I've said this before, but here's my (long) basic take on the historiographic politics of the American Revolution and the #1619Project. I should note before I start that I am on the far Left, politically...
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The "radical, popular, open-ended" American Revolution lit in the 1970s, works by Al Young, Gary Nash, etc., were fundamentally about showing that the political radicalism of their own time - the New Left - was not un-American but in fact had deep U.S. roots
It's worth noting the Communist Party of the USA had as early as the 1930s made similar reaches back in time. They routinely placed the coming socialist revolution as the next step in a liberating American political tradition in the Revolution and the Civil War... anyways...
The bottom-up American Revolution, which (as the lit always stressed) almost went further on slavery, women's rights, etc. was always implicitly an argument that CLASS could get it done - in crucial moments, Foner's Philly artisans, Nash's Boston crowd could be egalitarian.
For a long time, *I* had that same kind of historical-political framework. That is why I went to grad school - to research that kind of stuff (as @jsmolenski well knows!)
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Anyways, @nhannahjones #1619Project, Gerald Horne's Counter-Rev of 1776, Emily Blanck's Tyrannicide, Holton's Forced Founders (which in some ways straddled both sides of the question), Parkinson's Common Cause and other works helped to create a different synthesis of the Rev
In this new one, slavery and white power have not shaped U.S. history because the Revolution remains unfinished, but because an independence movement of slaveholding colonizers could not realistically be expected to create anything but a white republic.
Some folks have generalized this as afropessimism making its way into the historiography of early America, but I don't think most of the authors making this argument really come from that school.
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I think what @nhannahjones and these historians are doing is in fact more valuable for our political moment than the older bottom-up lit. In 2020, we need to center our analyses of the U.S. as a nation of colonizing violence and racial capitalism - starting with 1619 does that.
Moreover, if we are going to explain how we got here, with Trumpist white nationalism and some 40% of the nation that is fundamentally *not* committed culturally or ideologically to democracy, we gotta realize that racist authoritarianism has deep roots. #1619Project does that.
Anyways, that's my take. Would love to know what the sharpest critics on my TL think ( @craigbrucesmith, @earlymodjustice). Or everybody can just take this as late-night rambling which it probably just is.
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