I have a much shorter and less historically complex contribution than those offered thus far, but I think it's an important thing to raise in this particular context - not just the short-lived 1776 Commission, but also the feature itself: 'Monday Methods'.

As noted above, the 1776 Commission has been almost universally panned by historians, including by some of the profession's most prestigious organisations (who are not usually prone to making partisan statements on behalf of members). A common response here is that historians are engaging in gatekeeping, looking down on and belittling the efforts of those who lack the right credentials and dismissing the validity of their perspectives on the past. In this sense, the reaction to the 1776 Commission might appear like a profession jealously guarding its own territory and truths against outsiders, afraid that they might lose control of the narrative.

These kinds of responses are hardly unique to the current situation. It's a common cry raised by conspiracy theorists, denialists and other purveyors of alternative forms of 'knowledge' - the very institutionalisation of the historical profession renders their collective judgement untrustworthy, that their dismissal of outside perspectives reflects their insecurity in the face of critique. By making ad hominem attacks about credentials rather than dealing with the arguments and evidence on its merits, so this line of thinking goes, the intellectual weakness of the historical profession is exposed.

Such arguments can find plenty of willing ears - there is a common instinct to want to access and even spread 'forbidden' knowledge that those in power don't want you to know (which is why even historians get a little excited about accessing classified documents!). Sunlight, so the saying goes, is the best disinfectant - why should alternative perspectives not be heard, debated and tested, so that people can decide for themselves if they're wrong rather than have historians merely proclaim it?

There are some big problems that underpin these responses, however. For one, the idea that equal public exposure is the best way to arbitrate truth is... problematic. It's vital to acknowledge that the goal of most alternative narratives is not actually to engage in truth-seeking conversation, but rather to win followers and influence. If 95% of the audience assesses both sides of the 'debate' and sides with reality, that's still a victory, because 5% of an audience adds up over time. What these ideas need and seek are platforms and ways to spread, and honest efforts to engage amplify the problem.

The other major issue with these arguments is that they mistake methodological critique for ad hominem attack. Contrary to the beliefs of the kinds of people who authored this Commission, historians tend to like controversy and revisionism in their fields - if nothing else, it makes the discussions more interesting, and by challenging the status quo, bold new work holds the promise of leading to useful advances in our understanding of the past even if we don't end up agreeing with it. New narratives - including new conservative narratives! - about the American past are proposed all the time, and are engaged with productively by historians of different ideological views.

However, for this revisionist work to be useful, it needs to play by the same fundamental rules as the scholarship it challenges. The 1776 Commission makes no pretence of doing so - it does not relate itself to alternative perspectives, acknowledge other scholarship or even provide sources for most of its claims. It is a grand piece of assertion, that deals with evidence and scholarship that flatly contradicts it by ignoring it. This runs completely contrary to the work of actual historians - who may well have their biases and differences of interpretation, but agree on the fundamental importance of dealing with sources directly and honestly to arrive at and support their conclusions.

What this means is that a direct discussion between the authors of this Commission and historians lacks purpose, because the authors have been already been manifestly clear in not engaging in that conversation when they wrote their report. In fact, 'alternative' histories are usually not written to be in conversation with historians, or to try and convince historians of the validity of the points being raised, precisely because the claims and methods look ridiculous to any historian with an advanced knowledge of the subject. These works are written for a sympathetic audience, one for whom the narrative being peddled is already appealing for whatever reason, and for whom the limitations of the methods and evidence is either not a dealbreaker (if they buy into the same worldview as the author) or not apparent enough to raise alarm bells - what the reader tends to be after is a veneer of evidence and plausibility sufficient to confirm their existing beliefs.

What historians are critiquing, therefore, is not the identity of the authors and their lack of credentials, but their unwillingness to use historical methodology honestly. The AskHistorians project itself is evidence that credentials are not required to engage productively and critically with historical narratives. We moderate content based purely on users' ability to demonstrate their ability to use the historical method, not on their credentials or job titles, and as a result are home to a thriving community of scholars both with and without those credentials. The people you see here dismissing the validity of the 1776 Commission are not hypocrites - rather, they are applying that exact same standard: the demonstrated (in)ability to use the historical method.

When Unity Equals Acquiescence

Remember the old Grant Hill Sprite commercial? Hill drinks a Sprite, dribbles the ball, and dunks on an outdoor, chain-net basket while a younger man observes him. The looker-on then drains his Sprite, nails a long shot with the can into the trash, dribbles, and takes to the air. But his journey ends by planting the ball into the front rim, falling far short of his planned Hillian dunk.

“Image is Nothing. Thirst is Everything. Obey your Thirst.”

The authors of the 1776 report want you to ignore this message. Or at least the first statement. They might as well retitle the project, “Image is everything. Reality is nothing. Obey the Image.”

When it comes to one of the Trump administration’s final public acts, even the timing screams that all the former President’s hangers-on were all image and no substance. By releasing their report on MLK day, they intentionally attempted to present the report as victoriously casting aside an overreaching and weak civil rights movement. Again, image is everything.

It does not matter that the report has no historical legitimacy or that its authors seemingly cannot maintain basic undergraduate standards of citations. What matters is that, to those who already bought in, they seem victorious. They seem like they are fighting. They seem manly.

But it is important that we actually know history. That we think critically. That we understand Edward Murrow’s famous statement that “we are not descended from fearful men.” Then we can see the reality of the situation.

We can understand that in its attempt to dunk on MLK, the Trump administration hit the front of the rim and swiftly fell back onto the court in futility.

I leave it to my colleagues at Askhistorians to parse out the numerous ways that this report fails at maintaining the barest minimum of historical validity. What I want to discuss is one topic: unity.

The 1776 report declares its entirely unsupported statements as “unifying” and the accounts of professional historians “divisive” at least 9 times over the course of the 20 pages of the body of the document. Its authors depicted progressivism, critical race theory, academia, and the historical profession itself as a threat to the so-called “principles of America” that the document purported to defend. They declare that only agreement with the Founder’s ideals can bring unity.

I want to demonstrate that modern conservatives have long used cries of “unity” to silence minority and opposing voices in their long, 70+ year assault on progressivism in the United States. When they say unity, they mean the enforcement of anti-democratic policies and the maintenance of white supremacy.

I will use a single example to demonstrate that Americans have often chosen a unity of acquiescence to racism and discrimination in order to avoid conflict and responsibility.

Part 1/3

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One of the jobs of a historian is to confront the lies and tell the uncomfortable truths, in the oft-vain hope that the latter might destroy the former. We don’t necessarily delight in discomfiting friends, relatives, or strangers who happen to read us on the internet. It just happens. There are many reasons why that’s so, right down to how any academic field has to deal with popular misconceptions. When those misconceptions have a lot of cultural power behind them and people are very invested in their persistence, they come with an urgency to be corrected and fierce resistance to that correcting.

This does not mean that we are perfect; historians themselves, past and present, have contributed to the same lies that we try to fight. They are often familiar to us from our youngest days, learned from parents and taught in our schools. We read them in our textbooks and on our monuments. They are as much a part of our culture as yours, embedded in how we imagine ourselves and others right down to the level of the language we speak.

We are all from somewhere and historians are as human as anyone else. Your present author grew up reading history textbooks. They excited him and so he developed a fascination that, through many detours, led to him referring to himself in the third person just now, at this place on the internet. The issues I grapple with here are common in the discipline and nowhere more fraught, at least in the public sphere, than where they tend most strongly to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted.

I am a white cis dude who grew up in a small town in the American Midwest. The history I read in my textbooks told me that “the Indians” came to the Americas long ago in the distant past we need not worry much about. There were a whole lot of them and then they mostly died out from disease. Somehow this disease wiped out most of two continents of people who were then unable to ever recoup their numbers despite many sources, including those of white men, telling us that they survived in great numbers and for the centuries after Europeans arrived and, indeed, survive to this day.

They were then dismissed in order to tell me the true story of America’s birth: A few Vikings went sailing and found Iceland, then Greenland, then Vinland. They all went away or died and also didn’t matter much, but it was important that we know that they discovered it and not the people whom they may have called skraelings who just happened to have lived there for thousands of years prior, apparently without noticing that they themselves existed in a particular place until a white man came along to let them know.

That version is absurd on its face, a direct contradiction of facts stated in the narrative itself. You cannot be the first person to discover something if someone else got there before you did and you absolutely cannot if they had a thousands of years head start on you and their ancestors literally met you there. But the contradiction is unremarked in the text and as a child one tends to believe what one reads in textbooks because in school this is essentially one’s main job. America began with white Europeans, who arrived on an empty continent because the narrative does not treat anyone else as really worthy of consideration. Native Americans literally do not count. This is not spelled out, but it is taught all the same.

For the United States, we can slice this more finely still. Native Americans obviously do not count, except when the genocides are too obvious to simply deny outright. Nor to Europeans who colonized the Caribbean basin, except insofar as they’re a prologue to the real story that really, really counts: The United States did not begin at St. Augustine down in Florida, or at that spot lost to history where someone walked across the Bering Land Bridge and first set foot on soil still above sea level. America, meaning the US, begins when Englishmen have a misadventure at Roanoke and then settle down in an abysmal swamp in Virginia where they nearly starve. This is where “our” story begins, though that too is not quite good enough. Colonial Virginia is a prologue to the extra-real story of religious dissenters who arrive in the new (to them) world not for fame or fortune but to worship their god in the way they saw fit and make sure their neighbors did too, no exceptions.

These are the sacrifices we make to nationalist history, or what we might call feel-good history for white Americans. They are intellectual, in that we sacrifice a fuller knowledge of the past in order to create a tidy narrative of righteous pilgrims who aim to create the envy of the world and, so the subtext goes, did so by birthing the glorious wonder that is us. Yet sacrifices are not only intellectual. The narrative I have sketched out for you is profoundly, to its very core, a narrative of racial hatred. The history of the American people does not include any but White Americans, to the degree that calling them white is a redundancy. To put it simply, this is the story white Americans tell themselves and it literally begins: “This is the history of our people, not others whom we do not deem people.”

If we did, then America-the-continents was discovered long before a Viking sighted it on the horizon. It would be a story full of the painful contradictions between vaunted rhetoric and genocidal, enslaving reality and also the real suffering wrought by those horrors upon actual people by other actual people. The nationalist history of the United States is not a history of the American people because so many are deemed to meet neither description and therefore are further fit to have history done unto them, good and hard.

Much more could be said about how White Americans have done their history to Native Americans, though I am not competent to do so. In discussing origins we must discuss them, but it behooves every historian to know that our knowledge is not universal. We have far more competent flairs to tell that side of the story. With utmost respect, I must defer to them.

I study the intersection between American politics and the nation’s other great crime against humanity: the forced and often murderous transfer of millions of Africans across the Atlantic to these shores, where they and their posterity were then enslaved by white Americans in a regime of violence, torture, and rape older than the nation in which I now write but bound so tightly to the core of it that I need not reach far to find the echoes of proslavery rhetoric long after the legal demise of enslavement, I can instead find them quoted nearly verbatim.

In many ways, this should be no surprise. If the United States began at Jamestown, as our story says it does, then enslaved people arrived there as early as 1619. Their precise status in Virginia at the time is difficult to ascertain and the subject of a long-running and possibly unresolvable historical debate. Jamestown was founded by Englishmen in 1607, so if it is America then America was free of slavery for maybe no more than twelve years. Slavery was certainly extant by the 1650s, when two indentured whites and one black man ran away together, were found and captured, and the black man alone had his service extended to the duration of his life. If we go by that metric, then you can push this era of no enslaving to around three decades...unless you include Massachusetts also where legalized slavery dawned somewhat sooner.

Either way, enslaving of Africans and their posterity then persisted in the United States, enshrined in the laws and constitutions and inscribed deep on the hearts of white men and women and forced on the bodies of black men and women for that day and every subsequent one until 1865, a span of perhaps two hundred thirty-six years. The American nation, as reckoned from the Declaration of Independence onward, will turn two hundred forty-five this summer. If we count also while abolition was a monumental change in the status of Black Americans, it remains true that white Americans then embarked on a campaign of violence and terror which, through the acquiescence and sometimes eager cooperation of other white Americans, reduced them to a state as near to being re-enslaved as could be managed, in which they remained for another century, the picture is more dire still. And that is to say nothing of the steady erosion of civil rights protections in recent decades.

This is not a story comforting to White Americans so we largely prefer to skate by it. Our narrative have traditionally and conventionally treated anyone who is not deemed adequately white as trivial, worthy of mention only when they can be constructed into an enemy to be vanquished or fit into a story by which we may congratulate ourselves on being somewhat less viciously racist than ancestors so distant and remote unto us that every American reading this post has probably had conversations with dozens of them over the course of our lives.

After reading the document (and after I considered trepannation to keep my head from exploding at some of the contents), one of the themes I noticed in between the constant assaults on academic history was its take on what constitutes appropriate education.

At one point (pp. 35-6) the document contrasts antebellum education with teaching from the late 19th century onwards. It portrays education of the Good Old Days as a body of "transcendent knowledge and practical wisdom that had been passed down for generations" as a means of shaping students' character by instilling "virtue" and teaching them things that were "true, good, or beautiful," those broadly defined to refer to the national mythology the authors are pushing in general.

In contrast, it describes education from the late 1800s onwards as utopian and as shaping students to fit the state's goals by "engineer[ing] the way students think" to adapt to a suddenly-protean human nature.

Leaving aside the obvious issue that "develop the character and intellect of the student" and "engineer the way students think" are basically synonymous aside from one being worded to sound nefarious, I was wondering if any AHers could speak to the report's portrayal of education at this time in general. Is the authors' take on how education worked in that time period as, ah, off-base as the rest of the history in the report? Is the contrast between early 19th and late 19th (and subsequent) education as stark as they describe, or are we looking at a hamfisted tradition-versus-modernity line in the sand that just happened to be drawn through the Civil War?

(Or perhaps this should be a top-level post/question instead of part of this thread?)

I hate to be nitpicky but shouldn't "Ghanese" be "Ghanian"?

I've had a tab open since the planning of this Monday Methods thread began, trying to figure out the best way to structure a comment that wasn't just one run-on sentence filled with expletives. The biggest hurdle to writing a useful comment is that the gap between what happens in schools and what the authors of the Report think happens in school is dramatically, almost amusingly, wide.

Also open in my browser was an article from The New York Times about the pandemic with the headline, "13,000 school districts, 13,000 approaches to teaching during COVID." As soon as it came out, various people who work in and around American education pointed out on social media that one could drop the phrase "during COVID" and it would apply to nearly every topic related to education, including curriculum and instruction which the 1776 Report claims to be interested in.

To complicate matters, not only is the approach to what gets taught and how it gets taught different in every district (and between private schools and parents who homeschool and could even be different between two teachers who teach the same grade level/subject in the same school), but each school has its own history, shaped by its geographical location in the state and country (/u/Kugelfang52's answer in this thread provides one such example.) u/zeeblecroid picked up on the Report authors' interest in flattening those complex histories into a single narrative, which doesn't make the authors unique in terms of how people think about or talk about American education history and history education. We often get questions on here where people ask about things taught in American schools - why something is or is not taught - and most times, I have to start with a context about the 10th Amendment and the tension between national patterns and the implications of a system that is locally controlled (this discussion about Barbary slaves is an example.)

There are, though, always exceptions to every rule. In the 1990s, two education historians, David Tyack and Larry Cuban coined the phrase "grammar of schooling." They used the phrase to describe the phenomenon where despite the fact there are 13,000 school districts in these United States, schools and the things that happen in them are the same in most schools and mark them as identifiable as a school. (More on that here in this question about Holocaust education in American schools.) This "grammar of schooling" is helpful for us to identify and recognize one of the exceptions to the 13,000 rule: Americana.

u/idontwantaname123 used the phrase "feel good" history and that is, in a nutshell, what Americana is about. The nature of who is meant to feel good about what can help us understand what makes The 1619 Project fundamentally different than the 1776 "Report" (Minor personal indulgence. It's not a report. It's barely a book report. It's mortifying that it was published. Gah.) For generations, going back to the mid-1800s, the "grammar of schooling" including teaching students about the Great Men of America (typically starting with Columbus), Manifest Destiny, Washington and his cherry tree, Ben Franklin and his key and a kite, Jefferson the inventor, and then Lincoln and his log cabin, etc., etc. Although the general sentiment was described as teaching children patriotism and citizenship, it very much was/is as u/commiespaceinvader describes in the title, nationalism. Likewise, as u/freedmenspatrol said, "if you are a white American you were almost certainly trained from an early age to be a white supremacist."

To be sure, there have been teachers in American schools who worked to teach a different narrative. Instead of focusing on Manifest Destiny, they taught the histories and lives of the Indigenous people who were displaced and murdered by white explorers and gold-seekers. Rather than focus on the myths of the founders, they encourage(d) students to hold multiple conflicting ideas in mind at the same time. Black educators especially shifted the focus from the founders to the histories, lives, and aspirations of freed and enslaved Africans brought to America (a bit more on that here in an answer about textbooks.) They were (and are) the exception, not the rule as the teaching as long been coded as women's work, mostly white. These demographic patterns have two distinct consequences. First, there's the prevailing sentiment among white Americans that there's history - and then there's Black history. Which is to say, generations of white women didn't see a need or urgency to teach a more complex, complicated history. So, there was no need for a formal national intervention or guidance about what history to teach; generations of white teachers taught what they learned in school and were comfortable with (apple trees, pledge, etc. etc.) Second, there's the fundamental truth that white women are active participants in shoring up white supremacy. The work of historians like McRae in her book, Mothers of Massive Resistance make that plain.

Both of these histories - the history of Americana in schools AND the work of teachers of color, teachers at Freedom Schools, those at reservation schools, and more - are reflected in The 1619 Project and the 1776 "Report." The various parts and pieces of the Project, plus the supporting curriculum were about explicitly centering Black Americans in American history. It moved white Americans from the center to the margins in ways big and small but it did so while embedding themes of patriotism and citizenship. In other words, the Project was about stating it plainly that Black Americans are Americans.

There have been a handful of other 1776-esque projects released and announced since The 1619 Project that are meant to be a response and claim to tell a "true" version of history. They are various levels of bad. Some of them are very, very bad. The 1776 Commission and Report, though, is the "official" version because it came from the White House. In effect, what it sought to do was "correct" the histories brought up in the 1619 Project (as an aside, it should be said plainly that when people critique the project they OVERWHELMINGLY focus on a single essay written by a Black journalist focused on her father's experiences. The multiple essays by men, including one by a high profile white male historian, are often ignored.

Remember how back at the beginning I said that education in the United States is locally controlled? What makes Americana so powerful is that it didn't come about by mandates or scripted curriculum. It was generations and generations of white teachers (mostly women, mostly cis, mostly non-disabled) repeating the same messages around what America is or supposed to be and who it belongs to under the guise of teaching history (and later Social Studies.) Although the Pledge to the Flag (more on the pledge here) was eventually codified by Congress, patriotic routines were common in schools, beginning in the 1840s.

To put it another way, The 1619 Project shook people in the American government. Nikole Hannah-Jones' idea - despite access to zero levers of control and the fact the free curriculum that goes with the project is more about journalism than history - so frightened those who wanted to see Americana endure in the form they were taught as children and were comfortable with as adults, they formed a commission and released an entire report, which several of the commenters in this thread have done a beautiful job lacerating. Some interesting pieces that make the connection between the two documents and history education include this one by Hogeland, this by Wilson, and while this piece is about Betsy DeVos, Laats gets into the long history of the right working to influence what gets taught in schools.

All of that said, it's easy to think the 1776 "Report" is harmless. However, about half the states in the country are textbook mandate states. This means that a state board determines which textbooks teachers use and there are leaders in those states who are big fans of the Report. They're also trying to ban the use of the 1619 Project in schools. Lawmakers from these states are also working to pass laws that ban trans children from participating in sports or require children use a particular bathroom. Some are trying to ban "ethnic study" courses and even in states where leaders will ignore the Report, there are efforts to defend racist school mascots and arrest parents who enroll their child in the "wrong" district. While it may seem like these things are unrelated, it's a reminder that the struggle over what is meant by "public" in public education is not a settled matter. We're still battling over who is for, much less what school is for - which means it's going to take an incredible amount of work and effort to pushback against the gravitational pull that is Americana.

One thing I love about history is having my preconceptions blown apart. You think this thing was the cause of an event? Sike! It was this!

This 1776 garbage is completely the opposite. Don’t want to engage critically with your country’s past? Here’s a nice soothing bottle of propaganda telling you everything is fine, you don’t have to feel uncomfortable.

Grow up.

PS mods I hope this okay since it’s not a question post pleasedontbanme

I don’t disagree that the 1776 commission seems like garbage and that it’s disgraceful such a commission was put forward by the office of the president.

That being said (and I say this not as a historian so I understand my view will be taken with a grain of salt) it also seems clear to me that the 1619 project was ideologically motivated and that it has many historical inaccuracies in it as well. Is this not the case? I must say as an outside observer this appears to be a situation where collegiate left leaning bias has honed in on one tragedy while ignoring (or at the very least not getting as upset by) another.

So to be clear are historians saying that the actual specific facts claimed in the piece or false or that the interpretations and reasons for creating the piece are problematic?

If there are actual specific facts being challenged, what are they?

The way you explain the concepts of groupism and ethnopolitical entrepreneurship, it seems like one could get the impression (and this may not be the intention behind the idea) that there is a contrast between group identity, which is always in a sense a social fiction, and historical fact; that ethnopolitical entrepreneurs build nationalities and give them a sense of historical purpose, but historians engaged in good historical research, because they must be critical and because nationality is invented, not pre-existing, must always be undermining the historical narratives propping up national identity. In this view, any work in the field of history that is honest and done in good faith will inevitably tend to destroy a sense of shared historical identity and the shared sense of purpose and values that go with it. The implications for society, which depends on a minimal commitment to certain shared values, are bad.

Is there a way out of this bind? Is it possible to use history to build group identities in a way that is historically honest?

Thank you for posting this! I recently took a class on nationalism and Brubaker was one of our textbooks so I appreciate seeing him around more. One of the key concepts discussed was wether nations actually have navels in a sense

Is the commission a rehash of standard talking points from the right, or is there anything new at all advanced, included disingenuous appropriation of contemporary scholarship? Also did it take a side in the pins vs saltpeter debate?