{"id":26194,"date":"2021-01-20T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-20T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/news\/aha-statement-condemning-report-of-advisory-1776-commission-january-2021\/"},"modified":"2024-06-17T09:08:43","modified_gmt":"2024-06-17T13:08:43","slug":"aha-statement-condemning-report-of-advisory-1776-commission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/news\/aha-statement-condemning-report-of-advisory-1776-commission\/","title":{"rendered":"AHA Statement Condemning Report of Advisory 1776 Commission"},"content":{"rendered":"

The AHA has issued a statement condemning the report<\/a> from \u201cThe President\u2019s Advisory 1776 Commission.\u201d \u201cWritten hastily in one month after two desultory and tendentious \u2018hearings,\u2019\u201d the AHA writes, \u201cwithout any consultation with professional historians of the United States, the report fails to engage a rich and vibrant body of scholarship that has evolved over the last seven decades.\u201d<\/p>\n

47 organizations have signed onto the statement.<\/p>\n

\n

Approved by AHA Council, January 20, 2021<\/em><\/p>\n

The just-released \u201c1776 Report\u201d claims that common understanding of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution can unify all Americans in the love of country. The product of \u201cThe President\u2019s Advisory 1776 Commission,\u201d the report focuses on these founding documents in an apparent attempt to reject recent efforts to understand the multiple ways the institution of slavery shaped our nation\u2019s history. The authors call for a form of government indoctrination of American students, and in the process elevate ignorance about the past to a civic virtue.<\/p>\n

The report actually consists of two main themes. One is an homage to the Founding Fathers, a simplistic interpretation that relies on falsehoods, inaccuracies, omissions, and misleading statements. The other is a screed against a half-century of historical scholarship, presented largely as a series of caricatures, using single examples (most notably the \u201c1619 Project\u201d) to represent broader historiographical trends.<\/p>\n

The sections on the founders envision godlike men who crafted documents that asserted \u201cuniversal and eternal principles of justice and political legitimacy.\u201d Ironically, the report erases whole swaths of the American population-enslaved people, Indigenous communities, and women-the way the founders excluded those groups from the body politic in a wide variety of founding documents as well as actual public practice. In listing threats to the ideals of the nation, the report ignores the Confederate States of America, whose leaders, many clearly guilty of treason, initiated a civil war that claimed more than 700,000 lives-more American lives than all other conflicts in the history of the country combined. Instead, the authors focus on early 20th-century Progressive reformers and bizarrely suggest they were similar to Mussolini and other World War II European fascists. Of particular note is the implied condemnation of Progressive Era legislation\u2014workplace health and safety legislation, regulation of the production of food and drugs, the elimination of child labor, and other social goods we take for granted today.<\/p>\n

The report concludes with a full-throated assault on American universities, which, the authors claim, have produced what they call \u201cdeliberately destructive scholarship.\u201d This scholarship is described as the \u201cintellectual force behind so much of the violence in our cities,\u201d including the \u201cdefamation of our treasured national statues.\u201d The vast majority of targeted statues, as the AHA has noted before<\/a>, honor either men who committed treason by violating oaths of office and taking up arms against the United States government, or whose main historical significance lay in their defense of slavery or other forms of white supremacy.<\/p>\n

Written hastily in one month after two desultory and tendentious \u201chearings,\u201d without any consultation with professional historians of the United States, the report fails to engage a rich and vibrant body of scholarship that has evolved over the last seven decades. Americans across the nation, perhaps including some of the commissioners, have encountered this history not only in books and classrooms, but also at museums, in national parks, and even in their homes as they watch documentaries.<\/p>\n

Though it extols (narrowly defined) family and faith as the ultimate forces for good, the \u201c1776 Report\u201d also observes that the \u201cbedrock upon which the American political system is built is the rule of law.\u201d Yet its condemnation of contemporary social movements ignores recent efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the very institutions enshrined in the Constitution itself.<\/p>\n

The following organizations have cosigned this statement:<\/strong><\/p>\n

American Anthropological Association
\nAmerican Association for State and Local History
\nAmerican Catholic Historical Association
\nAmerican Folklore Society
\nAmerican Library Association
\nAmerican Philosophical Association
\nAmerican Society for Environmental History
\nAmerican Society of Church History
\nAmerican Sociological Association
\nAmerican Studies Association
\nAssociation for Documentary Editing
\nAssociation for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies
\nAssociation for the Study of African American Life and History
\nAssociation of University Presses
\nAustrian and Habsburg History
\nCentral European History Society
\nChinese Historians in United States
\nCollege Art Association
\nCommittee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender History
\nConference on Asian History
\nCoordinating Council for Women in History
\nForum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions
\nFrench Colonial Historical Society
\nGeorgia Association of Historians
\nGerman Studies Association
\nHistorical Society for Twentieth-Century China
\nHungarian Studies Association
\nImmigration and Ethnic History Society
\nMiddle East Studies Association
\nNational Coalition for History
\nNational Council on Public History
\nNew\u00a0England\u00a0Historical\u00a0Association
\nOral History Association
\nOrganization of American Historians
\nPhi Beta Kappa Society
\nPolish American Historical Association
\nRadical History Review
\nShakespeare Association of America
\nSixteenth Century Society & Conference
\nSociety for Advancing the History of South Asia
\nSociety for U.S. Intellectual History
\nSociety of American Archivists
\nSociety of Civil War Historians
\nSouthern Association for Women Historians
\nSouthern Historical Association
\nUrban History Association
\nWestern History Association<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The AHA has issued a statement condemning the report from \u201cThe President\u2019s Advisory 1776 Commission.\u201d \u201cWritten hastily in one month…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":17025,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"AHA Statement Condemning Report of Advisory 1776 Commission","_seopress_titles_desc":"The AHA has issued a statement condemning the report from \u201cThe President\u2019s Advisory 1776 Commission.\u201d","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"aha-topic":[],"month":[552],"geographic-taxonomy":[56],"post-type":[10,613],"thematic-taxonomy":[],"year":[107],"class_list":{"0":"post-26194","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"month-january","8":"geographic-taxonomy-united-states","9":"post-type-advocacy","10":"post-type-history-education","11":"year-107","16":"year-2021","17":"has-featured-image"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26194"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65101,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26194\/revisions\/65101"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"aha-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/aha-topic?post=26194"},{"taxonomy":"month","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/month?post=26194"},{"taxonomy":"geographic-taxonomy","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/geographic-taxonomy?post=26194"},{"taxonomy":"post-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post-type?post=26194"},{"taxonomy":"thematic-taxonomy","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematic-taxonomy?post=26194"},{"taxonomy":"year","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/year?post=26194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}