Unfortunately, most of what the 1619 Project got wrong is not just what Oakes says, but other things besides.....
Further, the NYT had gotten almost everything wrong in its prior project Oakes refers to, "Disunion".
I am not going to go back through this line by line.
The Civil War was fought, after the Republicans took power, to keep the white northern racist Republicans in power for as long as possible (70 fucking years!). It was not about being nice to or freeing negroes ever, ever! Read Lincoln's White House meeting with free negroes transcript. Read my lips.
Professor
As PJCats' remarks begin to suggest, Oakes is apparently a classic modern Whig historian, criticizing another Whig account, the NYT 1619 Project, a postmodern Whig, account.
This is Whig modern versus Whig postmodern intramuralism, all utter nonsense really.
All the best
Tuesday, January 04, 2022
Exactly a month ago, I did a post critiquing the defense of the 1619 Project that Jake Silverstein of the Times published to commemorate its new book version. An historian of slavery and the Civil War period named James Oakes has now published this extremely telling critique of the whole project on a fairly obscure, traditional leftist web site called Catalyst. Oakes brings to bear a lifetime of study of the issues involved and a real command of the literature on the politics and economics of slavery that has been written over the last century. I recommend to all interested readers that they read the long piece in detail, but I will summarize what he had to say quickly.
1. The centerpiece of the project--the idea that the it presents a new view of slavery that has only emerged since black scholars got their seat at the academic table in the last few decades--is ridiculous, and an insult to earlier generations of white and black scholars who in fact had investigated the same issues very thoroughly. Some of the project's arguments have already been raised and rejected based upon evidence.
2. The project is political, not historical or even journalistic, presenting a very slanted view of history designed explicitly and admittedly to bolster a case for reparations for black Americans.
3. The project's assertions about the importance of slavery to the pre-1861 American economy are badly overblown, and the sources that the authors cite often do not bear them out.
In a similar but much less wide-ranging criticism of the 1619 Project, the historian Sean Wilentz recently detailed how difficult it had turned out to be for him and other skeptical historians to register their concerns in a mainstream historical journal. This piece was published on a web site in the Czech Republic. Oakes's piece should be coming out in the New York Times Magazine as a full-scale rejoinder, or in the New York Review of Books or the American Historical Review or the Journal of American History--but it isn't. The critics, who include some of our most eminent and accomplished historians, are being marginalized, while the book version of the 1619 project has shot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. That is another reason that I am linking this article and asking readers to circulate it further. We need to make clear that this new imperial regime has no clothes.
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