Versions of this interpretation can be found in much of the scholarship into the origins and character of the Revolution that has marked the past 40 years or so of early American historiography — in part because historians of the past few decades have increasingly scrutinized the role of slavery and the agency of enslaved people in driving events of the Revolutionary period.
Whoops.
Question: What do you do when a dragon exposes its soft underbelly?
Answer: You swing your axe right at that underbelly with every last ounce of strength you have.
I have said (and it was not very long ago) that The New York Times, in running with this 1619 Project, has jumped the shark. I'm now more certain of that than ever. They have (without realizing it) told us the very weapon that will destroy them.
The way to win against this 1619 Project is very simple: Everybody go grab your shovels! We have some historians to go dig up. I mean by this, of course, older and larger libraries (particularly but not limited to the north east, such as university libraries, or the Library of Congress) that contain plenty of these history books from decades prior. This is a massive information leak that has farther reaching implications than what anybody can see in this moment.
This is the bottom line. If the Times only wants to focus on historians in the last 40 or so years, then the remaining historians from years prior present a problem to them.
Let's amplify that problem. But since they are all dead, they aren't going to be showing up on TV. We need to drag them out from the libraries and hit that soft underbelly right where it hurts most.
