So, there was a thread in /r/OutOfTheLoop the other day about the recemt report of the "1776 Commission", from which I gather that said commission was a reaction against the "1619 Commission".
Being a Brit, the existence of either of these was news to me, and I'm still not sure what basis either has (are they governmental bodies? Political think-tanks? Academic discussion groups?).
Obviously the OOTL thread gave me some details, and from what I understand it goes something like this:
The 1619 Commission, named after the year the first enslaved people were brought to the (now) US, seeks to reinterpret US history through the lens of slavery, and show that from its very inception the country was up to its neck in the slave trade.
The 1776 Commission was instigated by or on behalf of President Trump and/or his supporters to kick back against what was seen as an overly negative "bleeding-heart-liberal" interpretation of US history, and its recent report has rather sought to downplay the severity and evils of slavery. Some have suggested its release was expedited in the days before the inauguration in order that certain conservative districts, especially in the South, can use it as a basis for their school curricula going forward. Again, as a Brit, I'm not sure how any of that works.
The 1619 Commission itself "has been criticised" (weasel words, I know - I'm quoting) as academically flawed and biased, with one user commenting that "the idea that the United States was founded on or for or about white people is a LIE". Which threw me, because that seemed like a given to me.
So can anyone help me untangle all of this and give me an idea of the various arguments and counter-arguments? Obviously this is all very bound up in modern politics, much like the continuing arguments in the UK over the legacy of World War 1, so I understand it's a tricky subject.
Edit: punctuation
Hi there -- the 1619 Project is a multimedia project by the New York Times Magazine that was published in 2019, on the 400th anniversary of what we believe to be the first African slaves brought to the Americas. The project is meant to make an argument about re-imagining and re-centering American history around the arrival of enslaved people in the Americas, rather than histories that center American history around the arrival of white people in America. The goal of the project is to provoke critical thinking about why we tell the history of the United States through the lens of the European colonizers, rather than the oppressed people who were brought with them (much less through the lens of the people who were already here and were destroyed by genocide by colonizers.) The 1619 project does include school curricula that teachers can choose to use in their classrooms. My esteemed colleague /u/edhistory101 has written about 1619 before, here and here.
The 1776 Project was a Trump administration effort to refute the 1619 project and re-center history around the traditional founding of the United States (1776 being the date of the Declaration of Independence, though the revolution started with the fighting at Lexington and Concord in 1775). The project was taken off the White House website about 14 minutes after Biden became president; it was/is a very whitewashed, 1950s-style retelling of American history that centers it on white people. The only notable "historian" on the commission was probably Victor Davis Hanson, who is/was a capable historian of classical Greek warfare, and has frankly produced very little other than ideological drivel since the late 1980s.