Not so for Sweet’s mild and sympathetic criticism of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which he had initially viewed as “a synthesis of a tradition of Black nationalist historiography dating to the 19 th century with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent call for reparations.” Indeed, “ The 1619 Project: A New American Origin Story” book version concludes with Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay explicitly claiming that the material in the volume supported “race-specific remedies” for “a vastly unequal society maintained by historical and systemic racism” - reparations. His characterization of conservatives wanting to forbid teaching about slavery and present the Founders as flawless “tribunes of liberty” along with opinions by Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, though wrong, hardly produced a peep. Sweet used examples from the political right and the political left as illustrations. The essay weighed in on the problem of “presentism,” which he describes as evidenced today in reading “the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues-race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism,” as well as historical focus on recent time periods. 17 column, “ Is History History?” on the American Historical Association website, of which he is also president. Sweet, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a specialist in African history and the Atlantic slave trade, wrote in his Aug. For, when truth ceases to be an end in itself and becomes but a means toward an end, it also becomes malleable.” The Crime Handlin wrote that historians, “in reducing truth to an instrument, even an instrument for doing good,” “necessarily blunt its edge. One of Zinn’s biggest critics, Harvard history professor Oscar Handlin, bemoaned the trends in the profession illustrated starkly by Zinn’s work. Furthermore, historians’ writing and scholarship should be aimed “towards humane concerns,” inspiring readers and students to engage in “social action,” such as marching and protesting.
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