You are able to do that. So is Simin. Pat dismissal, especially on issue this important about which there is, at least, some stipulated agreement, is insufficient. Or else, stop with the “don’t piss over the tree of liberty” stuff (Somin). Brilliant Americans—mostly black—deserve
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I'll just note that a lot of the out-of-the-blocks criticism here is aimed at how the NYT is framing & marketing the series. You should at least be able to understand why people react to that.
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Replying to @baseballcrank @cjane87 and
I understand the meta criticism, ie, I see how framing becomes a part of the culture war, but that can’t replace actual engagement with arguments. And sure—this is a long standing fight between several “master narratives” here and that can be incorporated. But texts must be read.
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I'd be interested to know if you defend this exceptionally broad assertion, which is presented on the thinnest of evidence in the headline essay, and on what basis:pic.twitter.com/WFBABRl3kN
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Replying to @baseballcrank @cjane87 and
It’s complicated to express on twitter, but basically: yes and no. Yes, in that, if you focus on Virginia, the largest and wealthiest colony (wealth derived from slavery), I expected the thesis sentence you highlighted to flow right out of Morgan’s great work, American Slavery
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Replying to @yeselson @baseballcrank and
American Freedom: Virginian planter elites consolidate an ethos of egalitarianism and freedom—but only for white people. Black slaves are demarcated from it, while re-inscribing feared poor whites within a universalism fatally limited by racist hierarchy. This is Morgan’s great
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Replying to @yeselson @baseballcrank and
insight and it’s been picked apart around the edges, but few scholars of early America doubt its resonance. In fact, if anything, Morgan undersold his own argument by refusing to accept that Jefferson, Madison and other slave owning elites were fully conscious of the
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Replying to @yeselson @baseballcrank and
anti-slavery movement at the time of the American Revolution. The Brits weren’t that much more enlightened than were white Americans. Some freed slaves fought with the British, but few fled to Canada. And, sure there were other well known reasons that the colonies chose to fight
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Replying to @yeselson @baseballcrank and
the metropole. But, as Morgan memorably wrote, “Racism made it possible for white Virginians to develop a devotion to the equality that English republicans had declared to be the soul of liberty.”
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Replying to @yeselson @baseballcrank and
Would only add that Morgan ends his book with a series of rhetorical questions—with the modesty of a great scholar providing more questions than answers. But those questions are a lot if the ones that we should still try to answer and that the 1619 project is foregrounding.
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None of that even vaguely resembles the ambitious claim made, and not supported, in the centerpiece essay of the NYT series.
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Replying to @baseballcrank @cjane87 and
Well, I thought the claim would connect to what I explicated. But it didn’t.
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