Sean Wilentz
Historic Historical Misjudgment
Over the past fifty years, historical misjudgment has become the semi-official doctrine of legal interpretation in the United States, with profound effects on American politics. Although it goes by many names, most often “originalism,” this scriptural, anti-historical doctrine has successfully claimed supreme authority as a form of historical reasoning, perfectly objective and dispassionate. Yet while originalists claim the mantle of the nation’s founders, originalism is a very recent invention, rooted in the massive racist resistance to the civil rights breakthroughs of the 1950’s, especially the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. How has this happened?
Sean Wilentz is George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University and studies U.S. political and social history. His book Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (1984) won several national prizes, including the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association. His study The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005), was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2020, the Library of America published the first of three projected volumes of his authoritative edition of the writings of the historian Richard Hofstadter. Wilentz has received numerous fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Academy in Berlin. Formerly a contributing editor to The New Republic, and currently a member of the editorial board of Dissent and Democracy, he lectures frequently and has contributed some four hundred articles to publications such as The New York Review of Books, The New York Times and The Washington Post. He has also given congressional testimony, notably before the House Judiciary Committee in 1998.