JF

The 1619 Project brought us a recent and hotly contested set of empirical claims about the centrality of slavery to American prosperity and presented them as foundational to the American story. https://www.chronicle.com/article/shackles-and-dollars/ …pic.twitter.com/IlDI66ZG44

Long before Trump got involved in the 1619 controversy, some of the most eminent historians in America criticized the project in an open letter to the NYT seeking corrections, which the Times refused. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html …pic.twitter.com/w23fQYQY10

The Times eventually did provide a "clarification" to the most glaring error -- but only after a historian consulted during the factchecking process took to Politico to describe how the magazine ignored her objections to a major falsehood in the piece. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-project-new-york-times-mistake-122248 …pic.twitter.com/TCF3zO6ZTQ

Leading scholars of the American founding, civil war, slavery, and Reconstruction were among its critics. One of them was James McPherson author of what one admirer, Ta-Nehisi Coates called: "among the greatest single-volume histories in all of American historiographypic.twitter.com/iYHKlMs6IG