The Review

Last week, the American Historical Review published a cluster of 19 reflections on the New York Times’s “1619 Project.” Although a review forum of such “scope and magnitude” is, the editors write, without precedent at AHR, the Project’s position “at the center of the polarized politics of our era” justifies such full-scale treatment. Another factor, perhaps, goes unsaid: As the fortunes of academic history have declined catastrophically, the relative power of journalistic forays into the field has increased. The history departments might be shuttering, but The 1619 Project: A New American Origin Story, the Project’s 2021 book version, made the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

Daryl Michael Scott, who chairs the history department at Morgan State University and has been one of the fiercer critics of the “1619 Project,” opens his contribution by describing “1619" as “the coming of age of a partnership among journalists, reformers, and academics to create public-facing scholarship.” “The scholars,” Scott told me when we spoke last year, “are the junior partners in this enterprise.” As Scott has it, the bad habits of journalists (exaggeration in order to secure attention in an extremely crowded media landscape) and activists (subordination of historical truth to narratives usable for political and social reform) overwhelm more properly scholarly prerogatives: “To grab the general audience and advance the cause of reparations, the volume is unabashedly presentist.”

Scott’s dim view of the Project makes his AHR contribution something of an outlier. But other essays evince, if less pointedly, related anxieties about the sometimes awkward interface between journalism, activism, and scholarship. “Beyond factual errors,” Sandra E. Greene, a professor of African history at Cornell University, writes, “several chapters simplify to the point of distortion.” In Greene’s view, those distortions are largely in the service of the Project’s patriotic counter-mythography; in making Black Americans the heroes of a still-unrealized American ideal of liberty, it erases the actual diversity of Black experience across the centuries. Rhetoric replaces historical reconstruction.

Still, Greene writes, “as an African American, I also support The 1619 Project.” Its “errors and omissions,” she says, “should not be used as an excuse to deny the reality that racism and slavery have influenced every aspect of U.S. history.”

A certain strain is palpable here. In an environment as politically polarized as ours, factual disputes are especially vulnerable to the distorting lens of politics — and a commitment to getting things right might seem to lend aid and comfort to a political enemy. In the past few years, as Daniel Bessner put it recently in a New York Times essay, “fights over history — and historiography, even if few people use that word” have “become front-page news.” At the same time, “the historical profession itself is in rapid — maybe even terminal — decline.” In such a situation, the academic historians who remain will find themselves increasingly caught in meshes of others’ design.

Read the American Historical Review’s forum on the “1619 Project” and Daniel Bessner’s essay “The Dangerous Decline of the Historical Profession.” And for more on Daryl Scott, check out my conversation with him from last year.

Recommended

• “Foucault is not the only one interested in how venerable words might elude current structures of scientific power. For many Christians, the record of church teaching is still the teaching.” In the Boston Review, Mark D. Jordan on Michel Foucault’s final posthumous volume, published against his stated wishes.
• “What’s a ‘hard’ Unitarian, just so I can understand a ‘soft’ one by contrast?” At the podcast Sacred and Profane Love, Jennifer Frey talks with Anthony Domestico about T.S. Eliot.
• “Academic freedom exists because knowledge can be threatening: to values, social structures, political programs (of both left and right), and the supporters of universities themselves.” In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michael Meranze reviews Julia Schleck’s Dirty Knowledge. For a discussion of Schleck’s book in our own pages, see Joan W. Scott’s recent essay, “Academic Freedom Has Always Been Dirty.”

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin