A number threatened to cancel memberships to the AHA. Others accused him of being reactionary, bound to some earlier period of history writing. Some speculated about what they imagined to be Sweet’s true, unstated and nefarious motives. Many implied or stated openly that Sweet is racist, or that as a “white man” he has no right to make critical commentary on black or African history. Sadly, many of these tweets came from historians. Almost immediately, it brought forward deranged ad hominem attacks from race-obsessed Twitter users. His article was posted on Twitter at 1:18 p.m. Sweet warns, rather gently, that efforts such as the 1619 Project that purport “to claim a usable African American past reify elements of American hegemony and exceptionalism such narratives aim to dismantle.” Sweet’s second point gets at the 1619 Project’s insinuation that slavery was a uniquely American “original sin.” An accomplished scholar of African history and the slave trade, Sweet notes that at a single slaving site he recently visited in Ghana, Elmina, “ess than one percent of the Africans passing through … arrived in North America.” Most of the other 99 percent, presumably, were bound to destinations in Latin America and the Caribbean. But, so too have attacks from the quarters of identity politics, who find no “usable past” in subjects such as Ancient Rome, as we have argued elsewhere. The teaching of ancient history, medieval history, early modern history-in all geographical areas- is vanishing from curricula across the country, even at very large universities. He suggests that this presentism manifests itself not only in the imposition of present-day thinking onto the past but in a decline in what historians call “pre-modern” subjects-roughly speaking, things that happened before the 19th century. Suffice it to say that the subject is certainly worthy of discussion, not apology and retraction.
In Sweet’s view, this means the tendency to view history “through the prism of contemporary social justice issues-race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism,” while minimizing “the values and mores of people in their own times.” The relationship between present and past is an important and complicated subject, which raises questions of both method-the way sources are used and interpreted-and philosophy. Entitled “Is History History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present,” Sweet’s article made two overarching points.įirst, it criticized the dominance of “presentism” in historical writing. Sweet’s column on the 1619 Project was published in the most recent Perspectives on History newsletter of the AHA, the largest organization of American historians. The president of the American Historical Association (AHA), Professor James Sweet of the University of Wisconsin, has issued a groveling apology for a mild criticism he made of the 1619 Project and the influence of identity politics on historical writing.
0 kommentar(er)
