Of course, the 1619 Project was old hat compared to the 1584 Project when Sir Walter Raleigh, chief tobacconist to Good Queen Bess, sent the first shipload of “waste population” to the Roanoke Colony. Why “waste population?” Well, what with the end of the feudal era, there were a lot of landless vagabonds and vagrants — we call the homeless — wandering around in Britland. Something had to be done! Send the waste population to the Americas, old chap.
And then, let us celebrate the greatest slave states in all history, in which entire populations of vast countries were enslaved to a brutal overclass: Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China.
Jeremy Bray
1 year ago
Let us hope African Founders gets the attention and respect it merits despite not endorsing the ideological approach. Sane and balanced history is essential if dystopian myths are not to drag the US down.
Matt M
1 year ago
I cannot recommend Albion’s Seed highly enough. I listened to it recently on Audible and it was very well produced. If you wish to understand the relationship between Britain and the USA, this is the place to start. African Founders will go on my list.
Dustshoe Richinrut
1 year ago
Slavery or racism is “hardwired into (America’s) DNA”? Because Americans, at least most of them, have “a past that cannot be escaped”?
Does the 1619 express mean that … now America cannot deny the truth? Now that the truth has been elucidated? Does the project show that the only explanation for those scores of mostly men who were given the mantle of having made America is that it had to be their malign internal make-up of their DNA and all that that made them take all the credit for their undeserving selves? That their efforts had essentially been all show?
I must be exaggerating! But what is taught in the nationwide classroom curricula vis à vis this Project? Yes, “it is a dispiritingly static view of the country.” Do the very young, schoolchildren, need all that? Their school bags are probably weighed down by all the other theories they have to haul home with them.
Must America now look much less fondly and gladly upon the achievements of the Wright brothers: the inventors of the modern aeroplane? An invention that took place some forty years after the end of the Civil War. Because, well, there were many and profound injustices being committed against black Americans tens, hundreds, thousands of miles from where the Wright brothers, bicycle shop repairmen, were striving to solve the design problems?
Perhaps there are designs to make America miserable. To knock the stuffing out of America. What about music? The old pop singles charts? When stars, both black and white, smiled out from their record sleeve covers? It was a sign of equality and drive and hope and gladness, back in the day. Of course, there was probably not much equality back then either. But after the travails of the Sixties, and during them, music offered hope. The signs were displayed all the same. America was good at projecting hope. But how can America project hope when, in the technology age, when we’re all supposed to be having a whale of a time, misery and dispiriting fare dominate the airwaves, both in education and in entertainment?
What does it mean to be “hardwired” with badness? That Christianity is so yesterday?
Julian Pellatt
1 year ago
Reverse racism is no less awful than the racism is purports to target.
Reverse racism? Isn’t racism just racism? Unless you mean anti-racism (obviously a good), which can easily be perverted into an evil? But, if not, surely racism is just racism whichever way it goes?
Fair point. Some ‘anti-racism’ is a cover for straightforward racism.
John K
1 year ago
Of course all this ignores the people who have arguably been the most abused by the events of the last 400 years and are still largely ignored – the Native Americans. “The white man made us many promises, more than I can remember. They only ever kept one: they promised to take our land, and they took it” [Red Cloud]
The same could be said of virtually every native peoples on earth. It is the history of mankind all over the planet, not just the peoples of Africa or the Americas.
Andrew Horsman
1 year ago
This article deserves to be read in conjunction with Paul Kingsnorth’s superb essay on “how the Left fell for capitalism”.
There’s a reason why the collectivist left, the corporatist right, and the technocratic “centre” all have a shared interest in trashing the spirit of the individual that set brushfires alight in the American revolution. And that is that it challenges their power, that is built in each case with a web of clever, convincing, materialistic lies; handouts of bread and circuses; and good old-fashioned fear.
Each day more and more people are waking up to their nonsense and they know it. You can only push people so far before they will snap and revolt: humans are hard-wired to seek and find truth, and they will sooner or later dispense with truthless things. What other way for a mammal uniquely dependent on its cerebral cortex to survive, if not intellectually to know what truthfully works and what doesn’t when faced with a threat or when looking for the means of survival? It may make evolutionary sense to stick with the herd, a strategy which works right up until to the point at which it doesn’t: and it doesn’t if individuals use their god-given sense to discern that the herd is being led at increasing speed off a huge cliff by a morally compromised, panicking, fundamentally untruthful leadership.
The French Revolution was met with stunned shock across all of Europe. Louis XVI never saw it coming. If he had, he certainly would have fled in time to save his own life. By the time the revolution completely concluded with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the old feudal nobility’s power was shattered forever. Where they weren’t entirely destroyed, they were obliged to yield their chokehold on political power, lest they end up on the guillotine next. Could Trump be a Robespierre who began what some future Bonaparte will finish? Things can flip very quickly indeed.
Last edited 1 year ago by Steve Jolly
Jonathan Nash
1 year ago
I’m not sure about this at all, From this very brief review, it sounds as if this book is in a similar tradition to the 1619 Project, but conducted with more concern for evidence: viz., mining the records to construct a political narrative rather than to establish what happened and what was it like to be there. No doubt it will be said that history has always been done like this (step forward the Whig view of British history), but this seems much more selective and tendentious.
It is possible to explore the African tradition of America without pandering to the insecurity of modern black and white liberal women by pretending it was the centre of everything. 1619 is an exercise in narcissism and power grabbing; this is not. Most great history books have a narrative. They are not mere annals but have themes.
Well I read a lot of history, and it was my undergraduate degree, so I well understand that history is not “mere annals” (or even Annales). My point was that of course the 1619 Project is garbage and doesn’t really merit any serious consideration as history – it is a piece of flimsy propaganda. However, one of the jobs of the historian is to attribute appropriate importance to the themes which he or she is writing about: that is, after all, what is meant by historical context. My doubts about this book (which I have not read – I’m commenting on what this review tells us), is that it may fall into another form of ahistoricity which strives to attribute greater or different significance to people or events than they truly have for essentially propaganda purposes. We have seen that over here for the past twenty years or so with the promotion of Mary Seacole (for whom streets, parks and housing estates are now named) into a towering figure of nineteenth century nursing at least on a par with Nightingale, when her actual achievements are frankly indetectable. The title of this book, “African Founders”, appears to argue that some or all of the figures identified in it should be regarded as being of the same historical importance as the Founding Fathers: if that is the basic point, it is wrong, and “pandering” is a good word for it.
Agreed, that’s my concern too. I also read a lot of history books, and sometimes mistakenly buy books that have good reviews, only to realise on starting to read them that there is an agenda, which defeats the purpose of reading the book.
I can cope with agendas when reading the news, filtering it out as I read it; but I expect a decent historian to seek objectivity and perspective. I suspect ‘Albions Seed’ is an important contribution to understanding the USA, as the different parts of the British Isles contributed massively to the existing USA culture; but I suspect ‘African Founders’ will hugely over-egg the contribution of Africans to the existing USA culture, and therefore be a work for supporting social justice, not historical understanding.
In the strange times that we live in it’s difficult to ignore the common orthodoxy; difficult to escape it. I suppose that’s one sign of a successful propaganda campaign. (Think: Christianity in medieval Europe. Who could have written anything, other than Snorri Sturlesson, that wasn’t influenced by Church doctrine?)
So the question is “who was influenced by ‘1619’, the author or the reviewer”?
I discovered something useful in my own readings on history. Sometimes the heavy-weight academic tomes start with an “Author’s Forward”, or some such, that lays out the whole argument in fifty or a hundred pages. Saves a lot of time and effort. I’m going to wait until I can get “African Founders” from the library and see for myself.
Nell L
1 year ago
When will “The 1492 Project” be published? Isn’t it time for a rebuttal to “The 1619 Project” that correctly asserts that the creation of the modern Americas (including the US) began with the European colonization of the Western Hemisphere? This would correctly center the experience of indigenous people as the most important transformative experience in the history of the US and the rest of the Americas. The westward movement of Europeans in North America, and the near-eradication of indigenous peoples, is the single most important foundational aspect of the development of the US. The introduction of slavery into the economy of the early US in 1619 was a secondary effect of the conquest of land by European settlers who chose to use either slave, indentured, or free labor for its exploitation. And 1619 hardly marks the beginning of slavery in the Americas either, since slavery had played a role in many of the societies and civilizations of the Americas long before then. A history of America that centers of experience of indigenous peoples is badly needed.
Christopher Barclay
1 year ago
The 1619 Project implies that there was no human life in the land that is now the USA before 1619. That in turn suggests that Native Americans are sub-human. Not exactly fighting racism.
Mickey Mouse
1 year ago
Hackett Fischer’s best book is The Great Wave.
Mike Bell
1 year ago
This is a priority for today:“ancient ideas of open inquiry and empirical truth have gained a new importance, in part because of hostile assaults upon them from many directions.” There are various harmful manifestations (Woke etc) of the intellectual invasion of post-modernist ideas. The central task is to alert fair-minded people to what is happening so that we can address and reverse it. At present, most people are not aware of what is happening as it is rarely stated or defined. The intellectual foundations of Western civilisation are being dismantled. It is an emergency.
Kat L
1 year ago
I have seen no evidence that multiculturalism works anywhere.
Of course, the 1619 Project was old hat compared to the 1584 Project when Sir Walter Raleigh, chief tobacconist to Good Queen Bess, sent the first shipload of “waste population” to the Roanoke Colony. Why “waste population?” Well, what with the end of the feudal era, there were a lot of landless vagabonds and vagrants — we call the homeless — wandering around in Britland. Something had to be done! Send the waste population to the Americas, old chap.
And then, let us celebrate the greatest slave states in all history, in which entire populations of vast countries were enslaved to a brutal overclass: Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China.
Let us hope African Founders gets the attention and respect it merits despite not endorsing the ideological approach. Sane and balanced history is essential if dystopian myths are not to drag the US down.
I cannot recommend Albion’s Seed highly enough. I listened to it recently on Audible and it was very well produced. If you wish to understand the relationship between Britain and the USA, this is the place to start.
African Founders will go on my list.
Slavery or racism is “hardwired into (America’s) DNA”? Because Americans, at least most of them, have “a past that cannot be escaped”?
Does the 1619 express mean that … now America cannot deny the truth? Now that the truth has been elucidated? Does the project show that the only explanation for those scores of mostly men who were given the mantle of having made America is that it had to be their malign internal make-up of their DNA and all that that made them take all the credit for their undeserving selves? That their efforts had essentially been all show?
I must be exaggerating! But what is taught in the nationwide classroom curricula vis à vis this Project? Yes, “it is a dispiritingly static view of the country.” Do the very young, schoolchildren, need all that? Their school bags are probably weighed down by all the other theories they have to haul home with them.
Must America now look much less fondly and gladly upon the achievements of the Wright brothers: the inventors of the modern aeroplane? An invention that took place some forty years after the end of the Civil War. Because, well, there were many and profound injustices being committed against black Americans tens, hundreds, thousands of miles from where the Wright brothers, bicycle shop repairmen, were striving to solve the design problems?
Perhaps there are designs to make America miserable. To knock the stuffing out of America. What about music? The old pop singles charts? When stars, both black and white, smiled out from their record sleeve covers? It was a sign of equality and drive and hope and gladness, back in the day. Of course, there was probably not much equality back then either. But after the travails of the Sixties, and during them, music offered hope. The signs were displayed all the same. America was good at projecting hope. But how can America project hope when, in the technology age, when we’re all supposed to be having a whale of a time, misery and dispiriting fare dominate the airwaves, both in education and in entertainment?
What does it mean to be “hardwired” with badness? That Christianity is so yesterday?
Reverse racism is no less awful than the racism is purports to target.
Reverse racism? Isn’t racism just racism? Unless you mean anti-racism (obviously a good), which can easily be perverted into an evil? But, if not, surely racism is just racism whichever way it goes?
Fair point. Some ‘anti-racism’ is a cover for straightforward racism.
Of course all this ignores the people who have arguably been the most abused by the events of the last 400 years and are still largely ignored – the Native Americans.
“The white man made us many promises, more than I can remember. They only ever kept one: they promised to take our land, and they took it” [Red Cloud]
The same could be said of virtually every native peoples on earth. It is the history of mankind all over the planet, not just the peoples of Africa or the Americas.
This article deserves to be read in conjunction with Paul Kingsnorth’s superb essay on “how the Left fell for capitalism”.
There’s a reason why the collectivist left, the corporatist right, and the technocratic “centre” all have a shared interest in trashing the spirit of the individual that set brushfires alight in the American revolution. And that is that it challenges their power, that is built in each case with a web of clever, convincing, materialistic lies; handouts of bread and circuses; and good old-fashioned fear.
Each day more and more people are waking up to their nonsense and they know it. You can only push people so far before they will snap and revolt: humans are hard-wired to seek and find truth, and they will sooner or later dispense with truthless things. What other way for a mammal uniquely dependent on its cerebral cortex to survive, if not intellectually to know what truthfully works and what doesn’t when faced with a threat or when looking for the means of survival? It may make evolutionary sense to stick with the herd, a strategy which works right up until to the point at which it doesn’t: and it doesn’t if individuals use their god-given sense to discern that the herd is being led at increasing speed off a huge cliff by a morally compromised, panicking, fundamentally untruthful leadership.
This could all flip around, and very quickly.
I hope it does flip around quickly
The French Revolution was met with stunned shock across all of Europe. Louis XVI never saw it coming. If he had, he certainly would have fled in time to save his own life. By the time the revolution completely concluded with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the old feudal nobility’s power was shattered forever. Where they weren’t entirely destroyed, they were obliged to yield their chokehold on political power, lest they end up on the guillotine next. Could Trump be a Robespierre who began what some future Bonaparte will finish? Things can flip very quickly indeed.
I’m not sure about this at all, From this very brief review, it sounds as if this book is in a similar tradition to the 1619 Project, but conducted with more concern for evidence: viz., mining the records to construct a political narrative rather than to establish what happened and what was it like to be there. No doubt it will be said that history has always been done like this (step forward the Whig view of British history), but this seems much more selective and tendentious.
It is possible to explore the African tradition of America without pandering to the insecurity of modern black and white liberal women by pretending it was the centre of everything. 1619 is an exercise in narcissism and power grabbing; this is not. Most great history books have a narrative. They are not mere annals but have themes.
Well I read a lot of history, and it was my undergraduate degree, so I well understand that history is not “mere annals” (or even Annales). My point was that of course the 1619 Project is garbage and doesn’t really merit any serious consideration as history – it is a piece of flimsy propaganda. However, one of the jobs of the historian is to attribute appropriate importance to the themes which he or she is writing about: that is, after all, what is meant by historical context. My doubts about this book (which I have not read – I’m commenting on what this review tells us), is that it may fall into another form of ahistoricity which strives to attribute greater or different significance to people or events than they truly have for essentially propaganda purposes. We have seen that over here for the past twenty years or so with the promotion of Mary Seacole (for whom streets, parks and housing estates are now named) into a towering figure of nineteenth century nursing at least on a par with Nightingale, when her actual achievements are frankly indetectable. The title of this book, “African Founders”, appears to argue that some or all of the figures identified in it should be regarded as being of the same historical importance as the Founding Fathers: if that is the basic point, it is wrong, and “pandering” is a good word for it.
Agreed, that’s my concern too. I also read a lot of history books, and sometimes mistakenly buy books that have good reviews, only to realise on starting to read them that there is an agenda, which defeats the purpose of reading the book.
I can cope with agendas when reading the news, filtering it out as I read it; but I expect a decent historian to seek objectivity and perspective. I suspect ‘Albions Seed’ is an important contribution to understanding the USA, as the different parts of the British Isles contributed massively to the existing USA culture; but I suspect ‘African Founders’ will hugely over-egg the contribution of Africans to the existing USA culture, and therefore be a work for supporting social justice, not historical understanding.
In the strange times that we live in it’s difficult to ignore the common orthodoxy; difficult to escape it. I suppose that’s one sign of a successful propaganda campaign. (Think: Christianity in medieval Europe. Who could have written anything, other than Snorri Sturlesson, that wasn’t influenced by Church doctrine?)
So the question is “who was influenced by ‘1619’, the author or the reviewer”?
I discovered something useful in my own readings on history. Sometimes the heavy-weight academic tomes start with an “Author’s Forward”, or some such, that lays out the whole argument in fifty or a hundred pages. Saves a lot of time and effort. I’m going to wait until I can get “African Founders” from the library and see for myself.
When will “The 1492 Project” be published? Isn’t it time for a rebuttal to “The 1619 Project” that correctly asserts that the creation of the modern Americas (including the US) began with the European colonization of the Western Hemisphere? This would correctly center the experience of indigenous people as the most important transformative experience in the history of the US and the rest of the Americas. The westward movement of Europeans in North America, and the near-eradication of indigenous peoples, is the single most important foundational aspect of the development of the US. The introduction of slavery into the economy of the early US in 1619 was a secondary effect of the conquest of land by European settlers who chose to use either slave, indentured, or free labor for its exploitation. And 1619 hardly marks the beginning of slavery in the Americas either, since slavery had played a role in many of the societies and civilizations of the Americas long before then. A history of America that centers of experience of indigenous peoples is badly needed.
The 1619 Project implies that there was no human life in the land that is now the USA before 1619. That in turn suggests that Native Americans are sub-human. Not exactly fighting racism.
Hackett Fischer’s best book is The Great Wave.
This is a priority for today:“ancient ideas of open inquiry and empirical truth have gained a new importance, in part because of hostile assaults upon them from many directions.”
There are various harmful manifestations (Woke etc) of the intellectual invasion of post-modernist ideas. The central task is to alert fair-minded people to what is happening so that we can address and reverse it.
At present, most people are not aware of what is happening as it is rarely stated or defined.
The intellectual foundations of Western civilisation are being dismantled. It is an emergency.
I have seen no evidence that multiculturalism works anywhere.