Precarious Quality

 

                                                Precarious Quality

More on the horrible 1619 Project, this from Magness:

"To the extent that historians informed the project’s discussion of the crucial period between 1775 and 1865, the Times has remained entirely non-transparent. Hannah-Jones has declined to specify which experts she consulted for her essay, and the only public acknowledgment of any outside review to date has come from Leslie Harris, the historian the Times recruited to fact-check her arguments about slavery’s role in the American Revolution – and then promptly ignored when Harris advised against publishing the claim. Desmond’s essay sources its interpretation to seven academic historians who are quoted in the article. Yet all seven are affiliated with the “New History of Capitalism” (NHC) movement – an insular and ideological school of slavery scholars that emerged in the last decade, and that has fared poorly under scrutiny of its own arguments about slavery’s economic dimensions. Desmond’s essay is, at best, a sloppy cribbing of NHC arguments that most other economists and non-NHC historians of slavery already found wanting and rejected."

Buried in this pointed, goal-oriented politics disguised as scholarship is the denigration of academic quality. This kind of behavior disallows any standards.