1620 A Critical Response to the 1619 Project - Couverture rigide

Wood, Peter W.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1641771240 ISBN 13 : 9781641771245

Editeur : Encounter Books,USA, 2020

Synopsis

Peter Wood argues against the flawed interpretation of history found in the New York Times’ 1619 Project and asserts that the true origins of American self-government were enshrined in the Mayflower Compact in 1620.

"1620 is a dispassionate, clear reminder that the best in America’s past is still America’s best future." —Amity Shlaes, chair, Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation

"Peter Wood’s pushback against the 1619 Project is at once sharp, illuminating, entertaining, and profound." —Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center

When and where was America founded? Was it in Virginia in 1619, when a pirate ship landed a group of captive Africans at Jamestown? So asserted the New York Times in August 2019 when it announced its 1619 Project. The Times set out to transform history by tracing American institutions, culture, and prosperity to that pirate ship and the exploitation of African Americans that followed. A controversy erupted, with historians pushing back against what they say is a false narrative conjured out of racial grievance.

This book sums up what the critics have said and argues that the proper starting point for the American story is 1620, with the signing of the Mayflower Compact aboard ship before the Pilgrims set foot in the Massachusetts wilderness. A nation as complex as ours, of course, has many starting points, most notably the Declaration of Independence in 1776. But the quintessential ideas of American self-government and ordered liberty grew from the deliberate actions of the Mayflower immigrants in 1620.

Schools across the country have already adopted the Times’ radical revision of history as part of their curricula. The stakes are high. Should children be taught that our nation is a four-hundred-year-old system of racist oppression? Or should they learn that what has always made America exceptional is our pursuit of liberty and justice for all?

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Peter W. Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars. A former professor of anthropology and college provost, he is the author of several books about American culture, including Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (2003) and A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now (2007). He is editor-in-chief of the journal Academic Questions and a widely published essayist. In 2019, he received the Jeane Kirkpatrick Prize for contributions to academic freedom.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Preface: October 1462

When Columbus set foot on Watling’s Island inthe Bahamas on October 12, 1492, he set in trainevents that would change the whole world. He was, ofcourse, confused about his location. He imagined him-self on the outskirts of Asia, which is about twelve thousandmiles west of Watling’s Island – half the circumferenceof the Earth. Scholars believe Columbus erred by relyingon old books that estimated latitude in Arab miles, whichhe mistook for shorter Roman miles.

In September 1999, another long-distance voyagefailed for similar reasons. Ten months earlier, NASA hadfired off the Mars Climate Orbiter. The $125 million devicereached Mars but immediately disintegrated. The designteam, led by Lockheed Martin Astronautics, had builtthe machine using English units of measurement – inchesand feet – while the navigation team at the Jet PropulsionLaboratory did its calculations in the metric system.

NASA’s accident left a lot of red-faced engineers.Columbus’s accident led to Europeans’ discovering corn,tomatoes, tobacco, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers,pumpkins, peanuts, vanilla, blueberries, and chocolateamong some ninety New World crops. These were part ofwhat is now called the Columbian Exchange. Material items flowed in both directions. The New World peoplessoon had rice, citrus fruits, and bananas brought byEuropeans – and exotic animals including horses, don-keys, mules, pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, chickens, cats, andlarger breeds of dogs. Europeans also introduced West-ern technology, including wheeled vehicles and moreadvanced metallurgy.

These days Columbus is more often excoriated thanhe is celebrated. His accusers emphasize that native peoples had little immunity to the diseases that Europeansbrought with them, and the death rates from the result-ing epidemics were appalling. Moreover, in the wake ofColumbus’s discoveries came brutal Spanish adventurersintent on coercing labor and extracting every bit ofwealth they could from the local inhabitants. Columbus,in fact, and at least some Spanish clerics and officials,tried hard to protect native people but failed to impedethe demographic disaster that followed contact. Theyalso could not stop the orgy of rape, murder, and plunder, documented by the Dominican friar Bartolome´ delas Casas in a series of reports – giving rise to the “BlackLegend” of Spanish cruelty in the New World.1 TheSpanish, and soon the Portuguese, saw the opportunityto impose forced labor on the natives. Slavery, first in themines and soon on plantations, became part of theColumbian Exchange.

Slavery itself, however, was nothing new to the NewWorld. It was an institution familiar to many native societies in both North and South America. These popula-tions had been enslaving one another, as far as we cantell, from time immemorial, and forced labor was farfrom the worst of it. Captured people fed the almostindustrial level of human sacrifice at the center of theAztec Empire. Some New World peoples captured and kept their enemies for rituals and the sport of tortureand, in the case of cannibalistic societies, to maintain amobile food supply. Corte´s could not have capturedTenochtitla´n without the aid of tens of thousands ofindigenous allies who had been suffering under theAztecs’ brutal imperial rule.

As Europeans learned of these hideous customs, theywere relieved of any qualms they had about extractinglabor from or forcing Christian conversion on the peoplethey encountered. Better to have your beating heart rippedout of your chest by a masked man with an obsidianknife, or to kneel to a painted image of the Virgin Mary?

Native peoples saw the Europeans as fair game forslavery as well. We have, for example, the account of A´lvarNu´n~ez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish nobleman and would-be conquistador who served as the treasurer of the ill-fated Narva´ez Expedition in 1528. De Vaca and somethree hundred compatriots intended to conquer Floridabut were shipwrecked on the Florida coast. Withinmonths, all but sixty died; by spring 1529, fifteen wereleft, and soon just four. They survived because they wereenslaved by the local Indians and were traded from tribeto tribe, based on their skills as faith healers. After eightyears of this, they escaped to Mexico. De Vaca’s description of what he saw (Adventures in the Unknown Interior ofAmerica) is a key source for anthropologists – of which Iam one – and it is among other things testimony to howthoroughly established slavery was in the New Worldlong before any possible influence of Europeaninterlopers.

The year 1492 changed the world, but not by introducing slavery to the Americas. Slavery was already here.The Spanish initially embraced the idea of enslavingnative people, but then thought better of it. First, the Laws of Burgos, adopted in 1512, attempted to restrainthe Spanish abuse of indigenous people. But in 1542,with the issuing of the New Laws of the Indies for theGood Treatment and Preservation of the Indians, theSpanish liberated the Native Americans from this yoke:

We ordain and command that from henceforward for no causeof war nor any other whatsoever, though it be under title ofrebellion, nor by ransom nor in other manner can an Indianbe made a slave, and we will that they be treated as our vas-sals of the Crown of Castile since such they are.

The exact meaning of this is debated by historians. Itseems the Spanish crown wanted to roll back the encomienda, a form of servitude slightly different from theplantation slavery we are more familiar with. The encomienda gave Spanish holders of land-grants the rightto demand tribute and forced labor from the localinhabitants. 

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Encounter Books,USA
• Date d'édition: 2020
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1641771240
• ISBN 13: 9781641771245
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 262
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
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