.
By the time the constitution was ratified, all the Northern states had some process in place to eliminate slavery. To me, the notion that people in Massachusetts rebelled against the British to protect slavery is just wacky. OTOH, the notion that they compromised on slavery to get the South on board for the revolution and for the constitution makes sense.
This seems reasonable, since without those states, perhaps becoming their own country in 1788, the United States would not be as strong a Worldly force. Someone could pick off one (North by Brits in Canada) or the other (South by Spanish/French), then eventually take over the other half. And there we are, complicit to some King.
So, we probably not be the USofA as we are now without slavery. Not saying good or bad or shameful or prideful, but I wonder what alternative universes are out there. Dumb to whitewash (pun?) the effects of slavery and the resultant Reconstruction/Jim Crow eras in history books. And why people are the way they are today because of it all.
I’ve also read that the revolution itself pushed a number of people to be abolitionists, particular quakers as i recall.
If slavery and racism is an essential part of the US, then there are no alternative universes where the US is not racist. To not be racist is to not be america.
This does seem to be the implication of the claim that the revolution was based on the defense of slavery.
Similarly there is an argument (i think) that the development of america by the west essentially depended upon slave labor. it’s not that slavery was an immoral decision that may have sped up that development. Rather, nobody but slaves would have ever been willing to do the back breaking labor to cultivate the colonies, at least the southern ones.
Is America a fundamentally morally justified experiment that has been accidentally (as opposed to essentially) corrupted by human sin, as all human creations are? Or is it essentially an exercise in slavery, with racism still integral everywhere?
I’m extremely skeptical. The states in the “Northwest territories” never had slaves. They developed just fine. I suppose someone has done numbers on the amount of labor contributed by slaves in the northeastern states, vs. the amount of resources they consumed. I’d like to see that.
Yes, the plantation system in the South depended on slave labor. But, that’s not the only possible economic system. The Cherokee lived just fine in those states.
My comments are related to race, and hence slavery will mean African slaves.there were were others.
First off, sugar was the reason African slaves were so vital. The Euros tried working the sugar fields of the Caribbean themselves. It didn’t go well, with basically 80% annual mortality rates from malaria. The African slaves, with sickle cell keeping them from dying, were a perfect fit. Could the euros have developed sugar fields without slavery? Prolly not. And sugar was the overwhelming source of wealth. Tobacco would come later. So would cotton.
It seems the proximity of that slave labor, the slave trade infrastructure, and the plantation system spread easily to the SE.
I think we can find sources that say the plantation system came from (or was supported by) immigrants from the British “sugar islands”. This, for example https://www.jstor.org/stable/27567036
My point was that the plantation system wasn’t necessary for European development of the southern states. Maybe European death rates were 80% in the sugar fields in the Caribbean. But, plenty of Europeans lived in the southern US states before the civil war. Somehow, malaria didn’t kill them all.
South<>Caribbean.
