History is hot right now. From the op-ed pages of major newspapers to the board meetings of public schools across the country, a fierce battle is raging over America’s past. On the liberal left, the New York Times has given voice and platform to the 1619 Project, which argues that race and slavery have, by and large, determined the course of US history. Any attempt to grapple with the problems of the present must, partisans argue, begin by acknowledging these sins of the past. Informed by such a bold vision of the uses of history for public life, the originally journalistic 1619 project has given rise to a book, a school curriculum, and a Hulu docuseries, alongside a wider mainstream liberal tendency to make frequent political reference to a necessary “racial reckoning” with the past and, with it, a vituperative right-wing response to worries about liberal cultural hegemony.

First came the Trump administration’s 1776 Commission, which aimed to “enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States” by peddling a particularly patriotic and self-flattering account of the American past. The outgrowths of this top-down effort include attacks on educators, whom right-wingers have accused of teaching “critical race theory.” The boldest of these attacks has come from Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who has sought to undermine — and ultimately reshape — public school curricula in a reactionary mold.

Granted, critics of the 1619 Project — and the strain of liberal racial politics it epitomizes — are not all on the Right. Dissenting voices from across the political spectrum have taken the stance of defending truth against spin. The 1776 Project PAC, motivated by its own rival right-wing grand narrative of American history, accuses liberal opponents of believing that wielding “political power [is] more important than facts.” The well-known letter to the New York Times from several prominent progressive historians registering their discontent with 1619 specifically disputed “matters of verifiable fact” (of all the fact-disputers, these distinguished scholars have the most serious claim). Meanwhile, the sectarian Trotskyist World Socialist Web Site, often hysterical in its condemnations of this very publication, has expounded at length about what it sees as tendencies toward “falsification” prominent in 1619-inspired writing.