World Socialist Web Site: The 1619 Project And The Falsification Of History

The 1619 Project and the falsification of history: An analysis of the New York Times’ reply to five historians

I'm not finished reading it yet, but I post it because it's really good. One of the best refutations of the 1619 nonsense I've seen. 

The PC / Identity-politics left are such an important and destructive factor in contemporary politics that blots out the rest of the lefter-than-liberal left. So I tend to forget that the economic / socialist left still exists. Well, there's Bernie... But he's capitulated. 

   Anyway, North and London just slap the shit out of that idiotic "project." Just one small bit:

   The Times justifies its racial approach by claiming that slavery and the experience of African Americans are subjects long neglected by historians. In fact, the slave system—its origins, changing economic role in pre- and post-revolutionary North America, and its social, political and cultural significance over a period spanning several centuries—has been the subject of voluminous research. The essays that introduce the 1619 Project evince no familiarity with the massive body of work produced by generations of historians. The 1619 Project essays are not footnoted, nor are the readers provided with a bibliography.
   Ignoring the historiography of the Revolution and Civil War, the 1619 Project presents issues that have been subject to decades of intense and rigorous scholarly debate as settled. There is a substantial body of literature on the points the project addresses: in particular, the interaction between the revolution and slavery, the influence of slaveowners on the drafting of the Constitution, and, in the Civil War era, Lincoln’s changing attitudes on race and abolition.
Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the US
   Had the Times’ editors approached the 1619 Project as serious journalists, they would have had a particular obligation, at the very least, to take notice of and reference the disputes of the recent past—disputes that were open and ongoing even as Hannah-Jones and her co-authors were preparing their essays for publication. Many of these disputes were covered in the Times before the newspaper committed itself in recent years to racial politics.