On Thursday, September 17 – Constitution Day – the National Archives hosted an event billed as The White House History Conference. It was livestreamed on the White House youtube channel. Before the conference began, historians on Twitter were joking about who might be on the dais – David Barton, Dinesh D’Souza, Bill O’Reilly. Of course none of those people are historians, but none of us historians on Twitter expected that any actual, real historians would be willing to participate and therefore lend legitimacy to what we expected would be a highly partisan and thinly history-focused event.
We were right on the second expectation, wrong on the first one.
There were two well-regarded and highly prestigious scholars who participated in the “Conference”: Civil War historian Allen C. Guelzo of Princeton, and American intellectual historian Wilfred McClay of the University of Oklahoma – though Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College and functional chair of the “conference,” spilled the beans that McClay is headed to Hillsdale.
Immediately after the conclusion of the conference livestream, I emailed Bill McClay and asked him if he would be interested in writing a piece for our readers discussing how and why he came to be involved in this event sponsored by the White House. I have not yet heard back from him, but I will gladly publish anything he chooses to write about it here.
If you’d like a blow-by-blow account of the conference, I live-tweeted the event in real time – you can read that very long and occasionally NSFW thread here. (Is the F-word NSFW? I don’t even know any more.)
Historian and Slate editor Rebecca Onion saw my tweet thread and asked me if I would be willing to write up a piece explaining to Slate readers why many American historians from coast to coast were utterly aghast at what we saw transpiring. I had a turnaround time of about 18 hours, but I met the deadline—Rebecca is a fantastic editor. You can read my Slate piece here.
On Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere, historians are still commenting on and reacting to the history panel and the remarks of the President afterward calling for mandatory “patriotic education” for K-12 students.
A new Twitter account belonging to David W. Blight popped on Twitter yesterday with some choice words for Guelzo.
Have to confess. DT's claims for "patriotic" history
yesterday finally drew me into twitter. Will I regret this?
Shame on Guelzo for lending himself to that stunt, and helping profane the National Archives.— David W. Blight (@davidwblight1) September 18, 2020
In any case, American historians had much to discuss on Constitution Day and the day after – and that was before we saw the sad news of the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
This is the longest year.
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Just wanted our readers to know that we’ll be running a roundtable on Wilfred McClay’s book and the “1776 Commission” here at the blog. We have four contributors lined up so far, and would welcome more. If you’re interested in contributing, @ me on Facebook or Twitter or drop me an email.
I am only an adjunct (Indiana university East) now but spent 30 years in public history and almost 10 teaching it in classrooms. I will buy the textbook to help review it and discuss the nature of historical study. I am working on a book on Lincoln’s legacy as seen in the public museums of the United States.
Thomas, please never think of yourself as “only an adjunct.” We would love to have you contribute to the roundtable, and a public history angle would be particularly important, given the “patriotic education” program of which McClay’s book will presumably be a part. I can see your email address from your WordPress comment form in the dashboard, so I will drop you a line this week. Thanks for your willingness to contribute. This will be an important conversation for the field and for the public.
Funny how those critical of the conference and its attendees didn’t mention the piece of work that got Trump all worked up. The 1619 Project from the New York Times. The author did not do her homework as the Spanish brought Black slaves to Florida to work sugarcane plantations in 1525. She also deemed that the whites who purchased slaves were hate filled racists. I’m sorry but the term racist is a 20th century term (coined in 1902) and should not be used in discussing the Atlantic Slave Trade of 300 years earlier. I’m not excited about what is being proposed,but it cannot be and worse than the 1619 Project which was written by someone who has no understanding of the economics, culture, and Zeitgeist of the time.
I mentioned the 1619 project a few times in the Slate article — please read more carefully before leveling accusations.
But, just to correct some of your more substantial errors: the 1619 project did not have a single “author.” It was an anthology of historical essays edited by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist N. Hannah Jones. She wrote a powerful essay framing the project as an attempt to answer the question: what if we thought of 1619, when enslaved Africans were first brought to British North America, as the beginning of the American story?
Historians deal in such fruitful framing questions all the time: What if the American Revolution wasn’t a radical but a conservative act? What if we think of the Civil War as an unfinished revolution? What if we posit that the Confederacy has actually won the Civil War? What if we consider the War of 1812 as the real beginning of American nationhood? Historians ask these sorts of questions and then turn to the evidence to see if the questions help us understand something about the past that we had collectively missed in prior readings. It’s really not that controversial an approach, and I find it stupidly ironic that the people most rattled and disturbed by this approach are the same people most likely to be “just asking questions” on Al Gore’s internet.
So here’s a question for you. It may surprise you to know that the term “Western Civilization” was invented in the mid-19th century. Would you concede that Western Civilization never existed before people developed a name for it? Donald Trump invoked 1,000 years of Western Civilization. But “Western Civilization” as a term is less than 200 years old. So there couldn’t have been Western Civilization before then, right? That’s your logic on the term “racism” — apply it fairly, then.
The idea of race in America as an indelible and inheritable set of physical and psychological characteristics, some biological essence, that necessarily determined someone’s social status and the status of all their descendants — racism — was absolutely a development tied to the introduction and the legal fortification of chattel slavery as a permanent, heritable condition for people of African descent in British North America. You can see Peter N. Wood on this, in a book excerpt I assign every semester to my students: The Birth of Race-Based Slavery.
I won’t expend too much effort here (or anywhere) to respond to comments from people who didn’t actually read what they’re commenting on — I get enough of that grading response papers — but I will close by mentioning this interesting fact, about which I’ll probably write a standalone blog post:
When I took AP US History in high school, my textbook was The National Experience, that Yale-heavy tome written by John Blum, Edmund Morgan, and C. Vann Woodward, along with Kenneth Stampp, the junior Schlesinger, and a few others. In their chapter on the founding of Virginia colony they do not mention chattel slavery at all, and 1619 is most notable for the founding of the House of Burgesses. Instead, they discuss chattel slavery in their chapter on “Patterns of Existence” in British North America. Here’s what they had to say about the establishment of slavery in the edition published in 1981, which was the edition used in my class:
The English recognized slavery as the ultimate degradation to which human beings could be subjected, but they showed surprisingly little hesitation in imposing that degradation on peoples of darker complexion than their own. Though slavery had no place in English law, English colonists from the beginning had enslaved Indians [sic] who made unsuccessful war on them. The theory was that the lives of captives taken in just wars belonged to the captors, but history records no war acknowledged by the victors to have been unjust, and the English had not been in the habit of enslaving prisoners taken in their European wars. Making slaves of Indians and later of Africans (allegedly purchased from the victors in righteous tribal wars) was somehow different from making slaves of, say, the French or the Germans.
The difference, of course, was race. Although not all blacks [sic] were slaves — from the beginning a substantial minority even in the plantation colonies were free — all slaves were either blacks or Indians. Slavery became the dominant form of relationship between whites and other races and was recognized by law in every colony.
That textbook was published — it startles me to say so, for I do not feel so old — forty years ago.
The 1619 project has enriched and deepened and further refined and explored ideas that were so widely acknowledged by American historians for so long that they were already uncontroversial enough to make their way into a mass-market textbook approved for use in Texas and California and across the rest of the United States forty years ago.
If you didn’t learn about the centrality of race and racism in shaping the entire history of America when you took high school history, perhaps you weren’t paying attention — or, perhaps you chose not to pay attention. The 1619 project is a fruitful return to an issue to which historians have long paid attention, and it is aimed squarely at those who have not been paying attention. A hit dog will holler.
No one likes to be awakened from pleasant daydreams, but daydreams didn’t build this country and daydreams won’t make it a more perfect union.
Get up, read up, and love your country enough to tell the truth about it and hold yourself and your fellow citizens to account.
When I took AP US History in high school, my textbook was The National Experience
Same here (at least I’m pretty sure that was the text). Have to confess I have little recollection of its approach or the “line” it took, so the quote above was interesting. Do I have an excuse for this failure to recall? Not an esp. good excuse, but I am older than L.D. Burnett, which may be a partial excuse of a sort. I took the AP U.S. history course in my last year of high school, 1974-75, and those dates should allow anyone to work out, roughly, the age difference between L.D. and myself, in the extremely unlikely event that anyone is interested in this particular trivial factoid.
This evening I will be on “Drinking With Historians” to discuss the White House History Conference and whatever other issues the hosts or the audience bring up. You can register for the live webinar at the link below. Drinking With Historians
A recording of the event will be posted later on YouTube.
Here is the full episode of Drinking With Historians — historians mentioned/discussed by name include David Blight, Michael Twitty, Heather Cox Richardson, Howard Zinn, Bill McClay, Allen Guelzo, and maybe one or two others. Can’t remember if we dragged in Hofstadter.
https://youtu.be/_9OA9fChXPM