"Also Serves as a Reminder of the Need for a Wider Lens When Thinking About Enslavement and Freedom Throughout the Americas Today"

"Slavery shaped the Americas for four centuries, blighting the entire hemisphere. The long struggle to dismantle it did not happen only in the U.S. or only in the South; in fact, in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Brazil it continued for decades after the U.S. Civil War. Simple narratives such as 'California banned slavery at its founding' and 'slavery ended in 1865' obscure much of its connection to this larger story. What happened to California illuminates the unevenness of abolition and the many false promises of freedom. It also serves as a reminder of the need for a wider lens when thinking about enslavement and freedom throughout the Americas today."

Carrie Gibson at the Los Angeles Times discusses slavery in California.

"They Indeed Are Replaying the Shadow Side of the Revolution in Their Adherence to Conspiratorial, Violent, and Racist Views That Stemmed From Their Fear of Losing Power"

"Most liberals and many conservatives would recoil at the notion that the people who rampaged through the Capitol Building, injuring police officers and threatening to lynch the vice president and speaker of the House, deserve the label of patriot. Yet as we approach the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding, a candid consideration of some of the darker aspects our history, too often overlooked, supports the claims by rioters that they were following in many of our Founders' footsteps, as are millions of Trump supporters today—just not in the way they think."

Andrew Lawler at The Bulwark explains how January 6 insurrectionists connect to 1776.

"The Reconstruction Constitution—One Very Different from the Constitution of 1787"

"In 1776, revolutionaries destroyed their old colonial governments. New constitutions called new states into being. In 1787, those new states ratified a new federal constitution and made a new nation. In 1867, revolutionaries again destroyed existing governments, and again new constitutions brought new states to life. Those new states ratified a new constitution, remaking America. The Reconstruction Act of March 2 started that process, and we owe more to it than to the Declaration of 1776."

At the Los Angeles Times, Kermit Roosevelt III argues that "March 2 is the true birthday of modern America."

"A Process of Redress"

"The 500-page study describes decades of state and federal government actions that harmed Black Americans—from American slavery to the more recent redlining, mass incarceration, police actions and the widening wealth gap between Blacks and whites."

Lil Kalish at Cal Matters discusses the interim report from the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.

"Makes Visible Things That Need to Be Seen"

"The grisly record-keeping of the trade in enslaved people and colonial governments provided the infrastructure for epidemiological data collection. Downs shows how logs of sickness and death on slave ships, in prisons and at quarantine stations—unmentioned in standard histories—were central to the emergence of public health. A bureaucracy 'established in the service of war, colonialism, and imperialism emerged as the foundation for the development of epidemiology'. Downs provides history as truth-telling."

At Nature, Mary T. Bassett reviews Jim Downs's Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine.

"The Idol of Origins Is an Attractive God Because It Tells Us What We Must Do"

"If the filibuster's opponents wish to avoid being misled by false gods they have to ask inconvenient questions. What about John Davis and John Quincy Adams? What about the 289 non-civil rights filibusters, far outnumbering measures focused on civil rights, that Binder and Smith also found between 1837 and 1992? Does the fact that the filibuster appears nowhere in the Constitution mean that it is unconstitutional? Has the Senate, our political system, or our deeply fractured society changed in ways that might make the filibuster in some form necessary or even desirable? Jentleson argues that the filibuster favors conservatives because they only need to stop things to accomplish their mission, while liberals need to do things. But does anyone doubt that Trumpist Republicans, if not conservatives, have quite a lot they want to do?"

Robert Elder at The Bulwark challenges the charge that John C. Calhoun created the Senate filibuster.

Great Dissenters

"That is certainly true in the case of the Harlans, as well. But what emerged from the parsing and assessing was something unexpected. It was not a story about roots or bloodlines. Nor was it fundamentally about exploitation, the pain of inequality, or even the way slavery perverted basic emotions; it was about how, despite all of those things, a feeling grew up between Robert and John Harlan that was authentic and organically human: respect."

Politico runs an excerpt from Peter S. Canellos's The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America's Judicial Hero.

"To Be Human Is to Live With Moral Complexity and Existential Ambiguity"

"The ill-fated 1776 Commission and its report will likely be remembered, if they are remembered at all, for promoting the idea that Trumpian populist nationalism stands on one side and the 1619 Project on the other. But that's a false dichotomy. There is a message that stands in opposition both to the basic premise of the 1619 Project and to Trumpism."

Cathy Young at The Bulwark explores "[w]hat the conflict over the NYT extravaganza and the much-mocked Trump commission report is really about."

The World Socialist Web Site presents David North's introduction to the book The New York Times' 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History.

And James Oakes at Catalyst writes that "[o]f the manifold failings of the 1619 Project, this may be the greatest: it all but erases the fact that, for the first seventy years of its existence, the United States was roiled by intense, escalating conflict over slavery, a conflict that was only resolved by a brutal civil war."

"The Lines Between Justice and Injustice Are Crisscrossed"

"'The Star-Spangled Banner' nevertheless shares its conceptual DNA with the United States as a whole. It is a product of a time when the stain of slavery was clear on the nation and part of US law. To understand the anthem and its legacy, we need to know more than just Key's words. We need to understand their author's feelings and actions about slavery."

Mark Clague in a 2016 CNN article defends "The Star-Spangled Banner."

"A Politically Motivated Falsification of History"

"There are many scholars, students and workers who know that the 1619 Project makes a travesty of history. It is their responsibility to take a stand and reject the coordinated attempt, spearheaded by the Times, to dredge up and rehabilitate a reactionary race-based falsification of American and world history.
"Above all the working class must reject any such effort to divide it, efforts which will become ever more ferocious and pernicious as the class struggle develops. The great issue of this epoch is the fight for the international unity of the working class against all forms of racism, nationalism and related forms of identity politics."

The World Socialist Web Site launches a multi-article attack on The New York Times 1619 Project.

Tom Mackaman includes an interview with Adolph Reed, Jr.

And Sean Wilentz at The New York Review of Books discusses the history of American anti-slavery, while John Clegg at Jacobin points to a different kind of slavery influence.

"Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem"

"The point, once again, is to 'reframe American history' so that this appalling history stands at the very center of who we are as a country. Achieving that goal has required the Times to treat history in a highly sensationalistic, reductionistic, and tendentious way, with the cumulative result resembling agitprop more than responsible journalism or scholarship. Putting aside any pretense toward nuance or complexity, the paper has surrendered to the sensibility of left-wing political activists. The result is unpersuasive—and a sad comment on the state of our country's public life."

Damon Linker at The Week criticizes The New York Times' "1619 Project."

Zack Beauchamp at Vox criticizes the critics.

Servants into Slaves

"Even in 1700, Africans were hardly the only unfree colonists, for a majority of those laboring in Virginia were people bound to service. They were indentured whites. Population numbers are crucial in understanding the demography of labor in early Virginia. By 1680, only about 7% of Virginians were of African descent; 20% of Virginians were of African descent by 1700, and by 1750, the 100,000 enslaved Virginian men and women accounted for more than half the population. Here lies the demography of enslavement."

Nell Irvin Planter at The Guardian reminds readers that the first Africans in colonial Virginia were not enslaved.

And Olivia B. Waxman at Time discusses August 1619.

"Too-La-Loo"

"A little over a decade later, however, African Americans like Douglass began making the glorious anniversary their own. After the end of the Civil War in 1865, the nation's four million newly emancipated citizens transformed Independence Day into a celebration of black freedom. The Fourth became an almost exclusively African American holiday in the states of the former Confederacy—until white Southerners, after violently reasserting their dominance of the region, snuffed these black commemorations out."

In a 2018 Atlantic article, Ethan J. Kytle and Brian write about "When the Fourth of July Was a Black Holiday."

"There Was No Slaveholders' Ploy"

"A good way to summarize what actually happened inside the convention is to recall the place of slavery in the different plans that the convention considered about electing the president.  The delegates weighed three options: the president would be selected by direct popular vote, by Congress, or by electors who would be chosen either by the people or the state legislatures. Direct election failed, but not because it was intolerable to the slaveholders, as Amar maintains. It failed because it enjoyed little support in the convention, for reasons that had nothing to do with slavery. The real choice for the framers was between the congressional method and the electoral method. Both methods gave the slave states an extra measure of power in selecting the president; so once direct election was scrapped, the convention was bound to grant the slave states some sort of bonus. But this was because the great majority of the convention did not trust in the people at large to choose the president." 

Sean Wilentz at History News Network writes that "like most of my fellow American historians, I have been wrong about slavery and the Electoral College."

"America's First Poster Child"

"In March 1855, young Mary was taken to the offices of the New-York Daily Times, where reporters looked her over and expressed 'astonishment' that this child was 'held a slave.' Today, people are similarly surprised when I show them the daguerreotype of Mary and I point out she was born into slavery. They react the same as people did a century and a half ago, revealing that they still harbor some of the assumptions about race and slavery that Sumner tapped into when he first put Mary onstage."

Jessie Morgan-Owens at Smithsonian tells the story of Mary Mildred Williams.

"Women Can Hold Their Own When It Comes to Violence"

"To some (let's be honest, probably mostly white) people, the fact that white women have the capacity to inflict violence and to cruelly manipulate the lives of others—to be what Jones-Rogers, in our conversation, called 'evil and dastardly'—is an eternal revelation. That's why we still get curious, 'look at this weird phenomenon' articles about white women at Unite the Right, or within the alt-right movement. Or why we need to be reminded again and again that white women gleefully attended lynchings, flocked in the thousands to form auxiliaries for the Ku Klux Klan, and avidly protested school integration in the South and the North. This history of slave-owning women's economic relationship to slavery, Jones-Rogers says, should 'remove the surprise.' 'If you think about the value, the importance of whiteness in their lives, being a source of power, being a source of empowerment and emboldenment, then throughout history these little things make sense,' she said."

Rebecca Onion at Slate reviews Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers's They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. 

"20. and odd Negroes"

"'It's rather clear that Virginia did not have a set way of dealing with these folks, and it got worked out over time,' Scott says. 'They had indentured people in Virginia, and some people may have seen Africans just like they saw other indentured people. We know some people became free, so it looks like they were treated like every other indentured person.'
"Other scholars, including Linda Heywood and John Thornton of Boston University, insist that the Africans from the White Lion and the Treasurer were enslaved by the English as they had originally been by the Portuguese slave traders before they were taken by pirates.
"Whether indentured servants or slaves, Newby-Alexander says, 'Either way, they were unfree.'"

E. R. Shipp at USA Today discusses the four-hundredth anniversary of the first Africans arriving in colonial Virginia.

"Options Are Available"

"The Trump era presents a host of new challenges for evangelicals who believe in the Gospel—the 'good news' of Jesus Christ. The first step in addressing these challenges must come through a reckoning with our past. Evangelicals have taken many wrong turns over the decades even though better, more Christian, options could be found by simply opening up the Bible and reading it. We must stop our nostalgic gaze into a Christian golden age in America that probably never existed to begin with and turn toward the future with renewed hope. It is time, as the great theologian of hope Jurgen Moltmann taught us, to 'waken the dead and piece together what has been broken.'"

John Fea at The Atlantic presents a "very short history of evangelical fear."

"To Obey the Law While Respecting Themselves"

"In that sense, Lincoln was the embodiment of America's long struggle to remake itself as a morally coherent nation. Under his leadership, the Civil War finally resolved the problem of fugitive slaves by destroying the institution from which they had fled. By the time of his death, some 4 million black Americans were no longer at risk of forcible return to their erstwhile masters. They had entered the limbo between the privations of their past and the future promise of American life—a state of suspension in which millions of black Americans still live."

Andrew Delbanco at The Atlantic connects the 1850s to today.

"Portrays Douglass Unequivocally as a Hero While Also Revealing His Weaknesses"

"Ironically, his popularity is also due to ignorance. Some who commend him would probably cease doing so if they knew more about him. Frederick Douglass was a whirlwind of eloquence, imagination, and desperate striving as he sought to expose injustice and remedy its harms. All who praise him should know that part of what made him so distinctive are the tensions—indeed the contradictions—that he embraced."

Randall Kennedy in The Atlantic reviews David W. Blight's Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.