Race and the Constitution: Liberal Historians Correct the Left

Sean Wilentz and Eric Foner are both eminent American historians and men of the left. Wilentz, now nearing retirement at Princeton, has made his name as a fervent reformist, often with sharp words for radicals farther to the left who are impatient of the political system—including an incandescent critique of the Obama-ite approach to politics during the 2008 Democratic primaries. Foner, retired from Columbia, has championed a more radical vision of American history—one strongly influenced by Marxist historians, although not bespoke to the party line. Wilentz’s specialty is antebellum America; Foner’s Reconstruction.

Both historians are now at least slightly out of joint with the latest historical initiative of the left—the New York Times’s 1619 Project, whose tale of American history is slavery, oppression, and ideals that were false when they were written. Wilentz’s No Property in Man and Foner’s