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Historians Dismayed that NY Times “1619 Project” Will Be in Schools

by Andrew December 3, 2019, 5:49 pm 563 Comments

It’s one thing to try and rewrite history in the pages of The New York Times, it’s quite another to collect all of that anti-white, “slavery defines America” propaganda, pack it up in a shiny box, and start selling it to schoolchildren who don’t know any better. What passes as entertainment for guilty liberals in New York City high society isn’t quite so funny when it gets served to our impressionable youth. And that’s exactly what is happening around the country as this “reframing” of American history gets pushed into public school classrooms.

Among the most dismayed observers are not conservatives but rather actual expert historians, who say there is a lot of bad history in The Times’ history project.

“I was surprised, as many other people were, by the scope of this thing, especially since it’s going to become the basis for high school education and has the authority of The New York Times behind it, and yet it is so wrong in so many ways,” lamented Brown University Professor Gordon Wood in an interview with World Socialist Web Site last week. Wood said that “none of the leading scholars of the whole period from the Revolution to the Civil War” were consulted for the project.

Well, of course not. This is an attempt to replace actual history with the fever dreams of WOKE leftists. Why would you consult historians?

Another historian was equally distressed by the 1619 Project. Pulitzer Prize winning author James McPherson, whose “Battle Cry of Freedom” is considered one of the definitive Civil War texts, said he saw little to recommend in the essays he read.

“I’d say that, almost from the outset, I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery, which was clearly, obviously, not an exclusively American institution, but existed throughout history,” McPherson told WSWS. “And I was a little bit unhappy with the idea that people who did not have a good knowledge of the subject would be influenced by this and would then have a biased or narrow view.”

Historian James Oakes was also critical of the project, noting that it has “prompted some very strong criticism from scholars in the field.”

“These are really dangerous tropes,” Oakes said. “They’re not only ahistorical, they’re actually anti-historical. The function of those tropes is to deny change over time. It goes back to those analogies.”

Those tropes are, if you can boil it down to a single sentence, that racism forms the underpinning of the United States of America, and that it can never be washed clean of our DNA.

You know, the kind of thing you would want to teach to your children before they go out into the world.

Historians Dismayed that NY Times “1619 Project” Will Be in Schools

Written by Andrew

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