Between 2011 and 2015, the New York Times commemorated the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War by publishing, every day for four years, a series of original essays under the generic title “Disunion.” The essays varied in length and subject matter. On dates of significant events — the Battle of Gettysburg, the release of the Emancipation Proclamation — longer, more thoughtful essays appeared. But the standard form was a short piece on a host of topics written by a wide range of scholars within and without the academy. There was a smattering of economic and diplomatic history, and rather more political and military history. Reflecting the current interests of the professoriate, there was a good deal of social history — with particular attention paid, for example, to brief biographies of individual women and ordinary soldiers, especially black soldiers.

“Disunion” was, in many ways, the ideal collaboration of journalism and scholarship. Many of the leading historians of the Civil War era, reflecting a variety of different approaches, were given substantial space in the nation’s premier newspaper. The series, as a whole, was refreshingly undogmatic. “We wanted a multiplicity of perspectives,” the editors at the Times noted, adding that they never “expected to cover the entirety of the war.”¹ By 2015, when the 150th anniversary of the war ended and the series concluded, the most demanding scholars could not help but be impressed by the range and quality of the essays.

The paper’s next major foray into US history, “The 1619 Project,” could not have been more different. Extravagant claims of long-suppressed truth displaced the Times’ earlier, more modest recognition that each generation revises the past and different scholars argue over it. Collaboration was discarded by journalists who arrogantly dismissed any historians who raised substantive objections. The “multiplicity of perspectives” was gone, supplanted by an ideologically driven narrative. Not surprisingly, the 1619 Project was riddled with egregious factual errors. Yet, in some ways, the most startling thing about the project was the utter unoriginality of its claim to have discovered the historical significance of the year 1619. To anyone who earned a PhD in US history after 1965, this claim was almost risible.