In San Francisco, Virus is Contained but Schools Are Still Closed

[Gene C]

Thanks Rob...based upon what I have read about the 1619 Project, I would not be in a hurry to make that a significant reason to make a major change in the teaching of history in our public schools.

[David Lockmiller]

Daily Mail

CNN is accused of trying to cancel Abraham Lincoln: Network slammed for asking if president who fought Civil War to abolish slavery would believe in BLM.

• The analysis 'Did black lives matter to Abraham Lincoln? It's complicated' was published on Sunday to coincide with a documentary about the former president
• It questions Lincoln's stance on race and his attitudes towards black people and Native Americans
• Some have sharply criticised the feature, accusing CNN of producing 'clickbait conspiracy theories' and slamming revisionist history focused on Lincoln

But questions around Lincoln's views on race have 'intensified over the years,' the article said, noting a growing interest among historians, activists and politicians in how Lincoln regarded black people and Native Americans.

The article pointed to protesters in Portland vandalizing a statue of Lincoln and a San Francisco school named after him changing its name.

Dan Gainor, vice president of the Media Research Center, accused CNN of attempting to rewrite history.

'This isn't just historical revisionism. This is a complete rewrite of history by radicals who want to embrace the anti-American lunacy of The New York Times 1619 Project,' Gainor told Fox News, referring to a long-form journalism project that describes itself as aiming to 'reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States' national narrative.'

[Rob Wick]

Quote:Thanks Rob...based upon what I have read about the 1619 Project, I would not be in a hurry to make that a significant reason to make a major change in the teaching of history in our public schools.

Gene,

I say this with the utmost respect for you, but what you, or I, or anyone else, thinks about it is irrelevant. Just because one group doesn't like the way history is presented doesn't make it wrong, no more than one liking the way it's presented makes it right.

And David, given that the Media Research Center is a right-wing group, I will not give their "critique" any credence when it comes to their views on CNN. I would reserve judgement on the issue of Lincoln's feelings about race.

Best
Rob

[Gene C]

Rob,

Can't say I agree with you. Your comment opens the door for some deep philosophical issues. Then again, maybe it doesn't.
Upon further review of this topic, it's going to take some further review.

This reminds me of a song title, Anything Goes sung by Jo Stafford - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXhrmYH0Ul4

[Rob Wick]

Just remember this Gene. The act of censorship, or trying to silence something you disagree with, is far worse than the actual item that is being censored. Why? Because if that can be censored, so to can anything you believe.

Best
Rob

[Gene C]

With free speech, freedom of the press, comes responsibility.
(you probably figured I'd say something like that)

I see the lack of responsibility and damaging consequences with the 1619 Project being taught in public schools, not censorship.

[David Lockmiller]

(03-19-2021 09:08 AM)Gene C Wrote:  With free speech, freedom of the press, comes responsibility.
(you probably figured I'd say something like that)

I see the lack of responsibility and damaging consequences with the 1619 Project being taught in public schools, not censorship.

I agree with you, Gene. Well said!

[Rob Wick]

Quote:I see the lack of responsibility and damaging consequences with the 1619 Project being taught in public schools, not censorship.

Sorry Gene, but ignorance is always far more corrosive to the values of a free society than any one idea, no matter how much you are against it.

Please tell me what one concrete example of danger in exposing young people to the 1619 Project would be.

Best
Rob

[David Lockmiller]

(03-19-2021 10:54 AM)Rob Wick Wrote:  

Quote:I see the lack of responsibility and damaging consequences with the 1619 Project being taught in public schools, not censorship.

Sorry Gene, but ignorance is always far more corrosive to the values of a free society than any one idea, no matter how much you are against it.

Please tell me what one concrete example of danger in exposing young people to the 1619 Project would be.

Best
Rob

False history.

Did not very many prominent American historians object to Nikole Hannah-Jones 1619 Project work for this reason?

[Rob Wick]

"False history" is a pejorative you believe. Historians are a bit more nuanced in their criticism.

Besides, I know your opinion. I'm asking Gene.

Best
Rob

[David Lockmiller]

(03-19-2021 11:56 AM)Rob Wick Wrote:  "False history" is a pejorative you believe. Historians are a bit more nuanced in their criticism.

Besides, I know your opinion. I'm asking Gene.

Best
Rob

The prominent American historians were not "nuanced" in their criticism of the 1619 Project; they were precise.

David

[Rob Wick]

I really don't understand your fascination with the prominence of a historian. Prominence doesn't immediately infer being correct. Charles Beard was one of the most prominent of the 20th century historians yet I doubt you can find very many who give his economic theories credence. William Dunning was just as prominent at the turn of the century, yet no one accepts his race-based theories on Reconstruction.

Prominence does not automatically make one correct.

Best
Rob

[RobertLC]

I also agree with Gene!

While I am only slightly familiar with specifics of the 1619 Project, I did read an excellent critique of the project by Phillip W. Magnuss. Magnuss writes, “At the same time, however, certain 1619 Project essayists infused … with a heavy stream of ideological advocacy. Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones announced this political intention openly, pairing progressive activism with the initiative’s stated educational purposes.”

I don’t know if teaching progressive activism can promote facts above all else. I think not. Activism usually takes over. I’m reminded of a quote that was first attributed to Bernard Baruch by the Associated Press in 1946 and has since been slightly modified and used by numerous people. The modern-day version goes something like this, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

It seems to me that the problem arises when activism fuses with facts. How do we know what are the real facts and what is someone’s opinion? Teaching a history curriculum that is heavy in progressive activism doesn’t seem to be the best way to expose students to actual and necessary facts. Perhaps it is more like teaching an ideology than teaching history.

Bob

[David Lockmiller]

From: “Abraham Lincoln and the Dakota War in Academic and Popular Literature” by Larry D. Mansch

A military commission of five officers was established to summarily try the Indians who had participated in the uprising. Working at breakneck speed, in just five weeks the commission conducted 392 trials, sometimes as many as forty per day. A presumption of guilt applied at the trials; that is, it was assumed that each warrior had participated in the uprising and would be punished. No legal counsel was provided for the accused. While each defendant was allowed to make a statement on his own behalf, he was not permitted to call witnesses. Then prosecution witnesses were called—usually eyewitnesses who testified that they had seen the defendant fire a weapon, kill a settler, or commit an atrocity. One key witness, a mixed-blood man named Godfrey, testified against over fifty individuals.

A total of 303 Dakota men were found guilty and sentenced to hang. Public sentiment in Minnesota overwhelmingly approved the verdicts, and most residents demanded that the executions quickly take place.

Before the death sentences could be carried out, however, President Lincoln had to review the trial records, as mandated by federal law.

Because the vast majority of scholars, historians, and authors who have examined Lincoln’s presidency have focused on the Civil War, many have completely ignored the events in Minnesota or have, at best, given them only summary treatment. Stephen B. Oates’ brief treatment of the subject in his With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln is typical. Oates writes only that “Lincoln had himself intervened in the Minnesota Indian War of 1862 and had prevented vengeful whites from executing a number of innocent Sioux.

There are, however, exceptions to these summary treatments, and a notable divergence in how different categories of authors have treated Lincoln’s role in the Dakota War. Writers of mainstream books and articles, on the whole, have approved of Lincoln’s actions. Law review article writers and authors offering Native perspectives have been much more likely to be critical.

David Donald’s seminal Lincoln, the 1996 Lincoln Prize winner, offers a brief but sympathetic view of Lincoln’s actions during the Dakota War. . . . Donald writes that Lincoln “refused to be stampeded” by those who called for vengeance against the Minnesota Indians.

The number of Lincoln Prize winners that do not include any mention of the Dakota War is surprising. The 2012 winner, Elizabeth D. Leonard’s Lincoln’s Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky, provides a good example. Doris Kearns Goodwin, who won both the 2006 Lincoln Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, does not mention the Minnesota episode. Other notable works that exclude the Dakota War include James McPherson’s Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief and Allen C. Guelzo’s Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President.

A second category of books includes three that deal more specifically with Lincoln and Native Americans. The standard work in this category is David Nichols’ Lincoln and the Indians: Civil War Politics and Policies. It remains the only full-length book on the Lincoln Administration’s policies regarding Native Americans and is regularly cited by other writers. . . . [T]he third chapter, “Lincoln and the Sioux Execution: ‘I Could Not Afford to Hang Men for Votes,’” examines Lincoln’s review of the trials and his decision regarding the appropriate punishment.

In this third chapter Nichols, like Burlingame, focuses on the intense political pressure Lincoln faced to uphold the executions of all those Dakota found guilty. Nichols argues, however, that Indian missionary Stephen Riggs and Episcopal Bishop Henry Whipple influenced Lincoln to act with compassion rather than vengeance. Riggs, Nichols writes, was particularly persuasive in his pleas for flexibility and mercy. In reaching his final determination, Nichols describes Lincoln as “haunted,” “troubled,” “reluctant,” and finally “pragmatic.” He concludes that Lincoln’s actions, in balancing public sentiment against a sense of justice and equity, “were relatively humanitarian.”

While Nichols’ conclusion is almost entirely sympathetic to Lincoln, he does offer one refreshing perspective not found in other sources: while Lincoln did not satisfy the demands of outraged Minnesotans, he did not completely ignore them, either. Lincoln supported, and then signed, legislation that removed the Dakota from Minnesota, and approved the payment of $2 million in reparations to the uprising’s victims as “reasonable compensation for the depredations committed.”

In 2012, Minnesota native and historian Scott W. Berg published 38 Nooses: Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier’s End. . . . The book sets forth the pressures Lincoln felt to uphold the convictions and approve the executions, but does not, however, shed new light on his struggle to reach a just decision. Berg concludes that Lincoln - ever the lawyer - acted in a cool and detached manner in sanctioning the thirty-eight executions. Berg’s Lincoln wisely distanced himself from emotion. He approved executions “where he felt reasonable moral standards had been violated and reasonable legal standards, according to the strictures of the day, upheld.” Berg downplays any empathy or compassion Lincoln may have felt; rather, he writes that “on the question of war and emancipation, Lincoln lost sleep, but not so on the many death sentences he commuted or confirmed.”

The most recent book devoted to the Dakota War is Gustav Niebuhr’s Lincoln’s Bishop: A President, a Priest, and the Fate of 300 Dakota Sioux Warriors. Niebuhr, a professor of journalism at Syracuse University who specializes in religious commentary, examines the life and work of Henry Whipple, Bishop of Minnesota’s Episcopal Church in the 1860s, who worked tirelessly to convince Lincoln – and Congress – that the Indian system was unfair and badly in need of reform. Niebuhr is sympathetic to Whipple’s task. He offers a unique, and welcome, perspective in regards to Whipple’s relentless lobbying efforts on behalf of the Minnesota Dakota, a people with whom he had spent three years evangelizing and converting to Christianity.

Along with Henry Riggs, Whipple met personally with Lincoln on several occasions and wrote a series of essays, published in Minnesota newspapers, urging fair treatment for the Dakota. In the end, Niebuhr convincingly argues that Whipple’s personal pleas to Lincoln to act out of compassion and mercy for an oppressed people had the desired effect. Niebuhr notes that Whipple was, like Lincoln, strongly pro-Union and anti-slavery. Perhaps more important, the bishop and the President shared a firm “appreciation of God’s sovereignty.” Mistreatment of Native Americans, Whipple argued, was akin to slavery, and as such was subject to God’s terrible judgment. In Niebuhr’s examination, Lincoln’s actions represent the combination of the godly and the good.

A third category that can be examined includes books and articles specifically devoted to the Dakota War. Four books fall into this category: Kenneth Carley’s The Sioux Uprising of 1862; Michael Clodfelter’s The Dakota War: The United States Army Versus the Sioux, 1862-1865; Hank Cox’s Lincoln and the Sioux Uprising of 1862; and Duane Schultz’s Over the Earth I Come: The Great Sioux Uprising of 1862.

Each book presents the dilemma Lincoln faced: should he yield to public and political pressure and uphold the executions of 300 Dakota, or should he follow his conscience and personal sense of justice? Each author concludes that Lincoln reached a fair compromise, and each expresses admiration that Lincoln managed to take time out from the overwhelming complexities of the Civil War to personally attend to the situation in Minnesota. None of these books are scholarly; that is, they are not thoroughly researched and utilize only a few basic sources.

Several mainstream articles address Lincoln’s actions in the Dakota War. Almost all portray Lincoln in a sensitive, almost heroic light, as a fair-minded man who saw through the politics and acted not with vengeance, but with compassion. Typical of this vanilla-flavored writing is Daniel W. Homstad’s “Lincoln’s Agonizing Decision,” published in the December 2001 issue of American History. More nuanced, but ultimately just as approving, is historian Ron Soodalter’s article “Lincoln and the Sioux,” which appeared in The New York Times in August 2012. Soodalter’s article explores no new ground, but places the Indian uprising in Minnesota squarely in a Civil War context. Soodalter writes that “given the mood of the country” in 1862, the wonder of the event is that Lincoln “took the time away from a war that was going badly – and threatened the very existence of our nation – to examine one at a time the cases of more than 300 Sioux, and to spare the lives of all but 38 of them.”

[Gene C]

As I have stated before, my knowledge of Project 1619 is limited. I am basing my comments on what others in the news media have said about it, both good and bad.

The Project 1619 is about excuses.
What about the migrate labor and child labor that was taken advantage of to build up the economy in the Northern States?
Is that addressed in Project 1619?

In any generation, in any country, different groups of people have been discriminated against, taken advantage of, etc.
Life is not Fair. But in this country there are more opportunities to overcome that. Otherwise why do we have problems with so many people trying to get into this country. You don't see large numbers of those claiming they are discriminated against lining up to leave.
Our history as a country has given examples of how to overcome adversity. Lincoln is a perfect example

The purpose of education is not to show how you have been disadvantaged. It is to help people learn how to build themselves up and those around them.
It appears that many of our leaders in public education have lost site of that basic goal.
Project 1619 may do a fine job of showing how far the black community has come since 1619. But it doesn't seem do that in a positive, encouraging way. It doesn't say "look how far we've come, look at those who cared and have helped us without any expectation of reward, and how far we can go when we properly apply ourselves." It appears instead to promote the concept of "victimhood"

"Unfortunately, in a swing to the opposite side, victimhood has now become a protected class in our society, a trend fed by well-intended, but potentially harmful, therapists, activists, and daytime talk shows.' ... We must instead encourage people in a way that supports their ability to move forward in their lives, without needing emotional bodyguards to protect them from the unpreventable pains of life. To do less is disrespectful of them, and it discounts the strength they have within. It treats victims as though they are less than, less than capable, less than independent, and less than whole. It treats victims as though their victimization is the most important thing about them."- from Psychology Today, the Culture of Victimhood, June 24, 2018) - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...victimhood

That's the harm Project 1619 does.