The debate got off to a pretty rollicking start. Wood called Holton’s book “very malproportioned” and took issue with its focus and premises (he had also blurbed it, which might tell you something about blurbs); Holton, illustrating colonists’ ideas about their place in the empire before 1775, sang a line from Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were.” When Wood claimed Thomas Jefferson had no intention of exterminating Native nations, Holton pounced, quoting a letter in which Jefferson said he did intend extermination. (For some of us, at least, this qualifies as fun stuff.)
The moderator, historian and Massachusetts Historical Society president Catherine Allgor, then focused the discussion. These two historians had recently come at explicit odds, she noted. In July of 2021, a group of historians, including Wood, published an open letter disputing Holton’s claim, made in a Washington Post op-ed, that a desire to protect the institution of slavery was central to the colonists’ decision to rebel against Britain.
That, of course, is also a claim of the 1619 Project. In December of 2019, Wood joined in the crafting of an open letter to the editor of the New York Times Magazine (there’s a lot of open letter–writing going on), objecting to the project’s claim that protecting slavery served as a cause of the Revolution and asking for various editorial corrections. While Holton’s Post op-ed didn’t mention the 1619 Project, in many public statements, mostly on Twitter, he’s been explicit about his intention to defend statements regarding the centrality of slavery to the American decision to rebel, as made by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project’s editor, in her lead article. On his Twitter, Holton has associated Liberty Is Sweet both with Hannah-Jones’ essay and with the imminently forthcoming book The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. As Allgor reminded the two pugilists at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the 1619 Project and its cultural impact provide key context for their contest.
So were Holton and Wood fighting over the role of slavery in causing the American Revolution? Or were they fighting over the relative validity of the 1619 Project, and the impact of both the project and Hannah-Jones’ work in general, on public understandings of American history? Or are those fights now more or less the same fight?
