One of my early critiques of the anti-1619 literature from the older generation of tenured historians wasn't that the 1619 Project is sacrosanct -- it very clearly isn't -- but the tone and stridency of their critiques was very clearly going to be weaponized by the right.
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And the same is very much true of Sweet's essay, which is now being seized upon by such diverse figures as Ph*l M*gn*ss and R*ch*rd Sp*nc*r as brave truth-telling shouted down by the legions of woke historians.
In short, a cudgel to delegitimize the discipline.
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And all of this is very much predictable!
What I find so incredibly frustrating is that there's a particular subset of tenured historians who seem willfully blind to the predictable political consequences of their public interventions.
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This is why the Sweet blog post, in particular, was so bad.
Because he's not just another tenured historian. He's the president of the American Historical Association!
In a meaningful way he represents *us* as a discipline.
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Quite frankly, you shouldn't be the president of a major scholarly association if you don't understand the inherent political implications of your public statements and their likely consequences.
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It’s a good question. But I do think that we’re talking about two discrete political moments here. I was in high school in 2004, so I have a somewhat hazier memory of things, but I don’t recall there being a wave of teacher purges launched in direct response to your Zinn critique
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Isn’t that precisely the problem Sweet was trying to identify? If you are unable to critique research/scholarship in your profession because doing so would be a political victory for odious people, then you’ve forfeited any right to call yourself a discipline
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That’s another good question! But—and this is something that almost none of us have talked about since Sweet’s essay was published—it’s not a problem *unique* to history or even the social sciences.
Psychology has its own version of this problem. So does environmental science.
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So historians should self-police because someone could misuse or appropriate their criticism? Isn’t that suppressing knowledge?
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I'm getting a *teensy* bit irritated by the willful misconstruing of what I said -- you know, the whole "the 1619 Project is not sacrosanct" bit but that the tenor of the initial wave of critiques had a predictable political outcome.
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