Welcome to issue #2 of “Primary Source: An American History Newsletter.” For background on the newsletter, click here.
I picked an exciting time to start a newsletter, it turns out. I had been mulling it over for a while, and I ended up publishing the first issue between a huge tornado devastating Nashville (where I live) and the economic fallout and large-scale cancellations due to COVID-19. The last two weeks have been LONG.
With that, you might have missed some recent history news, or you might be looking for something to read this week. Here’s some highlights and commentary from the world of American history this week.
Highlights
Leslie M. Harris, “I helped fact-check the 1619 Project. The Times ignored me.” Politico.
“Not Additive, but Transformative: Women and Gender in the Journal of American History,” Organization of American Historians.
“Museums: A Special Report,” New York Times.
Sharon Kay Penman, “Historical Novelists Owe the Truth to Readers — and to History,” History News Network.
Victoria Macchi, “Confederate Slave Payrolls Shed Light on Lives of 19th-Century African American Families,” National Archives.
Commentary
The New York Times revises the 1619 Project
Earlier this week, the New York Times decided to revise a piece of the 1619 Project’s lead essay, by Nikole Hannah-Jones. One of the most controversial arguments in the essay (which has in-effect come to stand in for the project as a whole) is that American colonists declared their independence from Great Britain to protect the institution of slavery. The revision makes clear that while that was a motivation for some colonists, it was not true for all. The sentence in question now reads:
Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. [emphasis mine]
The revision is an important public demonstration of the back and forth nature of writing history, though now that the project has become a culture war lightning rod, it may be too little too late.
A few days before the revision announcement, historian Leslie M. Harris wrote in Politico that she shared her misgivings about the original claim with the Times from the beginning—“Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war”— but they declined to heed her advice. She shares that, while she agreed with the goals and major thrust of the project, she was concerned about the claim linking the Revolution with the protection of slavery for fear of how it would reflect on the project as a whole. In her words:
Overall, the 1619 Project is a much-needed corrective to the blindly celebratory histories that once dominated our understanding of the past—histories that wrongly suggested racism and slavery were not a central part of U.S. history. I was concerned that critics would use the overstated claim to discredit the entire undertaking. So far, that’s exactly what has happened.
Harris goes on to offer one of the most well-balanced and thorough assessments of the virtues and shortcomings of the essay, the project as a whole, and the arguments of its prominent critics. The essay feels to me like the final word (at least for now) in the ongoing back-and-forth about the merits of the project. She notes that ,“The 1619 Project, in its claim that the Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery, doesn’t do justice to” the complex history of slavery and freedom in colonial North America. Neither, she goes on to say, do some of the project’s most prominent critics, namely Gordon Wood, Sean Wilentz, and the other historians who submitted a critical letter to the New York Times setting off a months-long online conversation. Harris argues Wood, Wilentz, and others “underrepresent the centrality of slavery and African Americans to America’s history.” Harris concludes by noting that, thanks to the work of a diverse collection of scholars and journalists in recent years:
we have more detailed knowledge of the ways in which black people fought for freedom before, during and after the Revolutionary era—and how, as the 1619 Project rightly points out, they challenged the patriots to live up to their own ideals of freedom for all—ideals that only fully began to be realized at the close of the Civil War, and have still not been fulfilled.
What Harris acknowledges, and what the controversies around the 1619 Project make clear, is that while the centrality of race and slavery to the main narrative thread of American history is well-established among most scholars at this point, much of the public does not yet think about American history in that way. Responses by politically conservative outlets assailing the integrity of the project and its contributors make that abundantly clear. Six years out from the nation’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the debate over the past six months should inform the approach of historians interested in expanding the narrative we share with the public for that commemoration.
The many responses to the 1619 Project (there’s a thread of them here by historian Joshua Rothman) have also helped pull back the curtain on the process of historical debate for a wider audience. Although historians obviously understand that history is in a process of being constantly revised and re-written, the controversy around Hannah-Jones’s essay has allowed the public to view that process as it unfolded over the last six months. As Karin Wulf, historian and director of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, noted on Twitter in response to the essay revision, historians are used to viewing this back and forth (even if it typically occurs much more slowly), but it doesn’t usually play in major newspapers. Wulf also moderated a recent New York Times event discussing the project with historians Annette Gordon-Reed, Elijah H. Gould, Gerald Horne, and Alan Taylor.
She notes in her thread that what did work was honest communication and engagement in the service of a product that could better inform and serve the public about the history of race and slavery in America.
The 1619 project was a groundbreaking work of public history. As efforts to connect historians and journalists grow (the OAH has a database dedicated to building those connections, and a pilot project at the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest is helping connect historians and journalists in Philadelphia) I hope we’ll see more collaboration between historians, journalists, and the public as we all think about the past and why it matters.
“Not Additive, but Transformative:” Women’s History Month at the Journal of American History
To commemorate both Women’s History Month and the centennial of the passage of the nineteenth amendment, the Journal of American History has compiled an index of all of the articles about women’s history since its inception in 1914. Along with the index, they’ve published a special online issue of the journal, edited by historian Katherine Turk, made up of selected articles about women and gender history that have appeared in the JAH. Titled “Not Additive, but Transformative: Women and Gender in the Journal of American History,” the issue charts changes in the treatment of women and gender as subjects for historical analysis as well as changes in the work of women as historians. In her introductory essay, Turk notes that historians (and women historians in particular) “are still working to prove that fully integrating women and gender into the main body of knowledge is not merely additive, but transformative.” Like the above discussion for race and slavery, there’s still work to be done to ensure these more inclusive ways of conceiving of the American past are fully integrated into the historical narrative for mainstream audiences. You can find the announcement, along with links to the index and issue, here.
History museums connecting past and present profiled in the New York Times.
The New York Times has published another “Museums special section,” with some great profiles of history museums using the past to help audiences better understand the present. Although the issue focuses primarily on the art world (an ongoing shortcoming of museum reporting, considering well over 50 percent of the nation’s museums are history institutions), there are some great stories about trends in the history field. One article highlights the work of the Rokeby Museum in Vermont—a historic site and museum that primarily interprets American antislavery, abolitionism, an the Underground Railroad—to draw explicit connections between historical social movements and the modern fight for social justice in the U.S. Another highlights the work of institutions like the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and Museum of Chinese in America to interpret the country’s immigration history in a way that helps audiences better understand present-day conversations and challenges. In the American Historical Organization’s Perspectives magazine, I wrote about how this widespread emphasis on relevance and inclusiveness at the nation’s historical organizations seem to be driving an increase in visitation over the past several years.
“Historical Novelists Owe the Truth to Readers — and to History”
Over at History News Network, historical novelist Sharon Kay Penman writes about historical fiction writers’ obligation to their audiences to ground their work in the truth. “Historical novelists need to adhere to the known facts,” says Penman, “whether they are writing of a battle, a rebellion, or the lives of the men and women caught up in these events.” She goes on to note the importance of an “Author’s Note” in works of historical fiction to explain to readers where liberties were taken and why. Much of her insistence on adhering to the historical record as closely as possible, even in works of fiction, owe to the fact that historical novels represent an important dimension of public engagement with history.
But novelists have learned that our books can reach a wider audience than many academics can, that we can win converts to the cause—the belief that history should be an essential element in any school curriculum, as it once was. It helps us understand our place in the universe and it teaches us the importance of context, that we are united in our common humanity and there is nothing new under the sun.
Though the approaches and methods of historians and novelists differ in a million different ways, both groups should take the work of the other seriously to help advance a wider appreciation of the past.
National Archives digitizes Confederate slave payrolls
Earlier this month, the National Archives announced that thousands of pages of Confederate slave payroll documents have been digitized and made available to researchers. These remarkable documents reveal the names (and occasionally other details) of the enslaved men and women hired out to, and forced to work for, the Confederate military effort during the Civil War. The hiring out of enslaved people (with payments going to enslavers, not the enslaved individual performing the work) existed for much of slavery’s history in North America (and elsewhere), particularly in the urban South. Documentation for such arrangements can be hard to track down, so these documents are truly a treasure. They also provide a record of individual enslaved people’s names (which were rarely listed in other documents like the decennial census or tax rolls) and how much their enslavers were paid for work, offering new insight into the slave system during the final years before the end of the war and abolition. Following the publication last year of historian Kevin M. Levin’s Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth—an attempt to lay to rest once and for all the fiction that African Americans willingly served in the Confederate army—the digitization of these Confederate slave payrolls may hopefully help reveal for a wider swath of researchers and the public the nature of African American service to the Confederacy.
That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed this roundup and commentary, please share it!
I’m not sure yet if the next issue will be next Monday or in two weeks, but I’ll keep refining and improving each one. If you have ideas of ways to improve this newsletter, or different items you’d like to see included, please get in touch! If you haven’t already, subscribe to get each issue sent straight to your inbox.