Thursday, April 20, 2023

Resolution

The New York Times book The 1619 Project, and the Hulu video series based on it, are important contributions to our understanding of slavery and the role of African Americans in American history.

For the affirmative:

Woody Holton, the Peter and Bonnie McCausland Professor of American History at the University of South Carolina, is the author of Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (1999), which won the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Social History Award, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (2007), a finalist for the National Book Award, and Abigail Adams (2009), which won the Bancroft Prize. Liberty is Sweet: The Epic of the American Revolution, which Holton wrote as the Huntington Library’s Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow and as a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, was published in 2021 by Simon and Schuster.

For the negative:

Phillip Magness is Senior Research Faculty and Director of Research and Education at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is also a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He holds a PhD and MPP from George Mason University’s School of Public Policy, and a BA from the University of St. Thomas (Houston). Magness’s work encompasses the economic history of the United States and Atlantic world, with specializations in the economic dimensions of slavery and racial discrimination, the history of taxation, and measurements of economic inequality over time. In addition to his scholarship, Magness’s writings have appeared in numerous venues including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, Reason, National Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.