The 1619 Project, led by Nikole Hannah-Jones as part of a NY Times project now being spread in K-12 schools, has come under withering criticism by genuine historians who care about, you know, history. Jones and the Times were forced to walk back the central claims in the project.
We had an event devoted to exposing the malfeasance and malpractice of The 1619 Project, VIDEO: Rescuing History and Education From The 1619 Project
In a moment of remarkable candor, Hannah-Jones admitted that the 1619 Project wasn’t even intended to be a history. As she admitted in a now deleted Twitter thread, the 1619 Project was an effort in narrative creation.
James H. Sweet is a history professor at U. Wisconsin-Madison, and President of the American Historical Association (AHA). Sweet’s scholarly specialty is slavery and the African experience:
Sweet is the author of two prize-winning books, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (2003) and Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (2011). His books have won various prizes including the Wesley Logan Prize for Best Book in African Diaspora History, American Historical Association (2004), James A. Rawley Prize for Best Book in Atlantic History, American Historical Association (2012), and the Frederick Douglass Prize for Best Non-Fiction Book on Slavery, Resistance, and/or Abolition, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University (2012). His scholarly articles have appeared in William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of African History, The American Historical Review, The Americas, Slavery and Abolition, and Journal of Caribbean Studies.
He has lectured and spoken extensively on the topic:
James H. Sweet has been interviewed and featured in documentaries and news programming including the New Books Network, the PBS series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and a PBS interview on Africans in the Americas. He also appeared in an American Historical Association video, “Teaching with Integrity: Historians Speak.” The World History Project created a graphic biography based on the research for his second book, Domingos Álvares: African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World.
Sweet was as well-positioned as anyone to critique the 1619 Project.
Sweet posted an article on the AHA website “From The President,” in what appears to be the type of monthly statement presidents of associations typically give. The topic of his article was IS HISTORY HISTORY? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present (archive), that makes the point that is obvious to anyone paying attention, that so much of what passes as historical analysis is skewed to support present political views. This is familiar to anyone who has studied and studied in the former Soviet Union (like me) or who is on a campus in the United States circa this century, where almost everything is skewed to support the current thing.
Here’s an exerpt from Sweet’s very reasonable article, in which he uses the 1619 Project as an example of the concern over “presentism”:
Twenty years ago, in these pages, Lynn Hunt argued “against presentism.” She lamented historians’ declining interest in topics prior to the 20th century, as well as our increasing tendency to interpret the past through the lens of the present. Hunt warned that this rising presentism threatened to “put us out of business as historians.” If history was little more than “short-term . . . identity politics defined by present concerns,” wouldn’t students be better served by taking degrees in sociology, political science, or ethnic studies instead?* * *In many places, history suffuses everyday life as presentism; America is no exception. We suffer from an overabundance of history, not as method or analysis, but as anachronistic data points for the articulation of competing politics. The consequences of this new history are everywhere. I traveled to Ghana for two months this summer to research and write, and my first assignment was a critical response to The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story for a forthcoming forum in the American Historical Review. Whether or not historians believe that there is anything new in the New York Times project created by Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project is a best-selling book that sits at the center of current controversies over how to teach American history. As journalism, the project is powerful and effective, but is it history?When I first read the newspaper series that preceded the book, I thought of it as a synthesis of a tradition of Black nationalist historiography dating to the 19th century with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent call for reparations. The project spoke to the political moment, but I never thought of it primarily as a work of history…. At each of these junctures, history was a zero-sum game of heroes and villains viewed through the prism of contemporary racial identity. It was not an analysis of people’s ideas in their own time, nor a process of change over time….Yet as a historian of Africa and the African diaspora, I am troubled by the historical erasures and narrow politics that these narratives convey. Less than one percent of the Africans passing through Elmina arrived in North America. The vast majority went to Brazil and the Caribbean. Should the guide’s story differ for a tour with no African Americans? Likewise, would The 1619 Project tell a different history if it took into consideration that the shipboard kin of Jamestown’s “20. and odd” Africans also went to Mexico, Jamaica, and Bermuda? These are questions of historical interpretation, but present-day political ones follow: Do efforts to claim a usable African American past reify elements of American hegemony and exceptionalism such narratives aim to dismantle? …When we foreshorten or shape history to justify rather than inform contemporary political positions, we not only undermine the discipline but threaten its very integrity.
Incredibly on point, echoing criticisms others have made, and reflecting what Hannah-Jones admitted in her now-deleted tweets.
Speaking some truth that is not in sync with the prevailing campus and academic dogma on race and racism is dangerous. As so many people, some of whom we know, have found out. Sweet found out.
There was an aggressive backlash. Not all of it is public, though there are some tweets reflecting the claim that a white man like Sweet is just jealous of a black woman like Hannah-Jones gaining fame (archive)
It must have been intense in Sweet’s inbox and in AHA forums, because Sweet issued a groveling apology appended above his original article. Here is the confession of sin in full (emphasis added):
AUTHOR’S NOTE (AUG 19, 2022)My September Perspectives on History column has generated anger and dismay among many of our colleagues and members. I take full responsibility that it did not convey what I intended and for the harm that it has caused. I had hoped to open a conversation on how we “do” history in our current politically charged environment. Instead, I foreclosed this conversation for many members, causing harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association.A president’s monthly column, one of the privileges of the elected office, provides a megaphone to the membership and the discipline. The views and opinions expressed in that column are not those of the Association. If my ham-fisted attempt at provocation has proven anything, it is that the AHA membership is as vocal and robust as ever. If anyone has criticisms that they have been reluctant or unable to post publicly, please feel free to contact me directly.I sincerely regret the way I have alienated some of my Black colleagues and friends. I am deeply sorry. In my clumsy efforts to draw attention to methodological flaws in teleological presentism, I left the impression that questions posed from absence, grief, memory, and resilience somehow matter less than those posed from positions of power. This absolutely is not true. It wasn’t my intention to leave that impression, but my provocation completely missed the mark.Once again, I apologize for the damage I have caused to my fellow historians, the discipline, and the AHA. I hope to redeem myself in future conversations with you all. I’m listening and learning.
The AHA, which now has locked its Twitter account, tweeted out the apology:
There apparently was substantial criticism of AHA for the apology, so AHA locked its account:
This is just another example of how far academia has fallen. False confessions extracted from people who dared speak truth to the power that runs campuses, a power not very interested in the truth, but as Hannah-Jones admitted, seeks to frame narratives.
Academia is gone. It can’t be reformed from within. But you knew that.
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