Dollars to doughnuts they don't mention how white (Celtic) slaves were the America's FIRST slaves. Nor that they were slaves that were bought, sold, killed, mated, beaten etc, until the earlier part of the 1800's. It doesn't fit in with their victimization and hate whitey rhetoric.

I'd also wager that they fail to include the FACT that less them 2% of pre-Civil war Americans owned slaves. Some historians push that number up to 4%. Even so, that would mean that 96% + are being blamed for slavery. Now, add to this the FACT that the largest European immigration to this country happened AFTER the Civil war (millions)and you'll realize that over 99% of white Americans have not ever owned slaves, nor did their ancestors. Did you hear that in school??

PS: My Mother, whose family immigrated here from France in 1902 picked cotton (along with her mother and father) on a share cropper's farm in southern Missouri. No privilege there. Just doing work to eat..

______

By Shelby Talcott

Multiple historians have slammed the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which aims to “reframe” American history.

The historians noted they were not consulted about the project, and each provided historical evidence combating the NYT’s claims.

This project has already made its way into the public school curriculum.

Multiple historians have slammed The New York Times’ “1619 Project” as others are pushing for it to continue being added into public school curriculum, calling the reframing of history false and disturbing.

The “1619 Project” is made up of multiple stories and poems about racism and slavery. It suggests America’s “true founding” was when the first slaves arrived in 1619 and “aims to reframe the country’s history.” Written by journalists and opinion writers, the project has already received criticism from many conservatives.

Historian and Brown University professor Gordon Wood called the project “wrong in so many ways” in an interview with World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) Nov. 28.

“I had no warning about this. … I was surprised, as many other people were, by the scope of this thing, especially since it’s going to become the basis for high school education and has the authority of the New York Times behind it, and yet it is so wrong in so many ways,” Wood said in the interview.

The “1619 Project” has already been implemented into some public schools around the country, like Chicago, and has lesson plans available for schools to begin teaching its student this reframed history. The Pulitzer Center Education Resources and Programs, who provides lesson plans for the “1619 Project,” did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Wood said that no one approached him about the project and that “none of the leading scholars of the whole period from the Revolution to the Civil War” appeared to have been consulted either. Wood continues on to provide factual evidence that negates multiple points made in the NYT’s project.

American Civil War historian and Pulitzer Prize winner James M. McPherson was also interviewed by WSWS Nov. 14, and he called the project lacking in “context and perspective.” Like Wood, McPherson was never made aware of the project until it came out.

“Because this is a subject I’ve long been interested in I sat down and started to read some of the essays,” McPherson said. “I’d say that, almost from the outset, I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery, which was clearly, obviously, not an exclusively American institution, but existed throughout history.”

“And I was a little bit unhappy with the idea that people who did not have a good knowledge of the subject would be influenced by this and would then have a biased or narrow view.”

McPherson also countered some of the NYT’s claims throughout the project. He, like Wood, said during the interview that he was never approached by the publication. He added that lead writer of the “1619 Project” Nikole Hannah-Jones’s claim that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country” did not “make much sense” to him.

“I suppose she’s using DNA metaphorically,” McPherson said. “She argues that racism is the central theme of American history. It is certainly part of the history. But again, I think it lacks context, lacks perspective on the entire course of slavery and how slavery began and how slavery in the United States was hardly unique.”

Historian James Oakes was also interviewed by WSWS on Nov. 18. He said that “their work has prompted some very strong criticism from scholars in the field.”

“These are really dangerous tropes,” Oakes said about some of the claims the project makes. “They’re not only ahistorical, they’re actually anti-historical. The function of those tropes is to deny change over time. It goes back to those analogies.”

Oakes added that some of the project’s claims are just “ridiculous” and he, too, provides contextual evidence to disprove some of the NYT’s “reframing.”

NYT reporter Ida Bae Wells, who is working on the project, thoroughly dismissed the historian’s viewpoints of the “1619 Project.” She tweeted that McPherson did not read the entire project and therefore should not be taken seriously.