> Wineburg, one of the world's top researchers in the field of history education, raises larger issues about how history should be taught. He says that Zinn's desire to cast a light on what he saw as historic injustice was a crusade built on secondary sources of questionable provenance, omission of exculpatory evidence, leading questions and shaky connections between evidence and conclusions.
A similar warning needs to be leveled at the 1619 Project, which likewise focuses more on rhetoric than careful scholarship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project
In particular, the lead essay originally stated that protecting slavery was “one primary reason the colonists fought the American Revolution.”
After extensive criticism from scholars, the Times edited that sentence to read that protecting slavery was “one primary reason some of the colonists fought the American Revolution.”
Of course the “one primary ... some of...” construction dilutes they assertion beyond recognition. The Times defended this as just the addition of “two words” but it undermines the central thesis of the lead essay. Think of the evidence required to support the first assertion, compared to the second assertion. To support the first assertion, you needed evidence that protecting slavery was a primary reason for the colonists as a whole. To support the revised assertion, you need only find some colonists, among millions, with that motivation.
The 1619 articles on the economic importance of slavery, moreover, are not written by an economist and do not represent the consensus views of economists. Here, the Zinnesque aspect really comes out. It is an often overlooked and very important fact that slavery made some politically powerful people very rich, and those people had a major hand in fashioning America. But most people can’t trace any wealth back to that time. Politically, it would be better to convince people that they continue to benefit from slavery having existed. So the essays are forced to make the far more tenuous claim that America traces its exceptional wealth to slavery. But of course it defies basic economics to suggest you can make a society—as opposed to specific oligarchs—richer through non-free, non-market labor. That’s where it helps to have an author write the essays who isn’t an economist! https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1619-project-tells-a-false-...