The 1619 Project (in the New York Times Magazine)

[David Lockmiller]

(05-09-2020 02:23 PM)David Lockmiller Wrote:  Now, I guess that we on the Lincoln Discussion Symposium will just have to wait to see when "the other shoe will drop."

If anyone was wondering what "the other shoe to drop" is, Professor Alan Guelzo explained the meaning of this term as it applies to The 1619 Project in the last paragraph (especially the final sentence) of an opinion piece that he wrote for the Wall Street Journal last week.

‘The 1619 Project’ Tells a False Story About Capitalism, Too
Writing in 1854, George Fitzhugh described slavery as ‘a beautiful example of communism.’
By Allen C. Guelzo
Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2020

The awarding of a Pulitzer Prize for commentary to the New York Times magazine’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of “The 1619 Project” will serve as an additional selling point as the Times and the Pulitzer Center (unaffiliated with the prize) seek to market their 1619 Project Curriculum. It’s hard not to see the prize as an attempt to deflect the criticisms the paper has taken from historians across the country.

Jake Silverstein, the magazine’s editor, waved away those objections as differences of “interpretation and intention, not fact” in a letter responding to a dozen concerned historians, including me. Historians do argue over interpretations, but parts of the 1619 Project are sloppy, at best, with the facts. Consider the essay on capitalism by sociologist Matthew Desmond. . . .

[A]ttempting to replace the nation’s ideals with a false and destructive story is no way to do history. The 1619 Project can wave its Pulitzer as credibility insurance, but credibility isn’t the same as truth. Pulitzers have been handed out before—to the Times’s Walter Duranty and the Washington Post’s Janet Cooke—only to collapse under the weight of falsehood.

Mr. Guelzo is a senior research scholar at Princeton University and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation