The 1619 Project

"The 1619 Project"
The 1619 Project wordmark.jpg The 1619 Project logo
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Pseudohistory, historical revisionism
Publisher	The New York Times
Publication date	2019

The 1619 Project is a pseudohistorical project developed by The New York Times since 2019, which "aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of [the United States'] national narrative." The project was stated to be timed for the 400th anniversary of arrival of the first enslaved black Africans in the Virginia colony in 1619, and suggests that this date represents the nation's "birth year". This is done in order to challenge the generally accepted belief that American history began in 1776 with the American Revolution, thus implicitly challenging the most commonly accepted views on American history, such as the importance of the Age of Enlightenment and American exceptionalism.

It is an interactive project directed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for The New York Times, with contributions by the newspaper's writers, including essays on the history of different aspects of contemporary American life which the authors believe have "roots in slavery and its aftermath." It also includes poems, short fiction, and a photo essay. Originally conceived as a special issue for August 20, 2019, it was soon turned into a full-fledged project, including a special broadsheet section in the newspaper, live events, and a multi-episode podcast series.

The project has sparked extensive criticism and debate among prominent historians and political commentators. In a letter published in The New York Times in December 2019, historians Gordon S. Wood, James M. McPherson, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum and James Oakes expressed strong reservations about the project and requested factual corrections, accusing the project of putting ideology before historical understanding. In March 2020, historian Leslie M. Harris, who served as a fact-checker for the 1619 Project, wrote that the project was a "needed corrective" to prevailing historical narratives, but that the authors had ignored her corrections.

In the wake of the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, the 1619 Project saw a surge in popularity as the result of the civil unrest that stemmed due to one-sided reporting of Floyd's death from the politically correct mainstream media. The resulting rioting, looting, theft, destruction, and general devastation to several major cities in the United States and other Western countries is something Hannah-Jones is proud of, responding that "it would be an honor" when a pundit commented that the rioting in 2020 should be named the "1619 Riots". Despite this, project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her introductory essay to the 1619 Project.

Background

Further information: Slavery in the colonial history of the United States

The 1619 Project was launched in August 2019 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved black Africans in the English colonies and its legacy. The first enslaved Africans in the English colonies of mainland North America arrived in August 1619. A ship carrying 20–30 people who had been enslaved by a joint African-Portuguese war on Ndongo in modern Angola, landed at Point Comfort in the colony of Virginia.

Project

The project is to dedicate an issue of the magazine to a re-examination of the legacy of slavery in America, at the anniversary of the arrival of the first slaves to Virginia. The plan was to challenge the notion that the history of the United States began in 1776. The initiative quickly grew into a larger project. The project encompasses multiple issues of the magazine, with related materials in multiple other publications of the Times as well as a project curriculum developed in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center, for use in schools. The project employed a panel of historians and had support from the Smithsonian, for fact-checking, research and development. The project was envisioned with the condition that almost all of the contributions would be from African-American contributors, deeming the perspective of black writers an essential element of the story to be told.

August 14 magazine issue

The first edition, which appeared in The New York Times Magazine on August 14, 2019, published in 100 pages with ten essays, a photo essay, and a collection of poems and fiction by an additional 16 writers, included the following works:

• "America Wasn't a Democracy Until Black Americans Made It One", essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones
• "American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation", essay by Matthew Desmond
• "A New Literary Timeline of African-American History", a collection of original poems and stories from 16 different writers, including Clint Smith, Yusef Komunyakaa, Eve L. Ewing, Reginald Dwayne Betts, ZZ Packer, Barry Jenkins and Jesmyn Ward, among others
• "How False Beliefs in Physical Racial Difference Still Live in Medicine Today", essay by Linda Villarosa
• "What the Reactionary Politics of 2019 Owe to the Politics of Slavery", essay by Jamelle Bouie
• "Why Is Everyone Always Stealing Black Music?", essay by Wesley Morris
• "How Segregation Caused Your Traffic Jam", essay by Kevin Kruse
• "Why Doesn't America Have Universal Healthcare? One word: Race", essay by Jeneen Interlandi
• "Why American Prisons Owe Their Cruelty to Slavery", essay by Bryan Stevenson
• "The Barbaric History of Sugar in America", essay by Khalil Gibran Muhammad
• "How America's Vast Racial Wealth Gap Grew: By Plunder", essay by Trymaine Lee
• "Their Ancestors Were Enslaved by Law. Now They're Lawyers", photo essay by Djeneba Aduayom, with text from Nikole Hannah-Jones and Wadzanai Mhute

The essays discuss details of modern American society, such as traffic jams and the American affinity for sugar, and their connections to slavery and segregation. Matthew Desmond's essay argues that slavery has shaped modern capitalism and workplace norms. Jamelle Bouie's essay draws parallels between pro-slavery politics and the modern right-wing politics. Bouie argues that America still has not let go of the assumption that some people inherently deserve more power than others.

Accompanying material and activities

The magazine issue was accompanied by a special section in the Sunday newspaper, in partnership with the Smithsonian, examining the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade, written by Mary Elliott and Jazmine Hughes. Beginning on August 20, a multi-episode audio series titled "1619" was started, published by The Daily, the morning news podcast of the Times. The Sunday sports section had an essay about slavery's impact on professional sports in America: "Is Slavery's Legacy in the Power Dynamics of Sports?". The Times plans to take the project to schools, with the 1619 Project Curriculum developed in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center. Hundreds of thousands of extra copies of the magazine issue were printed for distribution to schools, museums and libraries.

The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting has made available free online lesson plans, is collecting further lesson plans from teachers, and helps arrange for speakers to visit classes. The Center considers most of the lessons usable by all grades from elementary school through college.

Reception

Reaction from historians

See also: Slavery in the United States § Revolutionary era

Beginning in October 2019, the World Socialist Web Site published a series of interviews with prominent historians critical of the 1619 Project, including Victoria E. Bynum, James M. McPherson, Gordon S. Wood, James Oakes, Richard Carwardine and Clayborne Carson. In an essay for The New York Review of Books, historian Sean Wilentz accused the 1619 Project of cynicism for its portrayal of the American Revolution, the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, who Wilentz wrote is "rendered as a white supremacist."

In December 2019, five leading American historians, Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum and James Oakes, sent a letter to the Times expressing objections to the framing of the project and accusing the authors of a "displacement of historical understanding by ideology". The letter disputed the claim, made in the Hannah-Jones' introductory essay to the 1619 Project, 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". The Times published the letter along with a rebuttal from the magazine's editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein. Wood responded in a letter, "I don't know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves [...] No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776." In an article in The Atlantic, Wilentz responded to Silverstein, writing, "No effort to educate the public in order to advance social justice can afford to dispense with a respect for basic facts", and disputing the factual accuracy of Silverstein's defense of the project.

Also during December 2019, twelve scholars and political scientists specializing in the American Civil War sent a letter to the Times saying that "The 1619 Project offers a historically-limited view of slavery." While agreeing to the importance of examining American slavery, they objected to the portrayal of slavery as a uniquely American phenomenon, to construing slavery as a capitalist venture despite documented anti-capitalist sentiment among many Southern slaveholders, and to presenting out-of-context quotes of a conversation between Abraham Lincoln and "five esteemed free black men". The following month, Times editor Jake Silverstein replied with notes from the research desk, concluding that the scholars had requested the inclusion of additional information, rather than corrections to existing information.

In March 2020, historian Leslie M. Harris, who was consulted for the Project, wrote in Politico that she had warned that the idea that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery was inaccurate, and that the Times made avoidable mistakes, but that the project was "a much-needed corrective to the blindly celebratory histories". Hannah-Jones has also said that she stands by the claim that slavery helped fuel the revolution, though she concedes she might have phrased it too strongly in her essay, in a way that could give readers the impression that the support for slavery was universal. On March 11, 2020, Silverstein authored an "update" in the form of a "clarification" on Times' website, correcting Hannah-Jones's essay to state that "protecting slavery was a primary motivation for some of the colonists".

Journalistic reaction

The 1619 Project received positive reviews in the mainstream media and from politically correct organizations, but otherwise received mostly negative reviews for its presentation of pseudohistory and historical revisionism. Andrew Sullivan critiqued the project as an important perspective that needed to be heard, but one presented in a biased way under the guise of objectivity. Writing in The Week, Damon Linkler found the 1619 Project's treatment of history "sensationalistic, reductionistic, and tendentious." Timothy Sandefur deemed the project's goal worthy, but observed that the articles persistently went wrong trying to connect everything with slavery. In the National Review, Phillip W. Magness wrote that the Project provided a distorted economic history borrowed from "bad scholarship" of the New History of Capitalism (NHC), and Rich Lowry wrote that Hannah-Jones' lead essay left out unwelcome facts about slavery, smeared the revolution, distorted the Constitution and misrepresented the founding era and Lincoln. The World Socialist Web Site criticized the Times' reactionary, politically motivated falsification of history that wrongly centers around racial rather than class conflict. Marxist political scientist Adolph Reed dismissed the 1619 Project as "the appropriation of the past in support of whatever kind of ‘just-so’ stories about the present are desired."

In February 2020, a rival project called the 1776 Project, published under the aegis of The Washington Examiner, was launched by a number of African-American academics who dispute the narrative of the 1619 Project.

Political reaction

The publication of the pseudohistorical project received some positive reactions from mostly Democratic political figures, such as Kamala Harris, who praised the project, in a tweet, but high-profile conservatives strongly criticized it. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich criticized the project as "brainwashing propaganda", in a tweet, and later wrote an op-ed characterising it as "left-wing propaganda masquerading as 'the truth'". Republican Senator Ted Cruz also equated it with propaganda. President Donald Trump, in an interview on Fox News, said, "I just look at—I look at school. I watch, I read, look at the stuff. Now they want to change—1492, Columbus discovered America. You know, we grew up, you grew up, we all did, that's what we learned. Now they want to make it the 1619 project. Where did that come from? What does it represent? I don't even know".

In July 2020, Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas proposed the "Saving American History Act of 2020", prohibiting K-12 schools from using federal funds to teach curriculum related to the pseudohistorical 1619 project, and make schools that did ineligible for federal professional-development grants. Cotton added that "The 1619 Project is a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles on which it was founded."

On September 6, 2020, Trump responded on Twitter to a claim that the state of California was implementing the pseudohistorical 1619 project into the state’s public school curriculum. Trump stated that the Department of Education was investigating the matter and, if the aforementioned claim was found true, federal funding would be withheld from Californian public schools. On September 17, Trump announced the 1776 Commission to develop a patriotic curriculum.

See also

• 500 Years Later (2005)
• Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
• 1776 Commission
• Nineteen Eighty-Four
• Historical revisionism (negationism)
• Anti-white

External links

• Official website