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Another 4th of July, another demand from conservatives (in this case, a NeverTrump conservative) that Americans embrace a simplistic, filiopietistic understanding of the nation's history or else the sky will fall.
The problem here is that Goldberg has not actually read any of the critics he's trying to dunk on here. Or if he's read them, he's done so incredibly selectively and ungenerously.
My sense is that most of the criticisms he's clutching his pearls over have a genealogy that traces back to Frederick Douglass's iconic "What to the American Slave is the Fourth of July?" speech from 1852. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/999684407509204995?s=20
It's the conservative "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH" approach to history that produces speeches like this from Trump, where Jefferson's ownership of hundreds of human beings is just not even mentioned. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1279251758137540608?s=20
Here's a thread on what conservatives get wrong about how contemporary historians write and think about race, slavery, Native American nations, and the founding of the US. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1164544838835924993?s=20
Thomas Jefferson was a man made out of slaves. Without the unpaid labor of hundreds of humans, Jefferson is not an architect, he's not a President, he's not anything we remember. That doesn't make his words or his work meaningless, but it's essential context.
The folks at Monticello and great historians like @agordonreed and Peter Onuf have spent decades helping us understand how to make sense of the relationship between slavery and the political ideals articulated by Jefferson. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Most_Blessed_of_the_Patriarchs_Thomas_Je/N_t1CQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PP1&printsec=frontcover
To reduce all such efforts to "the founding was only about white supremacy" is unworthy of someone who thinks of themselves as a public intellectual. It makes one sound like a creationist attacking Darwinism: "you just think humans are gorillas! But they're not!"
One of the books that most shaped my thinking on these complexities was published in 1976, 44 years ago. It was written by the most genteel, mild-mannered man you'd ever want to meet, Yale historian Edmund Morgan. https://www.google.com/books/edition/American_Slavery_American_Freedom/04LC5pgEc7IC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PP1&printsec=frontcover
I encountered that book in 1987, when it was assigned in a class by Gordon Wood, hardly some left wing America-hating radical. It's a shame "conservative thought leaders" are so out of touch with the culture they claim to be critiquing, and thus misrepresent it to their readers.
