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What history professors really think about ‘the 1619 project’.

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ATLANTA, GEORGIA - MAY 16: Author Nikole Hannah-Jones speaks on stage during the 137th Commencement ... [+] at Morehouse College on May 16, 2021 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Marcus Ingram/Getty Images)

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist  Nikole Hannah-Jones  has been in the news lately because the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill offered her a professorship, but  refused to give her tenure  along with it, even though the faculty review committee recommended tenure. At the center of the debate is “The 1619 Project” a historical endeavor developed by Hannah-Jones and published by  The New York Times Magazine . The project sought to reframe the nation’s history by placing Black people, and the institution of slavery as well as its impact, at the center of the U.S. historical narrative. “The  1619 Project ” was first published in August of 2019 in commemoration of the 400-year anniversary of enslaved Africans landing on the shores of the U.S. in Virginia. 

Although lauded by many and awarded the Pulitzer for Hannah-Jones, the project immediately drew criticism from scholars and politicians. However, the greatest objections emerged when “The 1619 Project” began to be  taught in grade school and college  history courses with some state government’s threatening to  revoke funding  from schools using it in their classrooms.

A few well-known historians have been critical of “The 1619 Project,” but not because it centers slavery in U.S. history. In a  letter  to  The New York Times  they wrote: “None of us have any disagreement with the need for Americans, as they consider their history, to understand that the past is populated by sinners as well as saints, by horrors as well as honors, and that is particularly true of the scarred legacy of slavery.” They are critical because they feel “The 1619 Project” “offers a  historically-limited view  of slavery” and “asserts that every aspect of American life has  only one lens for viewing , that of slavery, and its fall-out.”

Professor Christopher Span discussing his historical research.

At the same time, many history professors are using “The 1619 Project” in their classrooms and feel strongly about the importance of its use. Christopher Span, a history of education professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, thinks that “’The 1619 Project’ should be added to every undergraduate course surveying American history.” He sees it as essential and notes that “it centralizes the longstanding role race, racism, and slavery played in the making of this nation and illustrates how their tenets predate those of freedom and democracy by at least one year.” Span teaches “The 1619 Project” in both his undergraduate and graduate courses. For Span, “the history of African Americans  is  the history of America” and educating Americans to appreciate and understand this history “affords opportunities for healing and reconciliation.” 

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Jonathan Zimmerman, an educational historian at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that teaching “The 1619 Project” alongside other interpretations of history “represents a huge opportunity to teach students what history actually *is*: an act of interpretation.” He also plans on teaching “The 1619 Project” in his courses. History changes over time as historians uncover and analyze new data. Penn State University history professor Crystal Sanders believes it is essential to include Hannah-Jones’s “1619 Project” in history courses. In her words, “I think it is important for students to see that our understanding of the past is not frozen in time.” 

Politicians criticizing “The 1619 Project” believe that the work is dangerous to the nation, and that it misrepresents U.S. history. They argue that it denies the principles that the nation is built upon and is  racially divisive . Politicians have  introduced bills banning  the teaching of the project in public institutions in  Arkansas, Iowa, South Dakota, Mississippi, Texas, and Missouri . And, most recently, in late April 2021, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell sent a  letter  to U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona urging him to refrain from advocating for the use of “The 1619 Project” in curricula. McConnell wrote: “Our nation's youth do not need activist indoctrination that fixates solely on past flaws and splits our nation into divided camps. Taxpayer-supported programs should emphasize the shared civic virtues that bring us together, not push radical agendas that tear us apart.”

According to Zimmerman, not teaching about “The 1619 Project” and the debates that historians have with it is a “gigantic lost opportunity.” More importantly, he explains that history courses – in schools and in college classrooms – are intended to teach students  how  to think and question, not  what  to think.

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The 1619 Project Debate: A Bibliography

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As the debate over the New York Times ’ 1619 Project continues, it is helpful to have a list of resources that encompass the project’s contents and criticisms of the same. What follows below is a bibliographic reference to each, which I will also periodically update as new commentary becomes available.

I make no specific endorsements of these materials beyond my own contributions to the debate, other than drawing attention to the arguments they contain as substantive avenues of engaging the topic. In compiling this list, I aimed to gather commentary on the project from across the political spectrum. The discussion following the project’s publication has since produced several detailed criticisms that delve deeply into the historical debates it raises over slavery and early American history.

Defenses of the project are noticeably more scarce. This is in no small part due to an unfortunate tendency of its supporters to attack the critics rather than the criticisms, with most of that taking place on insult-laden Twitter threads . Should a more substantive defense emerge at a future date, I will gladly add the link. However, efforts to fulfill this task to date have been both underwhelming and light on substantive engagement.

The Times ’ original project and critiques are accordingly presented here to help the reader make an informed assessment of the controversies entailed.

New York Times Sources

The 1619 Project – Published in August 2019 as a special issue of the New York Times magazine, this multi-part journalistic endeavor launched the ongoing debate. Although the magazine covered historical topics from the early colonial era to the present, the overwhelming majority of the controversy has focused on just two pieces: the introductory essay by project editor Nikole Hannah-Jones, which depicts the American Revolution as partially motivated by the defense of slavery, and the essay by Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond , attempting to link modern American capitalism to slavery.

The Five Historians’ Letter, and the New York Times Response – On December 20, 2019, the Times published a short letter critiquing the project by historians Victoria Bynum, James McPherson, James Oakes, Gordon Wood, and Sean Wilentz. This letter featured criticisms of the project’s claims about (1) the American Revolution, (2) capitalism and slavery, and (3) Abraham Lincoln and pointed to (4) problems with its historical vetting process.

In response, Times editor Jake Silverstein penned a lengthy rebuttal that defended the project from the first, third, and fourth criticisms. Silverstein’s essay did not address the criticisms of Matthew Desmond’s essay on capitalism and slavery.

AIER Sources

“ The Anti-Capitalist Ideology of Slavery ” – In this essay, I examine the first of many oversights in Desmond’s 1619 Project essay, in which he asserts that American capitalism is infused with the brutality of the slave system. Briefly, his account completely neglects the role of intellectual history in defining and interpreting capitalism. Upon examining this history, two trends emerge.

First, the originators of what we now refer to as “capitalism” — the free market liberal tradition that passed from Adam Smith to the laissez-faire and free trade traditions of Richard Cobden and Frederic Bastiat — had a directly adversarial view of slavery. Economists and political writers in this tradition heavily overlapped with the contemporary abolitionist movement and tended to view slavery as both morally and economically repulsive. 

Second, proslavery theorists of this same period also held capitalism in contempt — and especially its laissez-faire iteration. I document this pronounced hostility to capitalism in the work of George Fitzhugh, the leading proslavery theorist of the late antebellum period. For academics such as Desmond who wish to forge a conceptual alliance between slavery and capitalism, this historical record of capitalism’s proponents and adversaries remains a substantial and unaccounted obstacle.

“ How Capitalist-Abolitionists Fought Slavery ” – This article tells the little-known story of Lewis Tappan, a wealthy New York abolitionist who financed several of the most important publications and institutions in the American anti-slavery movement. Tappan’s philanthropy caused an immense slaveholder backlash against his business interests. Rather than surrender to insolvency and ruin, he found a way to use free market institutions to circumvent a slaveholder boycott and slaveholder attempts to defraud his company.

“ A Comment on the New History of Capitalism ” – This longer paper, adapted from my published work on the subject, contains a historiographic discussion of the New History of Capitalism (NHC) literature. This emergent genre of historical scholarship forms the basis of Matthew Desmond’s essay and argument. In my paper, I discuss the problems of the NHC literature, including its use of defective definitions for the term “capitalism” and its embrace of a heavily anti-capitalistic ideological lens.

“ The Statistical Errors of the Reparations Agenda ” – This article predates the 1619 Project by a few months, but touches directly on a faulty statistical claim that informs the broader NHC literature on which the Times relies. A widely repeated passage from a book by NHC historian Edward Baptist incorrectly asserts that slave-produced cotton accounted for almost half of the antebellum economy’s gross domestic product (GDP). As I investigate and discuss, Baptist’s claim is based on an elementary misunderstanding of how GDP is calculated that causes him to double- and triple-count several intermediate steps of cotton production. The actual share of antebellum GDP accounted for by cotton is closer to 5 percent.

“ How the 1619 Project Rehabilitates the ‘King Cotton’ Thesis ” – In this essay, written for National Review, I examine the 1619 Project’s heavy reliance on the NHC literature. A recurring theme of this literature is the unwitting rehabilitation of the “King Cotton” thesis — the notion that cotton occupied a commanding place in the 19th-century global economy, which made the economic engines of the world dependent on plantation slavery. “King Cotton” was invented for proslavery propaganda reasons by Confederate secessionists around the eve of the Civil War as an attempt to lure foreign allies to their cause. 

The war itself disproved the “King Cotton” premise, as foreign powers simply turned elsewhere for their cotton supply and the Confederacy collapsed in economic isolation from the world. While most economic historians since that time have recognized the error of logic behind the “King Cotton” theory, the recent NHC literature has revived it — minus the Confederates’ slavery defenses — in an attempt to restore cotton to a historically untenable place as the centerpiece of 19th-century capitalism.

“ The New History of Capitalism Has a Whiteness Problem ” – In this piece, I look at some of the backlash against criticism of the 1619 Project by its editor Nikole Hannah-Jones and by some of its historian-defenders on Twitter. A common theme of the pushback has been to focus on the race, age, and gender of the project’s historian-critics, including essentially dismissing them as “old white guys.” Aside from the weakness of this line of argument as a means of eschewing substantive engagement, it suffers from another problem. The contested part of the 1619 Project does not pass its own test, as the NHC literature it heavily relies upon is almost exclusively written by a small and insular group of white scholars with Ivy League connections. The NHC literature is therefore susceptible to the same charge it makes against its critics.

“ Fact-Checking the 1619 Project ” – I wrote this essay as an extended assessment of the debate between the five historians mentioned above and the Times ’ Jake Silverstein, following the simultaneous publication of each in the paper’s letters section in December 2019. I evaluate each of the four contested claims and link to appropriate scholarly literature. Briefly, I find that (1) the historians have a stronger but not uncontested case on the role of slavery in the American Revolution, (2) the 1619 Project has a stronger argument on Abraham Lincoln, (3) the historians are correct to chastise the New History of Capitalism literature, and (4) the Times appears to have done an inadequate job at seeking scholarly guidance for the 1619 Project’s sections on the American Revolution, slavery, and the Civil War, although it also did a much better job at externally vetting its claims on the 20th century and present day.

“ The Case for Retracting Matthew Desmond’s 1619 Project Essay ” – In this essay look into the controversial 1619 Project contribution by Matthew Desmond . I document two areas of Desmond’s thesis that rest upon errors of fact and historical interpretation. Specifically, Desmond misrepresents recent scholarship on plantation accounting systems to create a false genealogy between slavery and the tools of modern financial capitalism. He also repeats and expands upon a well-documented error by NHC historian Ed Baptist regarding the cause of the antebellum cotton industry’s production boom, tying it into the false genealogy in order to advance an anti-capitalist ideological message in the present day. I then argue that, taken together, these two faults warrant the retraction of Desmond’s article by the Times.

The Five Historians’ Criticisms:

In addition to their published letter to the Times , the five historians have each written or interviewed at length about their criticisms of the project.

WSWS interview with James Oakes – This World Socialist Website (WSWS) interview with historian James Oakes critiques the project on its claims about the Civil War, Lincoln, and the relationship between slavery and capitalism. Oakes is a distinguished historian of the American Civil War and the Lincoln presidency.

WSWS interview with James McPherson – This interview with historian James McPherson chastises the 1619 Project for a myopic view of the Civil War that generally downplays the role of abolitionists and others who resisted slavery. McPherson is a Pulitzer Prize winner and is widely regarded as one of the leading Civil War scholars in the nation.

WSWS interview with Gordon Wood – This interview with historian Gordon Wood harshly scrutinizes the 1619 Project’s claim that slavery was a primary motivator of the American Revolution. Wood is also a Pulitzer Prize winner, and is widely regarded as one of the leading scholars of the American Revolution today. Wood also issued a rejoinder to the New York Times ’ defense of its work against the five historians after it was published.

WSWS interview with Victoria Bynum – This interview with historian Victoria Bynum scrutinizes the project’s deficient historiographical treatment of the Civil War era and of the complex history of race in the 19th century. Bynum is a distinguished historian of the Civil War era, focusing on the American South. Bynum also published a rejoinder to the Times ’ defense in the wake of the historians’ letter. In a third commentary, Bynum replies to American Historical Review editor Alex Lichtenstein (linked below).

“ American Slavery and the Relentless Unseen ,” by Sean Wilentz – This adaptation of a lecture by Wilentz appeared in the New York Review of Books. It contains a longer elaboration of the arguments in the historians’ letter to the Times , which was also primarily composed by Wilentz.

“ Matter of Facts ” by Sean Wilentz – This essay responds to the Times’ rebuttal of the ‘5 historians’ letter by looking at its specific claims about the Somerset case, the Dunmore Proclamation, and Lincoln’s relationship to colonization. Note that Wilentz is on stronger grounds with Somerset and Dunmore, but errs on significant matters of fact on Lincoln, as I documented in my previous piece on the historians/ Times debate

Other Criticisms of the 1619 Project

“ How Slavery Shaped Capitalism ,” by John Clegg – Written for the far-left magazine Jacobin , this essay by sociologist John Clegg examines the treatment of capitalism by the NHC literature, as featured in Desmond’s essay. Clegg discusses shortcomings in the works of several NHC scholars including Ed Baptist, Sven Beckert, and Walter Johnson, showing how their claims both overstate the economic position of cotton and have fared poorly under scrutiny by economic historians from across the spectrum. These subjects are approached from a classical Marxist perspective.

“ The 1619 Project Is Not History; It Is Conspiracy Theory ,” by Allen Guelzo – This essay for the Manhattan Institute mainly critiques the 1619 Project’s handling of the Civil War, the history of capitalism, and the Constitutional Convention. It is written by conservative historian Allen Guelzo, a well-known Lincoln biographer.

WSWS interview with Adolph Reed – This interview features a critique of the project for supplanting labor analysis of slavery with an idiosyncratic branch of critical race theory. It features Adolph Reed, a distinguished African-American political scientist who specializes in labor politics and who generally writes from a classical Marxist perspective.

WSWS interview with Dolores Janiewski – This broad-based interview critiques the 1619 Project for its inattention to labor history, its politicization of race, and its neglect of the interrelationships between the civil rights movement and other contemporary causes, among them an anti-war movement that attracted significant support from Martin Luther King, Jr.

WSWS interview with Richard Carwardine – This interview with distinguished British historian Richard Carwardine includes a detailed exploration of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and criticisms of the 1619 Project’s handling of each. Carwardine argues that the project is often inattentive to nuance and detail of this era, missing a large part of the relevant historiography as a result.

WSWS interview with Clayborne Carson – This interview with the chief editor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers offers harsh criticism of the 1619 Project’s depiction of the American Revolution and Civil Rights eras. Carson, who is also a historian at Stanford University, also notes that the project’s editors made no effort to include him or solicit input from MLK scholars, despite the subject’s obvious relevance to its content.

An analysis of the New York Times ’ reply to the five historians , by David North and Eric London – This lengthy rebuttal to Times editor Jake Silverstein was published by the two main interviewers of the historians featured on the World Socialist Website. It is argued from a classical Marxist perspective, but also digs deep into the historical evidence surrounding the contested claims — especially the debate over the Dunmore Proclamation and the role of slavery in the American Revolution. In a second essay by North, along with Niles Niemuth and Tom Mackaman, the WSWS editors attack the 1619 Project as a “ racialist falsification of American history .” They argue that the project’s race-centric interpretations obscure the role of economic class in shaping the same events, leaving the reader with a politicized narrative that largely aligns with the Democratic Party’s modern electoral objectives.

“ America Wasn’t Founded on White Supremacy,” by Lucas Morel – This essay critiques the 1619 Project for failing to adequately capture the philosophical debate over equality as an ideal of the American founding. It is written by political theorist Lucas Morel, a conservative who comes from the Straussian school of Lincoln scholarship.

“ The New York Times Surrenders to the Left on Race ,” by Damon Linker – This essay in the Week is one of the few criticisms of the 1619 Project that does not focus primarily on the period between the American Founding and the Civil War. Instead, Linker digs into an essay by Princeton historian and Twitter warrior Kevin M. Kruse that places blame for Atlanta’s notorious traffic jam problem on a highway system built around racial segregation. Linker argues that Kruse severely overstates his case by using only race to interpret a problem that has much wider implications arising from population growth, infrastructure demands of suburbia (including a large black suburban population), and the high costs of mass transit.

“ The 1619 Project Is the 2019 Project ,” by Peter Coclanis – This essay for the Specator by business historian Peter Coclanis adds to some of the historical critiques of the project’s treatment of slavery in the colonial era. It also knocks the project’s editors for attempting to politicize historical content, with objectives that have a closer relationship to electoral politics in the present than to scholarly analysis of the past.

“ The New York Times ‘1619 Project’ Revisited ,” by Katherine Kersten – This essay in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune by conservative writer Katherine Kersten frames itself as something of an alternative to the 1619 Project’s narrative. It argues for a competing vision that is more in line with American conservatism and that emphasizes a historical trajectory of triumphing over racism.

“ Counterpoint: The Point Katherine Kersten, New York Times ‘ ‘1619 Project’ Both Miss ,” by August Nimtz – This short essay by political science professor August Nimtz critiques both the 1619 Project and the response to it by Kersten for presenting what he calls “mirror image” accounts that are selective in their use of evidence to argue their respective positions.

“ Reclaiming 1619 ,” by Kevin Gutzman – This essay for Law and Liberty by Kevin Gutzman, a leading biographer of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, investigates the early history of slavery in Virginia, finding that the 1619 Project confuses the complex evolution of slavery as a legal institution. Gutzman also notes examples of clear anti-slavery advocacy among several leading figures of the American revolution.

“ Did Slavery Give Us Double-Entry Bookkeeping ?” by Hans Eicholz – This essay for Law and Liberty digs into Matthew Desmond’s 1619 Project essay, noting its propensity to weave thinly supported and ahistorical connections between modern economic events and the legacy of slavery. Eicholz notes that Desmond plays “fast and loose” with his evidence, and redefines capitalism to serve his own political ends, severely limiting the value of his article as a work of history in the process.

“ America’s Exceptional Guilt ” by Jason Ross – This third essay in the Law and Liberty series uses William Lloyd Garrison’s famous critique of the constitution as a pro-slavery document to investigate the ideals that Garrison wished to uphold. As a point of contrast, Ross notes Garrison’s acclaim for the Declaration of Independence’s ideals – a distinction, he argues, that is missing from the 1619 Project’s philosophical underpinnings.

“ The New York Times Resurrects the Positive Good Slavery Argument ” by W.B. Allen – Is this short contribution to the Law and Liberty series, Allen explores some of the curious implications of the 1619 Project’s attribution of great economic growth to plantation slavery.

“ Some Thoughts on the 1619 Project ” by Bradley Hanson – This data-packed blog post by an economic historian at the University of Mary Washington subjects several of Matthew Desmond’s empirical claims about the slave economy to scrutiny and finds them on shaky grounds.

“ How The New York Times Is Distorting American History ” by Wilfred McClay – In a lengthy review essay for Commentary magazine, historian Wilfred McClay notes the deficient historiographical background of the 1619 Project, including its oversight of several landmark historical works from the past half-century that investigated the cultural and economic dimensions of slavery. He concludes that the project offers a skewed and incomplete account of U.S. history.

“ The Founders Were Flawed. The Nation Is Imperfect. The Constitution Is Still a ‘Glorious Liberty Document. ‘” by Timothy Sandefur – This essay by Frederick Douglass biographer Timothy Sandefur examines the project’s neglect of competing constitutional visions in the early republic. This leaves the Times essentially embracing a pro-slavery constitutional interpretation, as put forth by John C. Calhoun and Roger B. Taney, while omitting contesting interpretations including that of Douglass, who tried to reconcile the document to the anti-slavery cause.

“ A Critical Look at the 1619 Project ” – This podcast discussion between Brown University economist Glenn Loury and Columbia University linguist John McWhorter – both leading African-American academics – offers a constructively scrutinizing take on the project’s framing of race relations in the United States.

“ The 1619 Project Depicts and America Tainted by Original Sin ,” by John McWhorter – This short essay expands upon some of the arguments McWhorter made in the podcast with Loury linked above, concluding that the 1619 Project creates a worldview in which it becomes impossible to redeem or improve upon the racial faults of American history. McWhorter also chastises the tendency exhibited in some quarters of the academy to dismiss the project’s critics as nuisances and heretics to a currently-fashionable political deployment of its content.

“ To the 1619 Project: Use More Art, Less Fake History, ” by Brian T. Allen – This essay by an art historian uses the complexity and nuance of historical paintings of slavery to provide a contrast point with the 1619 Project, which he contends is overly simplistic and overly politicized in its depictions of race relations.

“ Twelve Scholars Critique the 1619 Project ” – This letter signed by twelve prominent Civil War scholars was sent to New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein following the publication of the first letter by the five aforementioned historians. It presses Silverstein to issue a correction to factually false and misleading interpretations found in Matthew Desmond’s essay, and challenges the project’s depiction of Abraham Lincoln. Silverstein declined to publish the letter in a response. A related email exchange between Silverstein and Allen Guelzo, one of the signatories, follows.

“ The Fight over the 1619 Project ,” by Cathy Young – This essay dives deep into the arguments behind the 1619 Project’s depiction of the American Revolution as a pro-slavery event, focusing on its two most prominent pieces of evidence: the Somerset case of 1772 and Lord Dunmore’s proclamation of 1775. Young shows several instances where the lead essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones overstates the arguments behind each claim, and ignores counter-evidence. She also examines and critiques several of the academics that Hannah-Jones either relied upon or has since enlisted to her side after the fact – specifically David Waldstreicher, Woody Holton, Jill Lepore, and Gerald Horne. Young shows several instances where these historians make subtler and more heavily qualified claims than Hannah-Jones’s account depicts. She also documents areas where Waldstreicher, Holton, Lepore, Horne, and others in this revisionist historiographical camp have overstated their own evidence.

“ Abolitionism Was Actually A Free Market Cause ,” by David S. D’Amato – This essay explores the strong historical links between 19th century abolitionism and Manchester free market liberalism, the British school of thought that led the charge for the repeal of protectionist tariffs in the mid-19th century. In addition to having substantially overlapping memberships, the two causes shared a common political philosophy that formed a direct precursor to libertarian thought today. This history is almost entirely written out of existence by the 1619 Project through a combination of neglect and willful omission.

1619 Project Responses to Criticism

Note: This section intentionally left blank due to the paucity of substantive responses to criticism of the 1619 Project, excepting the above-noted December 20, 2019 New York Times rebuttal to the five historians. Additional links will be added here if/when they are published.

Addendum (January 9, 2020): A small number of responses to criticisms of the 1619 Project have begun to appear in print. As previously noted, this section will be updated to reflect new additions.

“ The 1619 Project and Bringing History to the People, ” by Anne C. Bailey – This short essay by a 1619 Project contributor responds to pushback from professional historians by emphasizing the need to keep historical discussion accessible to the general public. Although she does not get into specific contentions made by the historian critics, Bailey pushes back against a tendency in public discussion to position academic historians as authorities and arbiters of historical dialogue. The 1619 Project, she contends, performed a service by expanding historical discussion beyond these barriers.

“ Slavery, and American Racism, were born in Genocide ,” by Greg Grandin – This essay structures its presentation as something of a defense of the 1619 Project against its historian critics, and particularly the five signatories of the above-noted letter to the New York Times. Grandin builds his case by attacking the critics for their “omission” of the subjugation of Native Americans, suggesting the oversight is “motivated by a desire to defend a Whiggish narrative of liberal progress   (Wilentz’s position) or insist on a stronger focus on political economy (Oakes’s concern).” This argument makes for an odd retort to the critics though, as Grandin glides past and is apparently willing to overlook the much more glaring omission of Native Americans from the original 1619 Project material.

“ The Hidden Stakes of the 1619 Controversy ,” by David Waldstreicher – This essay examines the historiographical backstory to competing interpretations of the American Revolution’s relationship to slavery. Waldstreicher himself is a participant to that dispute in arguing that the revolution serviced pro-slavery objectives, arguing against 1619 Project critic Sean Wilentz. The account offered here is more nuanced than Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay advancing similar claims, but is generally supportive of assigning higher importance to the Dunmore Proclamation. Waldstreicher’s argument is also echoed in other recent historical works by Gerald Horne , and in a much older text by Woody Holton .

“ The Shameful Final Grievance of the Declaration of Independence ,” by Jeffrey Ostler – This essay uses the final passage from the Declaration of Independence to lend credence to the 1619 Project’s depiction of the revolution as a pro-slavery event, and to call further attention to the revolution’s harmful effects upon Native Americans – a group that neither the 1619 Project nor its critics have considered in depth.

“ Re-Animating the 1619 Project: Teachable Moments Not Turf Wars ,” by James Brewer Stewart – Though presented as a defense of the 1619 Project’s contested claims, this odd article by Stewart, a historian of abolitionism, quickly devolves into a sweeping chastisement of the project’s scholarly critics for providing ammunition to the political right in today’s culture wars. Bizarrely, Stewart contends that the 1619 Project’s critics are “all white” and depicts them as attacking the project’s “all black” contributors. A glance over this bibliography belies both claims, as several prominent African-American scholars have harshly critiqued the project, whereas one of the most hotly contested 1619 Project contributions draws exclusively from white New History of Capitalism scholars .

Editorial Coverage of the Debate

“ The 1619 Project Gets Schooled ,” by Elliot Kaufman  – This essay by a Wall Street Journal editorial writer explores how the WSWS essentially scooped the 1619 Project by securing interviews with four top historians in their fields, each of whom challenged the accuracy of its content for the momentous historical period of roughly 1775 to 1865. Kaufman also scrutinizes the initial reactions to this criticism by 1619 Project contributors and their defenders. As he notes, quite a bit of the defense relied on dismissing the critics as “white historians” while also neglecting to engage the content of their criticisms. It was published shortly before Silverstein’s response in the Times.

“ The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts ,” by Adam Serwer – Published shortly after the historians’ letter and the Times ’ response, this essay by Adam Serwer at the Atlantic characterizes the debate as a contest between competing visions of the American past and present. Serwer interviews some of the historians involved, as well as other historians who declined to sign the letter. Several of those who declined did so for reasons related to its tone as framed by Wilentz, or out of a belief that their endorsement would signify a “white guys’ attack” on a project spearheaded by African-American journalists.

“ History Without Truth ,” by K.C. Johnson – This essay for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal examines the fallout from the historians’ letter and the Times ’ response. Written by historian K.C. Johnson, it harshly evaluates Silverstein for largely dodging the historians’ specific criticisms and for presenting a superficial counterargument. Johnson also looks at the response by project editor Hannah-Jones and of the historians Serwer interviewed, noting that they have similarly avoided the substance of the criticisms while focusing on the racial identity of the authors involved.

“ Teachers Should Reject the 1619 Project ,” by Max Eden – This essay argues against the adoption of 1619 Project materials in the K-12 classroom curriculum, in light of its criticism by historians including McPherson and Wood. Published by the Manhattan Institute, Eden’s essay also contends that the project veers too heavily into partisan political arguments and fails to present a well-rounded historical account of the contentions involved.

“ 1776 Honors America’s Diversity in a Way 1619 Does Not, ” by Conor Friedersdorf – This commentary piece in the Atlantic evaluates the debate over the 1619 Project between historians and journalists on the political left and right. Friedersdorf also makes an intriguing argument that 1776 offers a more diverse and inclusive date of commemoration on account of the Declaration of Independence’s ecumenical egalitarian ideals, and their broader salience with marginalized individuals – including African-Americans, as both Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King argued.

“ 1619 And All That ” by Alex Lichtenstein – This commentary essay by the editor of the American Historical Review surveys the contours of the debate among historians, including the WSWS interviews and the historians’ letter to the Times. He judges the interviews as having merit, but is largely dismissive of the letter. Lichtenstein is generally sympathetic to Hannah-Jones and the project but concedes some of the moderate criticisms in the historians’ interviews. He also spends an unusual amount of space speculating about esoteric underpinnings of the Trotskyist WSWS in taking such a high profile place in the debate. Lichtenstein’s assessment of the content of the dispute focuses on the political aspects of the debate, and especially the American Revolution. Aside from a passing mention of Oakes’s interview for engaging the subject, he completely sidesteps the dispute over the “New History of Capitalism” literature and Desmond’s essay.

“ Disputed NY Times ‘1619 Project’ Already Shaping Schoolkids’ Minds on Race ” by John Murawski – This essay explores the relationship of the ongoing dispute over the 1619 Project’s historical content and the political push to adopt it in high school classrooms as either direct or supplemental curricular material for the teaching of American history. The tie between the project to the slavery reparations movement and related political causes, Murawski notes, is often intertwined with its historical content.

Useful Addenda on the New History of Capitalism

The following links contain useful contributions to the scholarly debate around the NHC literature. While not specific responses to the 1619 Project itself, they address the contents of the historical works that Matthew Desmond used while compiling his essay.

“ Cotton, Slavery and the New History of Capitalism ,” by Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode – This article by two leading economic historians severely criticizes the NHC literature’s treatment of slavery by misusing statistical data, misrepresenting archival materials, and in some cases even making up “evidence” without a basis in fact to recast slave-produced cotton as an integral feature of American capitalism. It focuses in particular on the works of Ed Baptist, Sven Beckert, and Walter Johnson.

“ Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism Revisited ,” by Gavin Wright – This keynote lecture by leading economic historian Gavin Wright was delivered at a recent conference of the Economic History Association. Wright harshly critiques the NHC literature, evaluating it against the latest empirical evidence on the economics of slavery.

“ Slavery Did Not Make America Rich ,” by Deirdre McCloskey – In this short essay for Reason, noted economist Deirdre McCloskey takes on the NHC literature for attempting to rehabilitate the “King Cotton” thesis. As McCloskey notes, this argument is both lacking in evidence and heavily politicized. She concludes that the NHC genre should be interpreted as an attempt to enlist the “history of slavery to bolster anti-capitalist ideology.”

“ Review Essay on the New History of Capitalism,” by Stanley Engerman – This article by Stanley Engerman, co-author of the groundbreaking Time on the Cross , examines recent NHC contributions by Ed Baptist and Calvin Schermerhorn. Like others, Engerman notes the similarity of these works to the “King Cotton” thesis and explores the problems this creates for their narratives. He also severely criticizes Baptist for evading his scholarly critics, and instead indulging in name-calling and accusations of racism.

“ Capitalism and Slavery ,” by John Clegg – This article contains an extended version of Clegg’s thesis on the NHC literature, as summarized in his critique of the 1619 Project for Jacobin. Though written from a perspective clearly on the political left, Clegg’s position largely echoes the economic historians in pointing out the deficiencies of this literature and its placing far too much weight on the cotton sector as a causal mechanism for industrialization.

“ Review of The Half Has Never Been Told ” – This special issue of the Journal of Economic History held a symposium on NHC scholar Ed Baptist’s book The Half Has Never Been Told. Featuring contributions from a half dozen economists and economic historians, it gives a largely negative assessment of Baptist’s argument and evidence.

“ Throwin’ Scholarly Shade: Eric Williams in the New Histories of Capitalism and Slavery, ” by H. Rueben Neptune – This article in the Journal of the Early Republic explores how a predominantly white group of NHC scholars have misappropriated the work of the black radical historian Eric Williams to their arguments about slavery and capitalism. Neptune uses close textual analysis to show that NHC scholars such as Ed Baptist, Walter Johnson, Greg Grandin, and Sven Beckert have essentially inverted the Williams’s thesis through careless and superficial readings.

Phillip W. Magness

Phillip W. Magness works at the Independent Institute. He was formerly the Senior Research Faculty and F.A. Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research. He holds a PhD and MPP from George Mason University’s School of Public Policy, and a BA from the University of St. Thomas (Houston). Prior to joining AIER, Dr. Magness spent over a decade teaching public policy, economics, and international trade at institutions including American University, George Mason University, and Berry College. Magness’s work encompasses the economic history of the United States and Atlantic world, with specializations in the economic dimensions of slavery and racial discrimination, the history of taxation, and measurements of economic inequality over time. He also maintains an active research interest in higher education policy and the history of economic thought. His work has appeared in scholarly outlets including the Journal of Political Economy, the Economic Journal, Economic Inquiry, and the Journal of Business Ethics. In addition to his scholarship, Magness’s popular writings have appeared in numerous venues including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, Reason, National Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay from ‘The 1619 Project’ wins commentary Pulitzer

Of all the thousands upon thousands of stories and projects produced by American media last year, perhaps the one most-talked about was The New York Times Magazine’s ambitious “The 1619 Project,” which recognized the 400th anniversary of the moment enslaved Africans were first brought to what would become the United States and how it forever changed the country.

It was a phenomenal piece of journalism.

And while the project in its entirety did not make the list of Pulitzer Prize finalists, the introductory essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones , the creator of the landmark project, was honored with a prestigious Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

After the announcement that she has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Hannah-Jones told the Times’ staff it was “the most important work of my life.”

While nearly impossible, and almost insulting, to try and describe in a handful of words or even sentences, Hannah-Jones’ essay was introduced with this headline: “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True.”

In her essay, Hannah-Jones wrote, “But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.”

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Hannah-Jones’ and “The 1619 Project,” however, were not without controversy. There was criticism of the project, particularly from conservatives. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich called it “propaganda.” A commentator for The Federalist tweeted the goal of the project was to “delegitimize America, and further divide and demoralize its citizenry.”

But the most noteworthy criticism came from a group of five historians. ln a letter to the Times , they wrote that they were “dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.” They added, “These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing.’ They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.”

Wall Street Journal assistant editorial features editor Elliot Kaufman wrote a column with the subhead: “The New York Times tries to rewrite U.S. history, but its falsehoods are exposed by surprising sources.”

In a rare move, the Times responded to the criticism with its own response . New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein wrote, “Though we respect the work of the signatories, appreciate that they are motivated by scholarly concern and applaud the efforts they have made in their own writings to illuminate the nation’s past, we disagree with their claim that our project contains significant factual errors and is driven by ideology rather than historical understanding. While we welcome criticism, we don’t believe that the request for corrections to The 1619 Project is warranted.”

That was just a portion of the rather lengthy and stern, but respectful response defending the project.

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In the end, the 1619 Project — and Hannah-Jones’ essay, in particular — will be remembered for one of the most impactful and thought-provoking pieces on race, slavery and its impact on America that we’ve ever seen.

And maybe there was another reason for the pushback besides those questioning its historical accuracy.

As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote in December , “U.S. history is often taught and popularly understood through the eyes of its great men, who are seen as either heroic or tragic figures in a global struggle for human freedom. The 1619 Project, named for the date of the first arrival of Africans on American soil, sought to place ‘the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.’ Viewed from the perspective of those historically denied the rights enumerated in America’s founding documents, the story of the country’s great men necessarily looks very different.”

There’s no question that Hannah-Jones’ essay, which requires the kind of smart thinking and discussion that this country needs to continue having, deserved to be recognized with a Pulitzer as the top commentary of 2019. After all, and this is not hyperbole, it’s one of the most important essays ever.

In addition, we should acknowledge the other two finalists in this category: Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins and Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez.

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Jenkins continues to be among the best sports columnists in the country. Meanwhile, has any writer done more to shine a light on homelessness than Lopez? This is the third time in the past four years (and fourth time overall) that Lopez has been a finalist in the commentary category.

In any other year, both would be deserving of Pulitzer Prizes. But 2019 will be remembered for Nikole Hannah-Jones’ powerful essay and project.

More Pulitzer coverage from Poynter

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The 1619 Project

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The 1619 Project , a celebrated and controversial multimedia journalism series that reframes U.S. history around African American experiences, particularly slavery and its legacy in contemporary American life. Introduced on August 14, 2019, in a special issue of The New York Times Magazine , The 1619 Project has grown to encompass multiple issues of that magazine, numerous accompanying articles and essays in The New York Times , live events, a school curriculum, books, a television documentary , and a podcast . The 1619 Project was originated by New York Times Magazine staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones , who received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for the project’s introductory essay.

The 1619 Project begins by provocatively identifying the origin of the United States as the 1619 introduction of enslaved Africans to the English colonies that became the United States, rather than such celebrated events as the 1620 arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers or the 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence . In focusing on that ignominious dawn, the project centers the narrative of American history around the consequences of slavery and the historically marginalized contributions of Black Americans. According to Jake Silverstein, the editor in chief of The New York Times Magazine , “The very premise of The 1619 Project, in fact, is that many of the inequalities that continue to afflict the nation are a direct result of the unhealed wound created by 250 years of slavery and an additional century of second-class citizenship and white-supremacist terrorism inflicted on black people (together, those two periods account for 88 percent of our history since 1619).” To that end, the project also features numerous pieces that show how the modern United States is still being shaped by the legacy of slavery. The essay “What the Reactionary Politics of 2019 Owe to the Politics of Slavery” by Jamelle Bouie, for example, ties 19th-century attempts to preserve slavery to modern conservative movements’ distaste for federal authority. More idiosyncratically, Kevin M. Kruse’s “How Segregation Caused Your Traffic Jam” pinpoints racist policies of the past as a major contributor to contemporary Atlanta traffic.

Hannah-Jones, whose previous writing on American segregation earned her a MacArthur grant in 2017, first pitched the idea to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the 1619 voyage at a New York Times Magazine editorial meeting in January 2019. An early decision was made that almost everyone involved in the writing of the issue would be Black, so that the history described would be told through African American perspectives. As the issue took shape, other departments of The New York Times became involved, turning the endeavor into a company-wide project. The online edition of the magazine issue is interactive, and The Times started an accompanying five-episode “1619” podcast series. Shortly after the special issue of the magazine was published, the Sunday edition of The New York Times featured a special section on the transatlantic slave trade , and even the newspaper’s sports section featured an essay describing slavery’s impact on professional sports in August 2019.

Positive feedback and multiple awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Hannah-Jones, led to the expansion of the series, filling additional issues of the magazine and other Times publications. In 2021 two books were released: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story , an expansion of the first magazine issue, and The 1619 Project: Born on the Water , a children’s picture book. The following year the streaming service Hulu ran a six-part The 1619 Project docuseries starring Hannah-Jones.

Although many historians have applauded The 1619 Project’s general aim of bringing attention to the centrality of African Americans in the development of the United States, some have also criticized its accuracy. On December 20, 2019, an open letter by five prominent historians—Gordon S. Wood, James M. McPherson, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes—was published in The New York Times in which they declared there to be “errors, which concern major events” within the project and objected to specific statements claiming that slavery was a central motivation for the American Revolution and the project’s treatment of Pres. Abraham Lincoln ’s views on Black equality. Similarly, Leslie M. Harris, a history professor who had consulted for the project, wrote in Politico in March 2020 that protecting slavery was not, in fact, one of the primary causes of the American Revolution. Harris also claimed that the magazine’s depictions of slavery in early America were anachronistic, reflecting laws and practices more characteristic of the antebellum period than the colonial era. Editor in chief Jake Silverstein at first defended the project’s positions but later softened the language in Hannah-Jones’s essay to read that only “some” of the colonists fought the British to defend slavery.

The 1619 Project also endured a torrent of political criticism , mainly from right-wing politicians and commentators who considered it to be an effort to delegitimize the United States. In November 2020 Pres. Donald Trump , running for reelection at the time, went as far as to form an 18-member “1776 Commission” to produce a “dispositive rebuttal” of the project. None of the commission’s members, however, were professional historians themselves, and the report they produced was almost unanimously derided by those who were. Shortly after taking office in 2021, Pres. Joe Biden revoked the report. The 1619 Project was also banned by Republican officials from being taught in Florida public schools, first by a 2021 Florida State Board of Education amendment banning critical race theory and later by the 2022 Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (WOKE) Act.

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An Update to The 1619 Project

Today we are making a clarification to a passage in an essay from The 1619 Project that has sparked a great deal of online debate.

By Jake Silverstein

Today we are making a clarification to a passage in an essay from The 1619 Project that has sparked a great deal of online debate. The passage in question states that one primary reason the colonists fought the American Revolution was to protect the institution of slavery. This assertion has elicited criticism from some historians and support from others.

We stand behind the basic point, which is that among the various motivations that drove the patriots toward independence was a concern that the British would seek or were already seeking to disrupt in various ways the entrenched system of American slavery. Versions of this interpretation can be found in much of the scholarship into the origins and character of the Revolution that has marked the past 40 years or so of early American historiography — in part because historians of the past few decades have increasingly scrutinized the role of slavery and the agency of enslaved people in driving events of the Revolutionary period.

The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. Read all the stories .

That accounting is itself part of a growing acceptance that the patriots represented a truly diverse coalition animated by a variety of interests, which varied by region, class, age, religion and a host of other factors, a point succinctly demonstrated in the title that the historian Alan Taylor chose for his 2016 account of the period: “American Revolutions.” (For some key selections from the recent scholarly work on the Revolution, see this list of suggested reading from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture.)

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Lesson Plan June 1, 2020

The 1619 Project Reading Guide: Quotes, Key Terms, and Questions

Resource overview with links to the following:

• PDF copy of The 1619 Project , a full issue of  The New York Times Magazine
• PDF copy of the supplementary broadsheet from the  Times  newspaper
• Reading Guide for  The 1619 Project Essays
• Reading Guide for  The 1619 Project  Creative Works

Warm-up questions that introduce themes from the project.

Discussion questions to process the content and structure of writing and visuals from  The 1619 Project .

Links to activities , a lesson plan , and other resources  that can be used to further students' engagement with the issue.

Resource Overview:

The 1619 Project , a special issue of The New York Times Magazine , marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to Jamestown, Virginia with a series of essays, images, stories, and poems that challenge readers to reframe their understanding of U.S. history by considering 1619 as the start of this nation's story. Through over 30 visual and written pieces from historians, journalists, playwrights, poets, authors, and artists, the issue examines the following questions:

• How do societal structures developed to support the enslavement of Black people, and the anti-Black racism that was cultivated in the U.S. to justify slavery, influence many aspects of modern laws, policies, systems, and culture?  
• How have resistance, innovation, and advocacy by Black Americans over the course of American history contributed to the nation's wealth and the strengthening of its democracy?

This guide offers reflection questions that can be used to support students' engagement with The 1619 Project , as well as downloadable PDFs that highlight the following for each piece:

• A quote that captures a central theme
• Key names/dates/terms
• Guiding questions to consider while reading

Questions to Consider Before Exploring The 1619 Project :

• How did you first learn about the history of slavery in the U.S.? What did you learn, and how was that information presented?
• What do you see as the lasting legacy of slavery in the U.S.?  
• What do you know about the contributions of Black Americans to U.S. society, and where does that information come from?
• What are the values stated in the Declaration of Independence?
• In what ways can you see those values working in contemporary American life? In what ways can you see them failing?
• How has the interpretation of those values changed over time? Who is responsible for creating those changes?

Questions to Consider After Exploring  The 1619 Project :

Connecting to content:

• What lines/images/moments stuck out to you, and why?
• What surprised you? What do you want to know more about?
• How do the authors connect mechanisms established to support slavery with modern day practices in law, politics, business, culture and other aspects of American society?
• How do the stories presented in The 1619 Project compare to the stories you grew up hearing about the origins of slavery and its modern day impacts? 
• How does the origin story of the U.S. change if we mark the beginning of U.S. history in 1619 instead of 1776?
• What is national memory? How do we create it? How can we change it?

Connecting to structure:

• What emotions do you feel when reading the pieces? What language most stuck out to you from the project, and why?
• How do the authors integrate research, primary source documents, testimonials from experts and personal narratives into their pieces? 
• How do the pieces in The 1619 Project connect to each other? Where do you see parallels and reflections?
• Why do you think the work by the writers and artists featured in this issue were included in The New York Times Magazine , a national news publication?
• What is the role of journalism in shaping national memory?

Extension Activities and Lesson Plans:

For more ideas on how to support students' explorations of this issue, click on the links below:

• Lesson Plan: Exploring "The Idea of America" by Nikole Hannah-Jones
• Activities to Extend Student Engagement with The 1619 Project

The questions and guides above can be used by students on their own, in small groups, or with their entire class. For more ways to connect  The 1619 Project  to your classes, click here .

Common Core Standards:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.1 Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.2 Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.3 Analyze how and why individuals, events, or ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.8 Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.9 Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.SL.1 Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.

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In a recent interview, journalist and tenured professor Nikole Hannah-Jones said, “Trying to really silence me at the [University of North Carolina] is part of a wave of these anti-1619 Project, anti-critical race theory, anti-history bills that are being passed.” (Liu Jie / Xinhua News Agency / Getty Images)

How Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project ignited the critical race theory backlash

Sign up for Chalkbeat Tennessee’s free daily newsletter to keep up with Memphis-Shelby County Schools and statewide education policy.  

A blaze of conservative backlash ignited in 2019 when The New York Times published The 1619 Project and Nikole Hannah-Jones’ opening commentary. Conservative critics fueled heated debates on the role of critical race theory in the classroom and, more recently, the journalist’s tenure battle with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Today, critical race theory – or the study of how racism shapes laws, policies, and society – is familiar to most and, so too, is the debate about how race factors into the teaching of American history.

Chalkbeat has tracked at least 27 state-level efforts attempting to restrict educators from discussing systemic racism, critical race theory, and The 1619 Project. The bans and political pressure affect millions of students, educators, and administrators nationwide by inhibiting classroom conversations on racial injustice. To chronicle how Hannah-Jones’ work and tenure controversy contributed to this transformational moment in history education and educational policy, Chalkbeat has created a timeline of key events.

Correction: A previous version of this story reported that John William Pope Foundation Chairman Art Pope played a role in initially withholding tenure from Hannah-Jones. A representative for Pope said he had no involvement in the decision.

The New York Times launches The 1619 Project , the brainchild of Hannah-Jones, a veteran journalist and recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” The series of articles and columns commemorates the date 400 years ago when about two dozen enslaved Africans disembarked near Kikotan or Point Comfort, today located in Hampton, Virginia. According to the series, their arrival in 1619 represents the expansion of American slavery and the “founding contradictions” of U.S. colonial history. Three months later, Hannah-Jones wins the Distinguished Alumna Award from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The New York Times publishes a letter from five historians denouncing what they called a “misleading” project and noting the newspaper’s plan to distribute the series to schools. That same month, the Pulitzer Center, an educational outreach organization that promotes democracy through journalism, releases its annual report , which details the successful educational partnership between The Center and The 1619 Project. The report states that thousands of educators in every state used the provided lesson plans. It adds, “Five school systems adopted the project district-wide: Buffalo, New York; Chicago; Washington, DC; Wilmington, Delaware; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina.”

Hannah-Jones wins the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. In its citation, the committee recognized Hannah-Jones for her stage-setting essay “which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution.” Days later, the world watches as white police officer Derek Chauvin murders black Minneapolis resident George Floyd. The incident leads to days of racial unrest, which Hannah-Jones chronicles through the lens of critical race theory in her column, “What is Owed.”

The Trump Administration takes several actions to curtail the use of The 1619 Project and critical race theory in public institutions. On Sept. 4, the administration issues a memo to the heads of federal agencies directing them to cease all training on “ ‘critical race theory,’ ‘white privilege,’ or any other training or propaganda effort.” On Sept. 6, President Donald Trump tweets that any school using The 1619 Project “will not be funded!” On Sept. 17, at the White House Conference on American History, Trump announces the formation of the 1776 Commission. During his speech, he says, “critical race theory, The 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda.” And on Sept. 22, he issues his “Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping.” The wave of legislation banning critical race theory and The 1619 Project in public schools uses much of the same language found in this executive order.

On Jan. 6, Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol, falsely claiming that state election officials rigged voting results to guarantee then-President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. In his final days in office, Trump’s controversial 1776 Commission releases its report. In a press release, Trump describes the report as “a dispositive rebuttal of reckless “re-education” attempts that seek to reframe American history around the idea that the United States is not an exceptional country but an evil one.”

Fox News reports that the Legal Insurrection Foundation of Rhode Island has launched criticalrace.org , a website that tracks alleged uses of critical race theory and The 1619 Project in the classroom. Later that month, the Pulitzer Center launches The 1619 Project Educational Network. Educators selected for the inaugural cohort receive $5,000 grants to help fund podcasts and other creative projects that incorporate The New York Times series. By February, Republican lawmakers in Iowa, Georgia, and Arkansas have filed bills to block the use of The 1619 Project and critical race theory in the classroom. This year, Chalkbeat has tracked at least 27 state-level efforts attempting to restrict educators from using critical race theory and The 1619 Project.

The Biden administration announces the creation of the American History and Civics Education grants to promote “culturally responsive teaching.” And on April 26, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announces that Hannah-Jones would join the university as the first African American to hold the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, a position historically held by a tenured faculty member.

Three weeks after the announcement and following the conservative backlash surrounding it, NC Policy Watch reports that trustees voted earlier to deny Hannah-Jones tenure, a status that grants faculty members substantial job security and academic freedom. Among those objecting to Hannah-Jones joining UNC were writers for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. The conservative think tank was formerly named the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy and funded by the Pope family. Pope formerly served on the UNC Board of Trustees. Son and conservative donor Art Pope currently serves on the UNC Board of Governors. Art Pope denies any involvement in the tenure decision.

Following public outcry and student demonstrations, the UNC board changes course and approves Hannah-Jones’ tenure application in a 9-4 vote.

Hannah-Jones declines the tenured position at the University of North Carolina and announces that she will instead join Howard University, a historically black institution, in a tenured position as the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Reporting. In a July 7 interview on CNN , she says, “Trying to really silence me at the [University of North Carolina] is part of a wave of these anti-1619 Project, anti-critical race theory, anti-history bills that are being passed. And they’re being passed in the same legislatures that are also passing voter suppression laws, so these two things are going hand-in-hand.”

What do you think? Leave a respectful comment.

The 1619 project details the legacy of slavery in america.

PBS News Hour PBS News Hour

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-1619-project-details-the-legacy-of-slavery-in-america

Four hundred years ago this month, the first enslaved people from Africa arrived in the Virginia colony. To observe the anniversary of American slavery, The New York Times Magazine launched The 1619 Project to reframe America’s history through the lens of slavery. The project lead, reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss.

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Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Hari Sreenivasan:

Today, the New York Times published the print edition of the 1619 Project. The name marks this month's 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved people brought from Africa to the then-Virginia colony. The Times says the project aims to reframe the country's history, understanding 1619 as our true founding and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are. The project is led by New York Times magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, who is the author of the opening essay. She joins me now.

You have been working on this for a number of years, but you put this together very quickly. First of all, why? Why this topic? Why this issue?

Nikole Hannah-Jones:

Well, you don't have very many opportunities to ever celebrate the 400th anniversary of anything, and it seemed to me that this was a great opportunity to really, as you said in your opening, reframe the way that we have thought about an institution that has impacted almost everything in modern American society, but that we're taught very little about, that we're often taught is marginal to the American story. And we wanted to do something different. We wanted to use the platform of The Times to force us to confront the reality of what slavery has meant for our development as a nation.

And this isn't just about sort of the kind of textbook ideas of what happened to slaves. You've got essays in here about health care, about geography, about sugar, about music, all of these different ripple effects that happened throughout the economy and really life here. You said — in a sentence, you said, you know we would not be the United States were it not for slavery. This is kind of one of the original fibers that made this country.

Absolutely. The conceit of the magazine is that one of things we hear all the time is, well that was in the past; why do you have to keep talking about the past? Well, one, I think the past is clearly instructive for the future, for how we are right now, but also the conceit of the magazine is that you can look at all of these modern phenomenon that you think are unrelated to slavery at all and we are going to show you how they are. And so we have a story in there about traffic patterns. We have a story about why we're the only Western industrial country without universal health care, about why Americans consume so much sugar, about capitalism, about democracy. We're really trying to change the way that Americans are thinking that this was just a problem of the past that we've resolved and show that it isn't. What many people don't know, and I point this out in my essay, is that one of the reasons we even decide to become a nation in the first place is over the issue of slavery and had we not had slavery we might be Canada. That one of the reasons that the founders wanted to break off from Britain is they were afraid that Britain was going to begin regulating slavery and maybe even moving towards abolishment. And we were making so much money off of slavery that the founders wanted to be able to continue it.

We're not taught that when we're taught about our origin stories, and not knowing that then it really does not allow us to grapple with a nation that we really are and not just the nation that we're taught in kind of American mythology.

And that money ends up fueling so much more of what made this country.

Of course. It's not incidental that 10 of the first 12 presidents of the United States were slaveowners. This is where, at that time, this kind of very burgeoning nation was getting so much of its wealth and its power. It's what allows this kind of ragged group of colonists to believe that they could defeat the most powerful empire in the world at that time. And it went everywhere. It was north and south. We talk about the industrial revolution — where do Americans believe that the cotton that was being spun in those textile mills was coming from, was coming from enslaved people who are growing that cotton in the south. The rum industry, which was really the currency of the slave trade, that rum was being processed and sold in the United States. The banking industry that rises in New York City is rising largely to provide the mortgages and insurance policies and to finance the slave trade. The shipbuilders are northern shipbuilders. The people who are sending voyages to Africa to bring enslaved people here are all in the north. So this is a truly national enterprise but we prefer to think that it was just some backward Southerners, because that is the way that we can kind of deal with our fundamental paradox that at our beginning that we were a nation built on both the inalienable rights of man and also a nation built on bondage.

And you even talked about Wall Street's name comes from something that most of us don't recognize.

Absolutely. So Wall Street is called Wall Street because it was on that wall that enslaved people were bought and sold. That's been completely erased from our national memory and completely erased from the way that we think about the North. At the time of the Civil War, New York City's mayor actually threatened to secede from the union with the South because so much money was being made off of slave-produced cotton that was being exported out of New York City. It is that erasure I think that has prevented us from really grappling with our history and so much in modern society that we see that is still related to that.

You know, one of the essays in here about health care, which is fascinating, is that some of the myths that started then are still perpetuated today in modern health care and that there are still gross misunderstandings that could actually have very serious health consequences.

Absolutely. So Linda Villarosa has this compelling essay that talks about how during slavery enslavers were using enslaved people to do these medical experiments, but also we were using medical technology to justify slavery by saying enslaved people don't feel pain the way, or people of African descent don't feel pain the way that white people do, that they have thicker skin. And so you can beat them or torture them and it's not going to hurt as bad. Well, these are all justifications for slavery, but if you look at modern medical science, in our understanding they're still using these calculations that say, for instance, lung capacity was one of the things that Linda writes about, that black people have worse lung capacity. And the reason enslavers said that was they said that working in the fields and doing this hard labor was good for black people because it helped them increase their lung capacity. Well, what Linda points out is today doctors and medical science are still accounting for what they think is a lessened lung capacity of black Americans and it's simply not true. But we've never purged ourselves of that false science that was used to justify racism.

You talked about how basically that the black American or there's the black experience has been inconvenient to the narrative of this nation in all of these different categories, that it's been something that we have struggled to deal with but oftentimes just not dealt with it as a result that it was thorny.

Absolutely. So when you think about the story of who we are, that we are this country built on individual rights. We are the country where, if you are coming from a place where you are not free, you can come to our shores and you can get freedom. Well then you have black people. And every time you look at black Americans, you have to be reminded that there was one-fifth of our population who, we had no rights, no liberties, no freedom whatsoever. We are the constant reminder of really the lie at our origins that while Thomas Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence his enslaved brother-in-law was there to serve him and make sure that he's comfortable. So I think this explains a lot the continued perception that black people are a problem, that black people are as Abraham Lincoln said "a troublesome presence" in American democracy because every time you see us you have to be reminded of our original sin, and no one wants to be reminded of sin. We're ashamed of sin.

You know, one of the things that you mentioned a couple of nights ago when this project launched is the story of your grandmother who grew up a sharecropper. And here you are today. She didn't live to be able to see this magazine, but I'm assuming she'd be proud.

Yeah, I think she would. My grandmother died when I was still in college, and she would be astounded to see what I became. And I think that that's an important part of this story. We hear all the time what people consider the problems of the quote-unquote "black community" and people like to point out statistics that they think are indicative of black failure. But when we think that, as I point out in the magazine, I'm part of the first generation of black Americans in the history of this country who was born into a country where it was not legal to discriminate against me just because I descended from people from Africa. We've made tremendous progress in a very short period of time. Really just one or two generations out of legal Jim Crow, you could have someone like me at the New York Times producing this work. And it really is a story of black ascension once the legal barriers have been removed.

You talk in eloquent terms about how black people really are the perfecters of this democracy, that we had these original documents but really it took this all the way almost to the civil rights struggle for us to start seeing what those words actually meant.

Absolutely. What I argue is that no one values freedom more than those who never had it. And so while the founders were writing these lofty and aspirational words, even as they knew that they were going to continue a system of slavery, black people had no choice but to believe in the literal interpretation of those words, that all men are created equal and are born with inalienable rights. And so black people really from the moment we landed on these shores have been resisting and trying to push this society toward a more equal society of universal rights. And that has really been our role. You can look at the fact that black people have fought in every single war this country has ever fought, but we've also engaged in a 250-year internal war against our own country to try to force our country to also bring full democracy here and not just abroad.

This magazine is also showing up in 2019 in a climate where at this point all you have to do is just look at your Twitter feed, look at the hashtag, and you see people who have an incredibly different narrative that they believe very strongly, that they'd look at this magazine, The Times, everything else as part of a larger propaganda campaign, this is part of a conspiracy, etc. How do you deal with that?

There's two things that I would say to that. Every piece in here is deeply researched. It is backed up by historical evidence. Our fact checkers went back to panels of historians and had them go through every single argument and every single fact that is in here. So it's really not something that you can dispute with facts. But the other thing is if we truly understand that black people are fully American and so the struggle of black people to make our union actually reflect its values is not a negative thing against the country, because we are citizens who are working to make this country better for all Americans. That is something that white Americans, if they really believe as they say that race doesn't matter, we're all Americans, should also be proud of and embrace that story. We cannot deny our past. And if you believe that 1776 matters, if you believe that our Constitution still matters, then you also have to understand that the legacy of slavery still matters and you can't pick and choose what parts of history we think are important and which ones aren't. They all are important. And that narrative that is inclusive and honest even if it's painful is the only way that we can understand our times now and the only way we can move forward. I think what, if people read for instance a story on why we don't have universal health care, what it shows is that racism doesn't just hurt black people but there are a lot — there are millions of white people in this country who are dying, who are sick, who are unable to pay their medical bills because we can't get past the legacy of slavery. This affects all Americans no matter if you just got here yesterday, if your family's been here 200 years, no matter what your race. Our inability to deal with this original sin is hurting all of us and this entire country is not the country that it could be because of it.

So just connect that dot. What is the connection between universal health care and slavery?

Well, what we know is that white support for universal programs declines if they think that large numbers of black people are going to benefit from it. And this is a sentiment that goes all the way back to right after the end of the Civil War when the Freedmen's Bureau starts to offer universal health care for people who had literally just come out of bondage, had not a dollar to their name, had no way to live, had nothing. And white people immediately pushed back against that believing that even people who had just come out of slavery should not get anything quote-unquote "for free," even though their labor clearly had built the entire, most of the economy of the country. And so that sentiment continues to this day. And if you look at across western industrialized nations, European nations, we have the stingiest social safety net of all of those nations. And it's because we are the only one on whose land we practiced slavery. So our inability to get past that is hurting. It's not just in terms of universal health care, but you can look at why we don't have universal child care, why we have the stingiest parental leave, why we have the lowest ability to have people represented by unions. All of this goes back to the sentiment that if black people are going to benefit, white Americans would not support it, large numbers of white Americans.

So this is the actual physical edition that a lot of people in the country might not be able to get if they don't have a newsstand that sells the New York Times. But it's also all of it is online, right?

All the essays are online and this was a special section. This was in partnership with the Smithsonian, right?

And so you've got curriculum that's online, you've got all of the New York Times Magazine that's online. You're doing a lot of different kinds of outreach projects. Right after this you're going to a 1619 brunch and this is happening in different parts of the country as well?

Yes. So people all across the country are holding brunches to really sit and discuss this, which is more than my wildest dreams for this project. I think just because of what's happening in the country right now, people are really searching for answers. We raised money so that we could print more than 200,000 additional copies that we are distributing in various places across the country for free because we really want not just Times subscribers to get access to this but communities where it's difficult to get the Times, where people can't afford to get the Times. We truly think that this is a public service project that is important for all Americans, not just our subscribers to get access to.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, thank you so much.

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The 1619 Project and the Demands of Public History

In August of 2019, a special issue of the Times Magazine appeared, wearing a portentous cover—a photograph, shot by the visual artist Dannielle Bowman, of a calm sea under gray skies, the line between earth and land cleanly bisecting the frame like the stroke of a minimalist painting. On the lower half of the page was a mighty paragraph, printed in bronze letters. It began:

In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began.

The name of this endeavor was introduced at the very bottom of the page, in print small enough to overlook: “The 1619 Project.” The titular year encapsulated a dramatic claim: that it was the arrival of what would become slavery in the colonies, and not the independence declared in 1776, that marked “the country’s true birth date,” as the issue’s editors wrote.

Seldom these days does a paper edition have such blockbuster draw. New Yorkers not in the habit of seeking out their Sunday Times ventured to bodegas to nab a hard copy. (Today you can find a copy on eBay for around a hundred dollars.) Commentators, such as the Vox correspondent Jamil Smith, lauded the Project—which consisted of eleven essays, nine poems, eight works of short fiction, and dozens of photographs, all documenting the long-fingered reach of American slavery—as an unprecedented journalistic feat. Impassioned critics emerged at both ends of the political spectrum. On the right, a boorish resistance developed that would eventually include everything from the Trump Administration’s error-riddled 1776 Commission report to states’ panicked attempts to purge their school curricula of so-called critical race theory . On the other side, unsentimental leftists, such as the political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr., accused the series of disregarding the struggles of a multiracial working class. But accompanying the salient historical questions was an underlying problem of genre. Journalism is, by its nature, a provisional and fragmentary undertaking—a “first draft of history,” as the saying goes—proceeding in installments that journalists often describe humbly as “pieces.” What are the difficulties that greet a journalistic endeavor when it aspires to function as a more concerted kind of history, and not just any history but a remodelling of our fundamental national narrative?

In the preface to a new book version of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones , a Times Magazine reporter and the leading force behind the endeavor, recalls that it began, as many journalistic projects do, in the form of a “simple pitch.” She proposed a large-scale public history, harnessing all of the paper’s institutional might and gloss, that would “bring slavery and the contributions of Black Americans from the margins of the American story to the center, where they belong.” The word “project” was chosen to “emphasize that its work would be ongoing and would not culminate with any single publication,” the editors wrote. Indeed, the undertaking from the beginning was a cross-platform affair for the Times , with special sections of the newspaper, a series on its podcast “The Daily,” and educational materials developed in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. By academic standards, the proposed argument was not all that provocative. The year 1619 itself has long been depicted as a tragic watershed. Langston Hughes wrote of it, in a poem that serves as the new book’s epigraph, as “The great mistake / That Jamestown made / Long ago.” In 2012, the College of William & Mary launched the “ Middle Passage Project 1619 Initiative ,” which sponsored academic and public events in anticipation of the approaching quadricentennial. “So much of what later becomes definitively ‘American’ is established at Jamestown,” the organizers wrote. But the legacy-media muscle behind the 1619 Project would accomplish what its predecessors in poetry and academia did not, thrusting the date in question into the national lexicon. There was something coyly American about the effort—public knowledge inculcated by way of impeccable branding.

The historical debates that followed are familiar by now. Four months after the special issue was released, the Times Magazine published a letter , jointly signed by five historians, taking issue with certain “errors and distortions” in the Project. The authors objected, especially, to a line in the introductory essay by Hannah-Jones stating that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Several months later, Politico published a piece by Leslie M. Harris, a historian and professor at Northwestern who’d been asked to help fact-check the 1619 Project. She’d “vigorously disputed” the same line, to no avail. “I was concerned that critics would use the overstated claim to discredit the entire undertaking,” she wrote. “So far, that’s exactly what has happened.”

The pushback from scholars was not just a matter of factuality. History is, in some senses, no less provisional than journalism. Its facts are subject to interpretation and disagreement—and also to change. But one detected in the historians’ complaints a discomfort with the 1619 Project’s fourth-estate bravado, its temperamental challenge to the slow and heavily qualified work of scholarly revelation. This concern was arguably borne out further in the Times’ corrections process. Hannah-Jones amended the line in question; in both the magazine and the book, it now states that “some of the colonists” were motivated by Britain’s growing abolitionist sentiment, a phrasing that neither retreats from the original claim nor shores it up convincingly. In the book, Hannah-Jones also clarifies another passage that had been under dispute, which had claimed that “for the most part” Black Americans fought for freedom “alone.” The original wording remains, but a qualifying clause has been added: “For the most part, Black Americans fought back alone, never getting a majority of white Americans to join and support their freedom struggles.” As Carlos Lozada pointed out in the Washington Post , the addition seems to redefine the meaning of the word “alone” rather than revise or replace it. In my view, the original wording was acceptable as a rhetorical flourish, whereas the amended version sounds fuzzy.

In the book’s preface, Hannah-Jones doesn’t dwell, as she well could have, on the truly deranged ire the Project has triggered on the right over the past few years. ( Donald Trump ’s ignorant bluster is mercifully confined to a single paragraph.) But neither is she entirely honest about the scope of fair criticism that the work has received. She files both academic disagreement (from “a few scholars”) and fury from the likes of Tom Cotton under the convenient label “backlash,” and suggests that any readers with qualms resent the Project for focussing “too much on the brutality of slavery and our nation’s legacy of anti-Blackness.” (Meanwhile, even the five historians behind the letter wrote that they “applaud all efforts to address the enduring centrality of slavery and racism to our history.”) The editors of the book, who include Hannah-Jones and the Times Magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, want to “address the criticisms historians offered in good faith”; accordingly, they’ve updated other passages, including ones on Lincoln and on constitutional property rights. But even the use of the term “good faith” suggests a hawkish mentality regarding the revisions process: you’re either against the Project or you’re with it, all in. There is little room in a venue as public as the 1619 Project’s for the learning opportunities that arise when research sets its ego aside and evolves in plain sight.

As Hannah-Jones notes, the disagreements needn’t undermine the 1619 Project as a whole. (After all, one of the letter’s signatories, James M. McPherson, an emeritus professor at Princeton, admitted in an interview that he’d “skimmed” most of the essays.) But the high-profile disputes over Hannah-Jones’s claims have eclipsed some of the quieter scrutiny that the Project has received, and which in the book goes unmentioned. In an essay published in the peer-reviewed journal American Literary History last winter, Michelle M. Wright, a scholar of Black diaspora at Emory, enumerated other objections, including the series’ near-erasure of Indigenous peoples. Wright sees the 1619 Project as replacing one insufficient creation story with another. “Be wary of asserting origins: they tend to shift as new archival evidence turns up,” she wrote.

The Project’s original hundred pages of magazine material have, in the new volume, swelled to more than five hundred, and certain formatting changes seem designed to serve its “big book” aspirations. Lyrical titles from the magazine issue, such as “Undemocratic Democracy” and “How Slavery Made Its Way West,” have been traded for broadly thematic ones (“Democracy,” “Dispossession”) and now join sixteen other single-word chapter titles, such as “Politics” (by the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie), “Self-Defense” (by the Emory professor Carol Anderson), and “Progress” (by the historian and best-selling anti-racism author Ibram X. Kendi). Along with the preface and an updated version of the original ruckus-raising essay, Hannah-Jones has written a closing piece, cementing her role as the 1619 custodian. In the manner of an academic text, the Project is showier about its scholarship this time around, sometimes cumbersomely so, with in-text citations of monographs with interminable titles. New essays, by scholars including Martha S. Jones and Dorothy Roberts, pointedly bolster the contributions from within the academy. Perhaps also pointedly, endnotes at the back of the book list the source material, which the series in magazine form had been accused of withholding.

At the same time, many of the essays in the book remain shaped according to the conventions of the magazine feature. First, a contemporary scene is set: the day after the 2020 election; the day Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd on a Minneapolis street; Obama’s first campaign for President; Obama’s farewell address. Then there is a section break, followed by a leap way back in time, the sort of move that David Roth, of Defector, has called, not without admiration, “The New Yorker Eurostep,” after a similarly swerving basketball maneuver. For the 1619 Project, though, the “Eurostep” isn’t merely a literary device, used in the service of storytelling; it is also a tool of historical argument, bolstering the Project’s assertion that one long-ago date explicates so much of what has come since. Modern-day policing evolved from white fears of Black freedom. Slave torture pioneered contemporary medical racism. For each of those points a historical narrative is unfolded, dilating here and leapfrogging there until the writer has traversed the promised four hundred years and established a neat causal connection.

For instance, an essay by the lawyer and professor Bryan Stevenson traces the modern plague of mass incarceration back to the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery but made an exception for those convicted of crimes. In his eight pages outlining the “unbroken links” between then and now, Stevenson breezes past the constellation of policies that gave rise to mass incarceration in the span of a single sentence—“Richard Nixon’s war on drugs, mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes laws, children tried as adults, ‘broken windows’ ”—and explains that those policies have “many of the same features” as the Black Codes that controlled freed Black people a century and a half ago. (The language here has been softened: in his original magazine piece, Stevenson deemed the Black Codes and the latter-day policies “essentially the same.”) It is not an untruthful accounting but it is an unstudious one, devoid of the sort of close reading that enlivens well-told histories. Alighting only so briefly on events of great consequence, many of “The 1619 Project” contributions end up reading like the CliffsNotes to more compelling bodies of work.

At its best, the book’s repetitive structure allows the stand-alone essays to converse fruitfully with one another. Matthew Desmond, explaining the origins of the American economy, describes the lengths the Framers went to secure the country’s chattel, including by adding a provision to the Constitution granting Congress the power to “suppress insurrections.” The implications of that provision and others like it are explored in the essay “Self-Defense,” by Anderson, whose note that “the enslaved were not considered citizens” acquires richer significance if you’ve read Martha S. Jones’s preceding chapter on citizenship. But the formula wears over time. With few exceptions—among them, a piece by Wesley Morris, a masterly stylist—the voices of the individual writers are unrecognizable, hewn to flatness by the primacy of the Project’s thesis. Regretfully, this is true even of the book’s poems and short fiction, which, in a rather utilitarian gesture, are presented between chapters along with a time line that aids the volume’s march toward the present.

For instance, the book’s very first listed event—the arrival of the White Lion in August, 1619—is followed by a poem by Claudia Rankine, which sits on the opposite page and borrows its name from that ship: “The first / vessel to land at Point Comfort / on the James River enters history, / and thus history enters Virginia.” A short piece by Nafissa Thompson-Spires depicts the interior monologue of a campaigner for Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run for President, after Chisholm decided to visit George (“segregation forever”) Wallace in the hospital following an assassination attempt in 1972—a visit noted in a time line on the preceding page. As in much of the other fiction in the volume, Thompson-Spires’s prose is left winded by the responsibilities of exposition: “It seemed best not to try to convert the whites but to instead focus on registering voters, especially older ones on our side of town, many of whom, including Gran and PawPaw, couldn’t have passed even a basic literacy test.”

The didacticism does let up on occasion. An ennobling found poem by Tracy K. Smith derives its text from an 1870 speech by the Mississippi Senator Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first Black member of congress, who, a month after his swearing in, had to argue to keep Georgia’s duly elected Black legislators, who’d been denied their seats by the Democrats. (“My term is short, fraught, / and I bear about me daily / the keenest sense of the power / of blacks to shed hallowed light, / to welcome the Good News.”) A poem by Rita Dove channels the antsiness of Addie, Cynthia, Carol, and Carole, the four children who perished in a church bombing in Birmingham on September 15, 1963: “This morning’s already good—summer’s / cooling, Addie chattering like a magpie— / but today we are leading the congregation. / Ain’t that a fine thing!” But, on the whole, the literary creativity fits awkwardly with the task of record-keeping. It is a shame to assemble some of the finest and most daring authors of our time only to hem them in with time stamps.

So what are the facts? There are plenty in the volume that aren’t likely to be disputed. In the late seventeenth century, South Carolina made its whites legally responsible for policing any slave found off of the plantation without permission, with penalties for those who neglected to do so. In 1857, the Supreme Court decided against Dred Scott, ruling that Black people “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides.” In 1919, the U.S. Army strode into Elaine, Arkansas, and gunned down hundreds of Black residents. In 1960, Senator Barry Goldwater mourned the decline of states’ rights heralded by Brown v. Board of Education, contending that protecting racial equality was not federal business. In 1985, six adults and five children in Philadelphia received “the commissioner’s recipe for eviction,” as Gregory Pardlo writes in a poem, including “M16s, Uzi submachine guns, sniper rifles, tear gas . . . and one / state police / helicopter to drop two pounds of mining explosives combined with two / pounds of C-4.” In 2020, Black Americans were reportedly 2.8 times more likely to die after contracting COVID -19 . What the 1619 Project accounts for is the brutal racial logic governing the “afterlife of slavery,” as Saidiya V. Hartman has put it in her transformative scholarship (which is referenced only once in this book, in an endnote, but without which a project such as 1619 might very well not exist).

The book’s final essay, by Hannah-Jones, argues in favor of reparations so that America may “finally live up to the magnificent ideals upon which we were founded.” By “we” here she is referring to the nation as a whole, but embedded in Hannah-Jones’s vision is a more provincial collective identity. The convoluted apparatuses of anti-Black racism don’t spare individuals based on the specifics of their family trees. Black Americans encompass those whose roots in this country date back for many generations, or for one. Yet Hannah-Jones’s unstated but unsubtle suggestion is that a particular subset of Black people, namely those of us who can trace our ancestry to slavery within the nation’s borders, are the truest inheritors of America, both its ills and its ideals. We represent the country’s best “defenders and perfecters,” are “the most American of all,” and are not “the problem, but the solution.” These dubious honors are pinned, like badges of pride, at the volume’s beginning and end, and, for me, the imposition of patriotism is more bothersome than any debated factual claim. In spite of all of the ugly evidence it has assembled, the 1619 Project ultimately seeks to inspire faith in the American project, just as any conventional social-studies curriculum would.

This faith finds its most sentimental expression in another new book about 1619, “ Born on the Water ,” which was co-authored by Hannah-Jones and Renée Watson for school-aged readers. Beautifully illustrated by Nikkolas Smith, it centers on a young Black girl’s familiar dilemma during a classroom genealogy assignment—what knowledge does she have to share about an ancestry that was torn asunder by the Middle Passage? One answer comes on the story’s final page, in which the girl is seated at her desk, smiling, her hands poised midway through crayoning stars and stripes for “the flag of the country my ancestors built, / that my grandma and grandpa built, / that I will help build, too.” Here the 1619 Project has left the genres of journalism and history for the realm of fable. But a similar thinking resides at the center of the 1619 Project in all of its evolving forms—past, present, and future, arranged in a single line.

A Matter of Facts

The New York Times ’ 1619 Project launched with the best of intentions, but has been undermined by some of its claims.

W ith much fanfare , The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue in August to what it called the 1619 Project. The project’s aim, the magazine announced, was to reinterpret the entirety of American history. “Our democracy’s founding ideals,” its lead essay proclaimed, “were false when they were written.” Our history as a nation rests on slavery and white supremacy, whose existence made a mockery of the Declaration of Independence’s “self-evident” truth that all men are created equal. Accordingly, the nation’s birth came not in 1776 but in 1619, the year, the project stated, when slavery arrived in Britain’s North American colonies. From then on, America’s politics, economics, and culture have stemmed from efforts to subjugate African Americans—first under slavery, then under Jim Crow, and then under the abiding racial injustices that mark our own time—as well as from the struggles, undertaken for the most part by black people alone, to end that subjugation and redeem American democracy.

The opportunity seized by the 1619 Project is as urgent as it is enormous. For more than two generations, historians have deepened and transformed the study of the centrality of slavery and race to American history and generated a wealth of facts and interpretations. Yet the subject, which connects the past to our current troubled times, remains too little understood by the general public. The 1619 Project proposed to fill that gap with its own interpretation.

To sustain its particular take on an immense subject while also informing a wide readership is a remarkably ambitious goal, imposing, among other responsibilities, a scrupulous regard for factual accuracy. Readers expect nothing less from The New York Times , the project’s sponsor, and they deserve nothing less from an effort as profound in its intentions as the 1619 Project. During the weeks and months after the 1619 Project first appeared, however, historians, publicly and privately, began expressing alarm over serious inaccuracies.

Adam Serwer: The fight over the 1619 Project is not about the facts

On December 20, the Times Magazine published a letter that I signed with four other historians—Victoria Bynum, James McPherson, James Oakes, and Gordon Wood. Our letter applauded the project’s stated aim to raise public awareness and understanding of slavery’s central importance in our history. Although the project is not a conventional work of history and cannot be judged as such, the letter intended to help ensure that its efforts did not come at the expense of basic accuracy. Offering practical support to that end, it pointed out specific statements that, if allowed to stand, would misinform the public and give ammunition to those who might be opposed to the mission of grappling with the legacy of slavery. The letter requested that the Times print corrections of the errors that had already appeared, and that it keep those errors from appearing in any future materials published with the Times ’ imprimatur, including the school curricula the newspaper announced it was developing in conjunction with the project.

The letter has provoked considerable reaction, some of it from historians affirming our concerns about the 1619 Project’s inaccuracies, some from historians questioning our motives in pointing out those inaccuracies, and some from the Times itself. In the newspaper’s lengthy formal response, the New York Times Magazine editor in chief, Jake Silverstein, flatly denied that the project “contains significant factual errors” and said that our request for corrections was not “warranted.” Silverstein then offered new evidence to support claims that our letter had described as groundless. In the interest of historical accuracy, it is worth examining his denials and new claims in detail.

No effort to educate the public in order to advance social justice can afford to dispense with a respect for basic facts. In the long and continuing battle against oppression of every kind, an insistence on plain and accurate facts has been a powerful tool against propaganda that is widely accepted as truth. That tool is far too important to cede now.

M y colleagues and I focused on the project’s discussion of three crucial subjects: the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the long history of resistance to racism from Jim Crow to the present. No effort to reframe American history can succeed if it fails to provide accurate accounts of these subjects.

The project’s lead essay, written by the Times staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, includes early on a discussion of the Revolution. Although that discussion is brief, its conclusions are central to the essay’s overarching contention that slavery and racism are the foundations of American history. The essay argues that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” That is a striking claim built on three false assertions.

“By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere,” Hannah-Jones wrote. But apart from the activity of the pioneering abolitionist Granville Sharp, Britain was hardly conflicted at all in 1776 over its involvement in the slave system. Sharp played a key role in securing the 1772 Somerset v. Stewart ruling, which declared that chattel slavery was not recognized in English common law. That ruling did little, however, to reverse Britain’s devotion to human bondage, which lay almost entirely in its colonial slavery and its heavy involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. Nor did it generate a movement inside Britain in opposition to either slavery or the slave trade. As the historian Christopher Leslie Brown writes in his authoritative study of British abolitionism, Moral Capital , Sharp “worked tirelessly against the institution of slavery everywhere within the British Empire after 1772, but for many years in England he would stand nearly alone.” What Hannah-Jones described as a perceptible British threat to American slavery in 1776 in fact did not exist.

“In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade,” Hannah-Jones continued. But the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired, as Brown demonstrates in great detail, by American antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and ’70s. There were no “growing calls” in London to abolish the trade as early as 1776.

“This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South,” Hannah-Jones wrote. But the colonists had themselves taken decisive steps to end the Atlantic slave trade from 1769 to 1774. During that time, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island either outlawed the trade or imposed prohibitive duties on it. Measures to abolish the trade also won approval in Massachusetts, Delaware, New York, and Virginia, but were denied by royal officials. The colonials’ motives were not always humanitarian: Virginia, for example, had more enslaved black people than it needed to sustain its economy and saw the further importation of Africans as a threat to social order. But the Americans who attempted to end the trade did not believe that they were committing economic suicide.

Assertions that a primary reason the Revolution was fought was to protect slavery are as inaccurate as the assertions, still current, that southern secession and the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. In his reply to our letter, though, Silverstein ignored the errors we had specified and then imputed to the essay a very different claim. In place of Hannah-Jones’s statement that “the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain … because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,” Silverstein substituted “that uneasiness among slaveholders in the colonies about growing antislavery sentiment in Britain and increasing imperial regulation helped motivate the Revolution.” Silverstein makes a large concession here about the errors in Hannah-Jones’s essay without acknowledging that he has done so. There is a notable gap between the claim that the defense of slavery was a chief reason behind the colonists’ drive for independence and the claim that concerns about slavery among a particular group, the slaveholders, “helped motivate the Revolution.”

But even the evidence proffered in support of this more restricted claim—which implicitly cedes the problem with the original assertion—fails to hold up to scrutiny. Silverstein pointed to the Somerset case, in which, as I’ve noted, a British high court ruled that English common law did not support chattel slavery. Even though the decision did not legally threaten slavery in the colonies, Silverstein wrote, it caused a “sensation” when reported in colonial newspapers and “slavery joined other issues in helping to gradually drive apart the patriots and their colonial governments.”

In fact, the Somerset ruling caused no such sensation. In the entire slaveholding South, a total of six newspapers—one in Maryland, two in Virginia, and three in South Carolina—published only 15 reports about Somerset , virtually all of them very brief. Coverage was spotty: The two South Carolina newspapers that devoted the most space to the case didn’t even report its outcome. American newspaper readers learned far more about the doings of the queen of Denmark, George III’s sister Caroline, whom Danish rebels had charged with having an affair with the court physician and plotting the death of her husband. A pair of Boston newspapers gave the Somerset decision prominent play; otherwise, most of the coverage appeared in the tiny-font foreign dispatches placed on the second or third page of a four- or six-page issue.

Above all, the reportage was almost entirely matter-of-fact, betraying no fear of incipient tyranny. A London correspondent for one New York newspaper did predict, months in advance of the actual ruling, that the case “will occasion a greater ferment in America (particularly in the islands) than the Stamp Act,” but that forecast fell flat. Some recent studies have conjectured that the Somerset ruling must have intensely riled southern slaveholders, and word of the decision may well have encouraged enslaved Virginians about the prospects of their gaining freedom, which could have added to slaveholders’ constant fears of insurrection. Actual evidence, however, that the Somerset decision jolted the slaveholders into fearing an abolitionist Britain—let alone to the extent that it can be considered a leading impetus to declaring independence—is less than scant.

Slaveholders and their defenders in the West Indies, to be sure, were more exercised, producing a few proslavery pamphlets that strongly denounced the decision. Even so, as Trevor Burnard’s comprehensive study of Jamaica in the age of the American Revolution observes, “ Somerset had less impact in the West Indies than might have been expected.” Which is not to say that the Somerset ruling had no effect at all in the British colonies, including those that would become the United States. In the South, it may have contributed, over time, to amplifying the slaveholders’ mistrust of overweening imperial power, although the mistrust dated back to the Stamp Act crisis in 1765. In the North, meanwhile, where newspaper coverage of Somerset was far more plentiful than in the South, the ruling’s principles became a reference point for antislavery lawyers and lawmakers, an important development in the history of early antislavery politics.

In addition to the Somerset ruling, Silverstein referred to a proclamation from 1775 by John Murray, the fourth earl of Dunmore and royal governor of Virginia, as further evidence that fears about British antislavery sentiment pushed the slaveholders to support independence. Unfortunately, his reference was inaccurate: Dunmore’s proclamation pointedly did not offer freedom “to any enslaved person who fled his plantation,” as Silverstein claimed. In declaring martial law in Virginia, the proclamation offered freedom only to those held by rebel slaveholders. Tory slaveholders could keep their enslaved people. This was a cold and calculated political move. The proclamation, far from fomenting an American rebellion, presumed a rebellion had already begun . Dunmore, himself an unapologetic slaveholder—he would end his career as the royal governor of the Bahamas, overseeing an attempt to establish a cotton slavery regime on the islands—aimed to alarm and disrupt the patriots, free their human property to bolster his army, and incite fears of a wider uprising by enslaved people. His proclamation was intended as an act of war, not a blow against the institution of slavery, and everyone understood it as such.

Sanford Levinson: The Constitution is the crisis

Dunmore’s proclamation (unlike the Somerset decision three years earlier) certainly touched off an intense panic among Virginia slaveholders, Tory and patriot alike, who were horror-struck that it might spark a general insurrection, as the groundbreaking historian Benjamin Quarles showed many years ago. To the hundreds of enslaved men, women, and children who escaped to Dunmore’s lines, the governor was unquestionably, as Richard Henry Lee disparagingly remarked , the “African hero.” To the 300 formerly enslaved black men who joined what the governor called Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, outfitted with uniforms emblazoned with the slogan “Liberty to slaves,” he was a redeemer.

The spectacle likely stiffened the resolve for independence among the rebel patriots whom Dunmore singled out, but they were already rebels. The proclamation may conceivably have persuaded some Tory slaveholders to switch sides, or some who remained on the fence. It would have done so, however, because Dunmore, exploiting the Achilles’ heel of any slaveholding society, posed a direct and immediate threat to lives and property (which included, under Virginia law, enslaved persons), not because he affirmed slaveholders’ fears of “growing antislavery sentiment in Britain.” The offer of freedom in a single colony to persons enslaved by men who had already joined the patriots’ ranks—after a decade of mounting sentiment for independence, and after the American rebellion had commenced—cannot be held up as evidence that the slaveholder colonists wanted to separate from Britain to protect the institution of slavery.

To back up his argument that Dunmore’s proclamation, against the backdrop of a supposed British antislavery outpouring, was a catalyst for the Revolution, Silverstein seized upon a quotation not from a Virginian, but from a South Carolinian, Edward Rutledge, who was observing the events at a distance, from Philadelphia. “A member of South Carolina’s delegation to the Continental Congress wrote that this act did more to sever the ties between Britain and its colonies ‘than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of,’” Silverstein wrote.

Although he would become the youngest signer of the Declaration of Independence, Rutledge, a hyper-cautious patriot, was torn, late in 1775, about whether the time was yet ripe to move forward with a formal separation from Britain. By early December, while serving his state in the Continental Congress, he had moved toward finally declaring independence, in response to various events that had expanded the Americans’ rebellion, including the American invasion of Canada; news of George III’s refusal to consider the Continental Congress’s petition for reconciliation; the British burning of the town of Falmouth, Maine; and, most recently, Dunmore’s proclamation, full news of which was only just reaching Philadelphia.

In a private letter explaining his evolving thoughts, Rutledge described the proclamation as “tending in my judgment, more effectively to work an eternal separation” between Britain and America “than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.” By quoting only the second half of that statement, Silverstein altered its meaning, turning Rutledge’s personal and speculative observation into conclusive proof of a sweeping claim.

This is not the only flaw in Silverstein’s discussion. He seems unaware that, in the end, Rutledge himself was not sufficiently moved by Dunmore’s proclamation to support independence, and he rather notoriously led the opposition inside the Congress before switching at the last minute on July 1, 1776. Moreover, a man whom John Adams had earlier described as “a Swallow—a Sparrow—a Peacock; excessively vain, excessively weak, and excessively variable and unsteady—jejune, inane, & puerile” may not be the most reliable source.

To buttress his case, Silverstein also quoted the historian Jill Lepore: “Not the taxes and the tea, not the shots at Lexington and Concord, not the siege of Boston: rather, it was this act, Dunmore’s offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the scales in favor of American independence.” But Silverstein’s claim about Dunmore’s proclamation and the coming of independence is no more convincing when it turns up, almost identically, in a book by a distinguished authority; Lepore also relies on a foreshortened version of the Rutledge quote, presenting it as evidence of what the proclamation actually did, rather than as one man’s expectation as to what it would do. As for Silverstein’s main contention, meanwhile, neither Lepore nor Rutledge said anything about the colonists’ fear of growing antislavery sentiment in Britain.

O nly the Civil War surpasses the Revolution in its importance to American history with respect to slavery and racism. Yet here again, particularly with regard to the ideas and actions of Abraham Lincoln, Hannah-Jones’s argument is built on partial truths and misstatements of the facts, which combine to impart a fundamentally misleading impression.

The essay chooses to examine Lincoln within the context of a meeting he called at the White House with five prominent black men from Washington, D.C., in August 1862, during which Lincoln told the visitors of his long-held support for the colonization of free black people, encouraging them voluntarily to participate in a tentative experimental colony. Hannah-Jones wrote that this meeting was “one of the few times that black people had ever been invited to the White House as guests”; in fact, it was the first such occasion. The essay says that Lincoln “was weighing a proclamation that threatened to emancipate all enslaved people in the states that had seceded from the Union,” but that he “worried about what the consequences of this radical step would be,” because he “believed that free black people were a ‘troublesome presence’ incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people.”

In fact, Lincoln had already decided a month earlier to issue a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation with no contingency of colonization, and was only awaiting a military victory, which came in September at Antietam. And Lincoln had supported and signed the act that emancipated the slaves in D.C. in June, again with no imperative of colonization—the consummation of his emancipation proposal from 1849, when he was a member of the House of Representatives.

Not only was Lincoln’s support for emancipation not contingent on colonization, but his pessimism was echoed by some black abolitionists who enthusiastically endorsed black colonization, including the early pan-Africanist Martin Delany (favorably quoted elsewhere by Hannah-Jones) and the well-known minister Henry Highland Garnet, as well as, for a time, Frederick Douglass’s sons Lewis and Charles Douglass. And Lincoln’s views on colonization were evolving. Soon enough, as his secretary, John Hay, put it, Lincoln “sloughed off” the idea of colonization, which Hay called a “hideous & barbarous humbug.”

But this Lincoln is not visible in Hannah-Jones’s essay. “Like many white Americans,” she wrote, Lincoln “opposed slavery as a cruel system at odds with American ideals, but he also opposed black equality.” This elides the crucial difference between Lincoln and the white supremacists who opposed him. Lincoln asserted on many occasions, most notably during his famous debates with the racist Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, that the Declaration of Independence’s famous precept that “all men are created equal” was a human universal that applied to black people as well as white people. Like the majority of white Americans of his time, including many radical abolitionists, Lincoln harbored the belief that white people were socially superior to black people. He insisted, however, that “in the right to eat the bread without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, [the Negro] is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man.” To state flatly, as Hannah-Jones’s essay does, that Lincoln “opposed black equality” is to deny the very basis of his opposition to slavery.

Nor was Lincoln, who had close relations with the free black people of Springfield, Illinois, and represented a number of them as clients, known to treat black people as inferior. After meeting with Lincoln at the White House, Sojourner Truth, the black abolitionist, said that he “showed as much respect and kindness to the coloured persons present as to the white,” and that she “never was treated by any one with more kindness and cordiality” than “by that great and good man.” In his first meeting with Lincoln, Frederick Douglass wrote, the president greeted him “just as you have seen one gentleman receive another, with a hand and voice well-balanced between a kind cordiality and a respectful reserve.” Lincoln addressed him as “Mr. Douglass” as he encouraged his visitor to spread word in the South of the Emancipation Proclamation and to help recruit and organize black troops. Perhaps this is why in his response, instead of repeating the claim that Lincoln “opposed black equality,” Silverstein asserted that Lincoln “was ambivalent about full black citizenship.”

Michael Gerhardt and Jeffrey Rosen: How to revive Madison’s constitution

Did Lincoln believe that free black people were a “troublesome presence”? That phrase comes from an 1852 eulogy he delivered in honor of Henry Clay, describing Clay’s views of colonization and free black people. Lincoln did not use those words in his 1862 meeting or on any occasion other than the eulogy. And Lincoln did not believe that the United States was “a democracy intended only for white people.” On the contrary, in his stern opposition to the Supreme Court’s racist Dred Scott v. Sandford decision in 1857, he made a point of noting that, at the time the Constitution was ratified, five of the 13 states gave free black men the right to vote, a fact that helped explode Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s contention that black people had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

To be sure, on this subject as on many others, one could easily cherry-pick isolated episodes from Lincoln’s long career to portray him very differently. As a first-term Illinois state legislator, in a display of party loyalty, Lincoln voted in favor of a sham, highly partisan Whig resolution against black suffrage in the state, introduced as a campaign gambit before the 1836 election against the Democrats who had enacted a restrictive black code. More than 20 years later, in 1859, fending off racist demagogy about his antislavery politics, he carefully denied a charge that he was proposing to give voting rights to black men, while still upholding black people’s human rights. But Lincoln fully recognized the political inclusion of free black people in several states at the nation’s founding, and he lamented how most of those states had either abridged or rescinded black voting rights in the intervening decades. Far from agreeing with Taney and others that American democracy was intended to be for white people only, Lincoln rejected the claim, citing simple and unimpeachable facts.

As president, moreover, Lincoln acted on his beliefs, taking enormous political and, as it turned out, personal risks. In March 1864, as he approached a difficult reelection campaign, Lincoln asked the Union war governor of Louisiana to establish the beginning of black suffrage in a new state constitution, “to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom.” A year later, in his final speech, Lincoln publicly broached the subject of enlarging black enfranchisement, which was the final incitement to a member of the crowd, John Wilkes Booth, to assassinate him.

Silverstein acknowledged that Hannah-Jones’s essay presented a partial account of Lincoln’s ideas about abolition and racial equality, but excused the imbalance because the essay covered so much ground. “Admittedly, in an essay that covered several centuries and ranged from the personal to the historical, she did not set out to explore in full his continually shifting ideas about abolition and the rights of black Americans,” he wrote. In fact, throughout the essay’s lengthy discussion of Lincoln and colonization, what Silverstein called Lincoln’s “attitudes” are frozen in time, remote from political difficulties. Still, Silverstein contended, Hannah-Jones’s essay “provides an important historical lesson by simply reminding the public, which tends to view Lincoln as a saint, that for much of his career, he believed that a necessary prerequisite for freedom would be a plan to encourage the four million formerly enslaved people to leave the country.” Whether or not the public still regards Lincoln as a saint, a myth cannot be corrected by a distorted view. As Silverstein himself acknowledged, “At the end of his life, Lincoln’s racial outlook had evolved considerably in the direction of real equality.”

M oving beyond the Civil War , the essay briefly examined the history of Reconstruction, the long and bleak period of Jim Crow, and the resistance that led to the rise of the modern civil-rights movement. “For the most part,” Hannah-Jones wrote, “black Americans fought back alone.”

This is the third claim that my colleagues and I criticized, and although it covers the longest period of the three, it can be dealt with most directly. Before, during, and after the Civil War, some white people were always an integral part of the fight for racial equality. From lethal assaults on white southern “scalawags” for opposing white supremacy during Reconstruction through resistance to segregation led by the biracial NAACP through the murders of civil-rights workers, white and black, during the Freedom Summer, in 1964, and in Selma, Alabama, a year later, liberal and radical white people have stood up for racial equality. A. Philip Randolph, the founder of the modern civil-rights movement, stated in his speech at the March on Washington, in 1963, “This civil-rights revolution is not confined to the Negro, nor is it confined to civil rights, for our white allies know that they cannot be free while we are not.”

Silverstein, in his reply, observed that civil-rights advances “have almost always come as a result of political and social struggles in which African-Americans have generally taken the lead.” But when it comes to African Americans’ struggles for their own freedom and civil rights, this is not what Hannah-Jones’s essay asserted.

T he specific criticisms of the 1619 Project that my colleagues and I raised in our letter, and the dispute that has ensued, are not about historical trajectories or the intractability of racism or anything other than the facts—the errors contained in the 1619 Project as well as, now, the errors in Silverstein’s response to our letter. We wholeheartedly support the stated goal to educate widely on slavery and its long-term consequences. Our letter attempted to advance that goal, one that, no matter how the history is interpreted and related, cannot be forwarded through falsehoods, distortions, and significant omissions. Allowing these shortcomings to stand uncorrected would only make it easier for critics hostile to the overarching mission to malign it for their own ideological and partisan purposes, as some had already begun to do well before we wrote our letter.

Taking care of the facts is, I believe, all the more important in light of current political realities. The New York Times has taken a lead in combatting the degradation of truth and assault on a free press propagated by Donald Trump’s White House, aided and abetted by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and spun by the far right on social media. American democracy is in a perilous condition, and the Times can report on that danger only by upholding its standards “without fear or favor.” That is why it is so important that lapses such as those pointed out in our letter receive attention and timely correction. When describing history, more is at stake than the past.

No historian better expressed this point, as part of the broader imperative for factual historical accuracy, than W. E. B. Du Bois. In Black Reconstruction in America , published in 1935, Du Bois challenged a reigning school of American historians working under the tutelage and guidance of William Archibald Dunning of Columbia University. The Dunning School, coupled with a broader current of Lost Cause defenders, produced works that characterized Reconstruction as vicious and vindictive, imposing the rule of corrupt and ignorant black people on a stricken postwar South. Those works, Du Bois understood, helped perpetuate racial oppression. Part of the genius of Black Reconstruction in America lay in Du Bois’s ability to mount a commanding counterinterpretation built on basic facts that the Dunning School had ignored or suppressed about the experiment in democratic government during Reconstruction and how it was overthrown and eventually replaced with Jim Crow.

In exposing the falsehoods of his racist adversaries, Du Bois became the upholder of plain, provable fact against what he saw as the Dunning School’s propagandistic story line. Du Bois repeatedly pointed out the “deliberate contradiction of plain facts.” Time and again in Black Reconstruction , he appealed to the facts against one or another false interpretation: “the plain, authentic facts of our history … perfectly clear and authenticated facts … the very cogency of my facts … the whole body of facts … certain quite well-known facts that are irreconcilable with this theory of history.” Only by carefully marshaling the facts was Du Bois able to establish the truth about Reconstruction. Indifference to the facts or their sloppy deployment, he argued, could lead and had led even intelligent scholars into “wide error.” Du Bois’s lesson should not be lost.

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The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 4

Chapters 5-9

Chapters 10-14

Chapters 15-18

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Summary and Study Guide

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story is an anthology curated by Nikole Hannah-Jones that provides a new perspective on American history. Hannah-Jones and the authors in this work challenge conventional teachings of American history, often offered only through a white lens. Using historical record, essays, fiction, and poetry, the authors of The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story present a new understanding of the American identity, one that has been forged by the contributions, labor, and intellectualism of the country’s Black citizens. This book represents the culmination of an original issue of The New York Times Magazine commemorating the arrival of enslaved Africans to American shores in 1619. Since the issue’s publication, The 1619 Project has expanded, including a television mini-series, podcasts, and school curriculum. Nikole Hannah-Jones is the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story was named one of the ten greatest works of journalism between 2010-2019 by New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

This guide refers to the 2021 hardback edition by The New York Times Company.

Content Warning: The source material contains graphic descriptions of slavery, physical and sexual abuse, sexual assault, and murder. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story also covers historical resources that may use outdated or racist language. This guide reproduces this language only when using direct quotations.

Using essays, fiction, and poetry, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story reframes American history in a new light, challenging pervasive white, colonial perspectives. The project began when Hannah-Jones encountered the title date as a teenager, learning that a ship called the White Lion brought enslaved Africans to the Virginia Colony, long before the nation’s founders ever signed the Declaration of Independence. Hannah-Jones realized that American slavery was a part of the foundation of American life. The work expands upon this idea by examining the motivations and nuances of important historical events.

Each chapter explores a different aspect of slavery’s impact on American structures and institutions and connects historical events with contemporary issues. The essays are accompanied by short vignettes, providing brief details about important historical events and acts of resistance by Black Americans and enslaved Africans, as well as poems that help to contextualize the experiences of those living during these historic moments.

In the Preface-Chapter 4, the authors examine the early days of slavery and its connection to the American Revolution , sugar, and democracy. Chapter 1 connects slavery and democracy, arguing that Black Americans have contributed to advancements in equality and democracy. Chapter 2 uncovers the origin of the idea of “race” and how it was developed by enslavers to ensure the longevity of slavery. In Chapter 3, author Khalil Gibran Muhammad details how sugar production created the justification for slavery and gave birth to American capitalism. Chapter 4 examines the prevalence of white fear in both historical and contemporary contexts.

Chapters 5-9 spotlight dispossession, capitalism, politics, citizenship, and self-defense. Chapter 5 details the relationship between Black and Indigenous people in the United States throughout history and juxtaposes their status and treatment within American policies. In Chapter 6, Matthew Desmond contends that slavery defined the nation’s extreme adherence to capitalism and created a model for oppression and wealth advancement. Chapter 7 analyzes the connection between slavery and the structure of the US government and political policies. In Chapter 8, Martha S. Jones draws attention to the efforts of Black Americans to redesign the meaning of citizenship.

Chapters 10-14 unpack other forms of disparity and activism in US history. Chapter 10 traces the link between the violent control and punishment during slavery to the modern incarceration system. Chapter 11 elucidates the false promise of Reconstruction , examining the many ways in which Black citizens were denied rights following Emancipation. In Chapter 12, Linda Villarosa focuses on the historical relationship between Black people and the American healthcare system. Chapter 13 spotlights the interconnectedness of Black churches and activism, and Chapter 14 focuses on the development of Black music in popular American culture.

Chapters 15-18 identify more issues of racial discrimination and their connection to slavery while providing a roadmap for America’s future. In Chapter 15, Interlandi details the backlash to the Affordable Care Act in 2008 and connects it to earlier efforts by emancipated enslaved people to develop systems of healthcare. Chapter 16 exposes how problems with transportation and infrastructure are rooted in segregationist efforts following the Civil War. Ibram X. Kendi challenges the idea of continued progress and advocates for persistence and diligence in Chapter 17, while Nikole Hannah-Jones outlines a roadmap for justice in Chapter 18.

As each chapter analyzes American history and the relationship between slavery and various American institutions and ideologies, the authors also lift up Black voices and acts of Black resistance that informed the American identity and culture.

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New York Times Quietly Edits “1619 Project” After Conservative Pushback

Sep 26, 2020

The online version of The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project” was quietly edited after considerable pushback from conservatives, including multiple Heritage Foundation scholars. Sections of the online publication were scrubbed for controversial language without even an editor’s note to explain the changes. The edits focus mainly on the thesis that America’s true founding was August 1619, marking the arrival of the first slaves in present-day Virginia.

Originally the leading text on the landing page for the digital version of the project read: “The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”

The original reference to the “true founding” was subsequently removed to read: “The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”

The Heritage Foundation has been tireless in its efforts to debunk the radical and anti-American positions taken by The New York Times and the “1619 Project” since it was first published. Heritage experts have thoroughly documented the factual errors, appeared on numerous radio and television interviews, and published dozens of commentaries.

In a piece written shortly after the release of the “1619 Project,” then-Heritage policy analyst John York observed: “To the Times, the dates and documents that typically mark our starting point do not deserve that honor. ... Our Founders’ own statements at the Constitutional Convention, speeches, and private correspondence thereafter paint a very different picture of their views on slavery and how it shaped the Constitution.”

Heritage visiting fellow Allen Guelzo was among a group of leading historians to document the project’s many factual inaccuracies. After heavy condemnation from experts like Guelzo, The New York Times made their first of many edits to the piece.

As Heritage policy expert Jonathan Butcher noted , “In the paper’s correction, editors changed the wording of [Nikole] Hannah-Jones’ leading article in the series to say that ‘some of’ the colonists fought the American Revolution to defend slavery.”

Butcher, a senior policy analyst for Heritage’s Center for Education Policy, continued to hammer the Times on its anti-Americanism.

“The editors called this a ‘small’ clarification, and it was indeed very small, although considering that the 1619 Project’s full-throated commitment to demonstrating that American history can only be explained through the lens of slavery, this correction appears nothing short of essential,” Butcher wrote. “Left unanswered today are other needed corrections to more than one of the project’s essays.”

Even though the “1619 Project” has been repeatedly debunked by conservatives, the left is still attempting to weaponize the project to indoctrinate America’s youth.

Guelzo, for example, criticized the decision to award Nikole Hannah-Jones a Pulitzer Prize for the “1619 Project.”

“The Pulitzer will help The New York Times face down the discovery that the 1619 Project—and not just Hannah-Jones’ lead essay—is riddled with mistakes and exaggerations,” Guelzo wrote. “Among the most egregious of those errors are the claims that the American Revolution was designed to protect slavery. That no shred of evidence for this assertion exists did nothing to discourage the energy with which it was promoted in Hannah-Jones’ lead essay.”

Heritage senior fellow Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum fellow, put it this way : “The 1619 Project isn’t just a series of articles placing slavery at the center of the American story. It is also a curriculum that is sweeping the land. No sooner had the prize been announced than The Pulitzer Center—which is independent of the prizes—was using it to promote that curriculum. The center boasted that it had “connected curricula based on the work of Hannah-Jones and her collaborators to some 4,500 classrooms since August 2019.”

Heritage has created its own curriculum resource for parents as well as “ A Celebration of America ,” rebutting attempts by the left to rewrite history.

Recently, on Constitution Day, President Donald Trump weighed in. He announced the creation of a “1776 Commission” designed explicitly to counter the harmful narratives propagated by anti-American initiatives, including the “1619 Project.” Trump cited the work of another Heritage visiting fellow, Wilfred McClay, in his speech .

September 25, 2020

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