We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
David Waldstreicher is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A historian of early and nineteenth-century America, he is author of Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (2009), Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (2004), and In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (1997).
Like the 1619 Project, two new books on the Constitution reflect a vigorous debate about what has changed in the American past—and what hasn’t.
Critics of the New York Times’s 1619 Project insist the facts don’t support its proslavery reading of the American Revolution. But they obscure a longstanding debate within the field of U.S. history over that very issue.
A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975. Registered 501(c)(3) organization. Learn more about our mission