48 11.14.21
letter, including the Society of Civil War Historians, the National Education
Association, the Midwestern History Association and the Organization of
American Historians.
Nevertheless, by late August, the two-year anniversary of the 1619 Project,
12 states had enacted some form of these bans. In Florida, the State Board
of Education voted unanimously to prohibit the teaching of the project at a
meeting in June, following a brief address from Gov. Ron DeSantis, in which
he explained his opposition (mischaracterizing, as was so often the case,
the claim from Nikole’s essay that the original fi ve historians seized on):
Th is 1619 Project that came out a couple years ago, the folks who created
that said that the American Revolution was fought primarily to preserve
slavery. Now, that is factually false. at is something that you can look at
the historical record. You want to know why they revolted against Britain?
ey told us. ey wrote pamphlets, they did committees of correspondence,
they did a Declaration of Independence.... I think it’s really important
that when we’re doing history, when we’re doing things like civics, that it is
grounded in actual fact, and I think we’ve got to have an education system
that is preferring fact over narratives.A curious feature of this argument on behalf of the historical record is how
ahistorical it is. In privileging ‘‘actual fact’’ over ‘‘narrative,’’ the governor, and
many others, seem to proceed from the premise that history is a fi xed thing;
that somehow, long ago, the nation’s historians identifi ed the relevant set of
facts about our past, and it is the job of subsequent generations to simply
protect and disseminate them. This conception denies history its own his-
tory — the dynamic, contested and frankly pretty thrilling process by which
an understanding of the past is formed and reformed. The study of this is
known as historiography, and a knowledge of American historiography, in
particular the way our historical profession evolved to take fuller account
of the role of slavery and racism in our past, is critical to understanding the
debates of the past two years.
The earliest attempts to record
the nation’s history took the form
of accounts of military campaigns,
summaries of state and federal leg-
islative activity, dispatches from the
frontier and other narrowly focused
reports. In the 19th century, these
were replaced by a master narrative
of the colonial and founding era, best
exemplifi ed by ‘‘the father of Amer-
ican history,’’ George Bancroft, in
his ‘‘History of the United States,
From the Discovery of the American
Continent.’’ Published in 10 volumes
from the 1830s through the 1870s,
Bancroft’s opus is generally seen as
the fi rst comprehensive history of
the country, and its infl uence was
incalculable. Bancroft’s ambition was
to synthesize American history into a grand and glorious epic. He viewed
the European colonists who settled the continent as acting out a divine
plan and the revolution as an almost purely philosophical act, undertaken
to model self-government for all the world.
The scholarly eff ort to revise this narrative began in the early 20th cen-
tury with the work of the ‘‘Progressive historians,’’ most notably Charles A.
Beard, who tried to show that the founders were motivated not exclusively
by idealism and virtue but also by their pocketbooks. ‘‘Suppose,’’ Beard
asked in 1913, ‘‘our fundamental law was not the product of an abstrac-
tion known as ‘the whole people,’ but of a group of economic interests
which must have expected benefi cial results from its adoption?’’ Though
the Progressives’ work was infl uential, they were bitterly attacked for their
theories, which shocked many Americans. ‘‘SCAVENGERS, HYENA-LIKE,
DESECRATE THE GRAVES OF THE DEAD PATRIOTS WE REVERE,’’ blared
one headline in an Ohio newspaper.
As the Cold War dawned, it
became clear that this school
could not provide the necessary
inspiration for an America that
envisioned itself a defender of
global freedom and democra-
cy. The Beardian approach was
beaten back by the counter-Pro-
gressive or ‘‘Consensus’’ school,
which emphasized the founders’
shared values and played down
class confl ict. Among Consen-
sus historians, a keen sense of
national purpose was evident, as
well as an eagerness to disavow
the whiff of Marxism in the
progressive narrative and re-es-
tablish the founders’ idealism.
In 1950, the Harvard historian
Samuel Eliot Morison lamented that the Progressives were ‘‘robbing the
people of their heroes’’ and ‘‘insulting their folk-memory of the great fi g-
ures whom they admired.’’ Seven years later, one of his former students,
Edmund S. Morgan, published ‘‘The Birth of the Republic, 1763-1789,’’ a
key text of this era (described by one reviewer at the time as having the
‘‘brilliant hue of the era of Eisenhower prosperity’’). Morgan stressed the
revolution as a ‘‘search for principles’’ that led to a nation committed to
liberty and equality.
By the 1960s, the pendulum was ready to swing the other way. A group
of scholars identifi ed variously as Neo-Progressive historians, New Left
historians or social historians challenged the old paradigm, turning their
focus to the lives of common people in colonial society and U.S. history
more broadly. Earlier generations primarily studied elites, who left a
copious archive of written material. Because the subjects of the new
history — laborers, seamen, enslaved people, women, Indigenous people
— produced relatively little writing of their own, many of these scholars
turned instead to large data sets like tax lists, real estate inventories
and other public records to illuminate the lives of what were sometimes
called the ‘‘inarticulate masses.’’ This novel approach set aside ‘‘the central
assumption of traditional history, what might be called the doctrine of
implicit importance,’’ wrote the historian Jack P. Greene in a 1975 article
in The Times. ‘‘From the perspective supplied by the new history, it has
become clear that the experience of women, children, servants, slaves
and other neglected groups are quite as integral to a comprehensive
understanding of the past as that of lawyers, lords and ministers of state.’’
An explosion of new research resulted, transforming the fi eld of Amer-
ican history. One of the most signifi cant developments was an increased
attention to Black history and the role of slavery. For more than a century,
a profession dominated by white men had mostly consigned these subjects
to the sidelines. Bancroft had seen slavery as problematic — ‘‘an anomaly
in a democratic country’’ — but mostly because it empowered a Southern
planter elite he considered corrupt, lazy and aristocratic. Beard and the other
Progressives hadn’t focused much on slavery, either. Until the 1950s, the insti-
tution was treated in canonical works of American history as an aberration
best addressed minimally if at all. When it was taken up for close study, as
in Ulrich B. Phillips’s 1918 book, ‘‘American Negro Slavery,’’ it was seen as
an ineffi cient enterprise sustained by benevolent masters to whom enslaved
people felt mostly gratitude. That began to change in the 1950s and 1960s, as
works by Herbert Aptheker, Stanley Elkins, Philip S. Foner, John Hope Frank-
lin, Eugene D. Genovese, Benjamin Quarles, Kenneth M. Stampp, C. Vann
Woodward and many others transformed the mainstream view of slavery. Bancroft: via Library of Congress. Morgan: Bob Child/Associated Press. Quarles: via Beulah M. Davis Special Collections, Morgan State University.Edmund MorganGeorge Bancroft