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Princeton’s Sean Wilentz is one of five historians who sent a letter to the NY Times last month requesting that the paper address factual errors in the 1619 Project. In response, the NY Times published the letter along with a lengthy response denying that any corrections were necessary. Today, Wilentz has written a piece for the Atlantic in which he addresses three false claims in the 1619 Project in more detail. He begins with the claim by lead-author Nikole Hannah-Jones that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted...

We write as historians to express our strong reservations about important aspects of The 1619 Project. The project is intended to offer a new version of American history in which slavery and white supremacy become the dominant organizing themes. The Times has announced ambitious plans to make the project available to schools in the form of curriculums and related instructional material. We applaud all efforts to address the enduring centrality of slavery and racism to our history. Some of us have devoted our entire professional lives to those efforts, and all of us have worked hard to advance them. Raising...

The racist skeletons in Charles Pickering's closetPresident Bush dumped Trent Lott because of his segregationist baggage. So why is he fighting relentlessly for a judge who has refused to come clean about his own bigoted past? - - - - - - - - - - - -By Sean WilentzMay 12, 2003  | When Senate Democrats voted last March to reject Judge Charles Pickering's nomination to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Majority Leader Trent Lott called the vote "a slap at Mississippi, my state." In fact, the bitter party-line vote on Pickering revolved around the same issues that...

In the fall of 1998, testifying before the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz prophesied that history would regard as "zealots" and "fanatics" members who sincerely believed they had good reason to vote to impeach President Clinton. In November 2000, days after the presidential election ended in stalemate, Wilentz assembled a bizarre group that included some of our nation's top professors of constitutional law (including Bruce Ackerman, Ronald Dworkin, and Cass Sunstein) mixed together with actors and other celebrities (including Robert De Niro, Rosie O'Donnell, and Bianca Jagger) and persuaded them to sign...