A number of conservatives have responded with indignation to this approach. Most prominent is former professional historian and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is apparently fed up with the focus on mistreatment of Africans.
“Certainly if you're an African American, slavery is at the center of what you see as the American experience. But for most Americans, most of the time, there were a lot of other things going on,” he explained. Instead of emphasizing the critical role played by race-based slavery, Gingrich argues that we should focus on the “several hundred thousand white Americans who died in the Civil War in order to free the slaves."
Gingrich’s argument is nonsensical. Whatever one’s race, “there were a lot of other things going on” at any period in history. One does not have to be black to see the importance of slavery to the American story. Nor does the fact that a lot of other things were “going on” make slavery inconsequential or somehow benign.
But then, despite comparing himself to scholar-president Woodrow Wilson, Gingrich is not a deep thinker. As historian Jonathan Zimmerman has pointed out, “to Gingrich, history is politics by any other means.”
