The New York Times is in denial as scholars eviscerate its 1619 Project

The reviews of The New York Times’ 1619 project are in.

It is “a very unbalanced, one-sided account.” It is “wrong in so many ways.” It is “not only ahistorical,” but “actually ­anti-historical.” It is “a tendentious and partial reading of American history.”

This is what top historians have said of the splashy Times Magazine feature on slavery in the United States that aspires to fundamentally re-orient our understanding of American history and change what students are taught in the schools…

At the end of the year, the Times published an extraordinary letter from McPherson, Oakes and Wood, as well as Sean Wilentz of Princeton and Victoria Bynum of Texas State University demanding “prominent corrections of all the errors and distortions presented in the 1619 project.”

“These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing,’  ” the historians wrote. “They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ­ideology. Dismissal of objections on racial grounds — that they are the objections of only ‘white historians’— has affirmed that displacement.” …

One focus of the historians is the preposterous claim of the 1619 project that a primary reason that the colonists launched the American Revolution was to protect slavery. “This is not true,” they say. “If supportable, the allegation would be astounding — yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false.”