It’s clear he’s immersed himself in that literature, and he’s always wanted to demonstrate he can write any kind of history in any chronology (so also the age of Reagan book close to our time). But focusing on some alleged empirical chasm—as if he is literally fact checking dates
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Replying to @yeselson @NicholasGuyatt
in a manuscript, is really bizarre. Even his use of Du Bois here is just a cheap polemic—Du Bois indeed corrected facts, but he was repetitively using the word to *undermine the credibility of incumbent racist scholars.* By contest, Sean barely corrects any real “facts” here.
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Replying to @yeselson @NicholasGuyatt
And truth is, Vital Center was the best book of its kind—and much to the left of Sean today re its own time—ever written. It had serious ambitious, not this kind of petty “put these hysterical non professionals back in their place” tone.
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Replying to @yeselson @NicholasGuyatt
You know, he’s a brilliant, erudite guy and usually sharp edged polemicist—I knew him long ago at the start of his career. Several books really are essential parts of the historiography, perhaps. But he’s trying to find a sweet spot that turns out to be rancid, rather than sweet.
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Replying to @yeselson @NicholasGuyatt
Basically agree on all this thread. And Sean's career arc is remarkable. I mean, Chants Democratic is an incredibly important book. I agree on the accusation of Ahabism, though I do think his critics here undermine themselves by digging on the causes of the rev argument.
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Replying to @joshtpm @NicholasGuyatt
Yes—when I worked in his dads store he would give me chapters of the dissertation that became Chants to read—it’s, essentially, an intellectual history of the antebellum northern WWC, and essential re Ariana republicanism.
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And agree—the stray remark by NHJ is now a totemic signifier to either obsessively attack or defend. Her editor failed her there—should have asked her for elaboration/historiography at that point. But Wilentz claiming a factual problem is just crap too. It’s an argument!
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Replying to @yeselson @NicholasGuyatt
Yeah, I mean, to me it's weak enough to approach a factual issue. But the bigger point is that I wish it weren't complicating this exchange. Because the other points are interpretive and obvs not just credentialed historians get to discuss American history. In a twitter ...
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This is a crucial point. In general I absolutely want academic historians to be addressing broader public debates about things like racism. But too often Wilentz tries to pull rank. I don't Schlesinger, by comparison, ever did that.
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Yeah—this is an interesting point and, I think, in large part it’s because of Russell Jacoby’s idea about the professionalization of academia in mid-late 20th c.—ASjr was fleeting that space; Wilentz, by contrast, is defending the guild.
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There's something to that, although I have to say most of the academic historian who have addressed 1619 either in criticism or support have made productive comments whether. As you mentioned, Oakes. Wilentz has been uniquely unproductive.
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Fair—indeed, as I said, given the space he had and the time devoted, I’m kind of shocked that this essay was so unimpressive.
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What I don’t get is why they’ve been so ungenerous; it’s not as if all conventional history texts are going to, next term, be removed from college bookstores, to be replaced by
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End of conversation
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