Thread by @Paul_E_Cohen

on the one hand, the @nytimes in-depth piece on Haitian 'reparations' to France brings much-needed attention onto a decisive moment in world history -- and its argument that the neocolonial constraints imposed by FR and US on Haiti has helped keep ...

nytimes.com/2022/05/20/wor…

is spot on, and needs to be communicated forcefully to audiences in US and France

on the other hand, the NYT's presentation of this as a "mystery" that its intrepid reporters have only now unraveled is, at the very least, troubling. This is a dimension of Haitian, French and ...

Atlantic history well-known to historians. We are well into the second generation of scholars doing great work on Caribbean, Atlantic and colonial history - including historians working specifically on debt/reparations

tbf, NYTimes should be applauded for providing ...

a lengthy discussion of sources and their research methods (link here)

but as the (very) lengthy discussion of historiography suggests, this is hardly new terrain that the Grey Lady decided to venture onto

Indeed, specialists in the field will ...
nytimes.com/2022/05/20/wor…

immediately detect just how selective and partial the list of historians here is, and just how many scholars working on these questions have been left out

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the Times goes further though, describing with no small amount of chest-thumping the extensive archival research they conducted

The reporters and their research assistants can only be applauded for "opening the hood" onto their methods, and explaining to readers what ...
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historical research in fact consists of

but what the NYT has done is precisely that -- no more and no less than what all historians do. And no more than what dozens upon dozens of PhD students and historians working on Saint-Domingue, Haiti, the Haitian Revolution, ...

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and the histories of capitalism, colonialism and empire have been doing for decades

I can't help but feel that their work in the archives, their analysis, their arguments, and their voices have largely been silenced here

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to a certain extent, the article's section on "Secondary Sources" is framed in a way that functions to _legitimate_ the journalists' claims about the originality and importance of their work

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consider one example: the piece invokes economist Thomas Piketty, as having verified the total amount of the reparations Haiti paid to France

he's cited elsewhere briefly, but you wouldn't know it from this piece that Piketty devotes a whole chapter of his ...

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Capital et idéologie to reparations not just in France, but in Britain and US (where the national governments compensated slave-owners with taxpayer funds). Piketty makes even bigger claims about the world-historical importance of these wealth transfers than the NYT does

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it's kind of stunning to realize that Eric Williams' classic Capitalism and Slavery isn't mentioned anywhere in the piece

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That the book - whose arguments about the centrality of Caribbean slavery in the origins of modern capitalism proved deeply influential - was published in ... 1944 reminds us that the broader questions the NYT is asking aren't quite as novel as the paper would like to suggest
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that Williams played a decisive role in Trinidad & Tobago's fight for independence, and served as that country's first prime minister, also reminds us that longstanding historical understandings have long played a crucial political role in the Caribbean

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let me be clear: I don't mean this to be an exercise in boundary policing (journalists, stay in your lane!). I think it's great that the Times is giving space to subjects like this

I thought the 1619 Project a wonderful initiative - it wasn't perfect, but it brought ...

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50 years (more?) of historiographical reflection on the history and legacy of slavery in US into the public sphere, and launched an important national conversation

But there is a big difference between the 1619 Project and the Times' latest endeavor

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the 1619 Project was a polyvocal project which encompassed contributions from authors writing in a variety of capacities -- including historians. The Project as a whole made no claims to having 'uncovered' a heretofore 'unknown' past that had been overlooked by historians ...
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it gave historians' credit where credit was due

here, it seems to me the NYT's authors have taken most of the credit, and have given short shrift to historians, in two ways

First, to individual historians who have already covered this ground, done a lot of this archival ...
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work, made these arguments, and sought to bring the implications of this historical reality and their research to bear in order to sway public policy with regards to Haiti

Second, to the historical discipline as a whole --

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This - what the Times has done here, ask historical questions, delve into archives, make sense of primary sources, reconstruct what happened and why, and what it means - is precisely what historians do for a living ...

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(those, at least, who are fortunate enough to have found a paying gig). At a moment in the US (and elsewhere) when the historical profession is in crisis -- evaporation of tenure-track teaching positions in higher ed, politicized attacks from right against history (CRT, ...
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history of slavery, capitalism, women/gender history etc.), crash in social capital associated with the history major & drop in student enrolments in history classes, etc. -- to at once proclaim grandly the importance of serious historical scholarship ...

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both for deepening our understanding of the past, and shedding light on our present, as the NY Times as done here, and to soft-pedal the crucial contributions of specific historians, and basically to pass over in silence the fact that whole new fields have sprung up ...

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in recent decades to investigate precisely the questions raised by the Times piece (Atlantic history? colonial/postcolonial history? new history of capitalism? if the Times mentioned these fields, I missed it) is to throw up another few rows of bricks atop the wall ...
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separating the historical discipline off from the public sphere, especially in the United States

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what is to be done?

first, venues like NYT should definitely continue to devote space to historical questions - I think that's great

second, they should give credit where credit is due. This is in part a question of framing -- of communicating clearly to readers that ...
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the ideas, arguments, and material being presented may be new with regards to national conversations, they aren't new to historians -- and that historians have been working on and thinking hard about these questions

It also means specifically crediting historians for ...

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their work -- their ideas, research, arguments, conclusions. This is a matter of fairness, of accuracy, of rigor, and of ethics. This wasn't done here, and I can't help but feel that the Times has not acted in an entirely ethical way here

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A number of historians whose work should have been cited here & wasn't immediately came to my mind (and I'm not even a specialist of Haitian history)

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And I know that there are historians who specifically worked on behalf of the project and yet were not credited

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https://twitter.com/profmarylewis/status/1528035076482617344

Finally, given how important stories like these are, maybe venues like NY Times should simply open their pages to historians from time to time. Washington Post already does this with their Made By History rubric (but these are short think pieces); it's common ...

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in other countries (in France, a number of historians are regular contributors to newspapers like Le Monde and Libération)

Historians' work is important - the traction that the NYT's Haiti piece will (rightfully) get is proof enough of that

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That's why venues like the NYT should give historians a voice and a platform

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PS it appears there may be a significant number of historians whose direct contributions to the NYT piece were not acknowledged

https://twitter.com/md_ptbo/status/1528069416944115713