JF

I don't presume to be able to judge whether these eminent figures are right in their assessment of the 1619 Project -- I'm calling attention to the fact of their criticisms, which appeared in relatively obscure venues.

They have as much standing as any people alive to judge the project which doesn't mean that their judgments are necessarily dispositive in themselves. But they deserve to be considered.

More on McPherson. Here is Ta-Nehisi Coates calling McPherson’s history of the civil war “arguably among the greatest single-volume histories in all of American historiography.”https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1197764685275320321?s=21 …

So McPherson responds with some stuff that sounds like a lot of standard white guy talking points. But he’s not a standard white guy — he’s a preeminent historian. So he’s coming at this not with the usual bro science but with a lifetime of scholarship.