The 1619 Project, edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and others, is a collection of essays (with citations to supporting historical research and documentation) that describe America’s past and present as largely shaped by the institution of slavery. The title of the project takes its name from year 1619, when the first ship carrying slaves from Africa landed in Virginia. There’s too much important information in the book to attempt a summary, but here’s a few interesting points. First, the wealth behind the American revolution was largely slave-holding and one motivation for slave colonies to fight the British may have been preservation of slavery. Second, a very high percentage of wealth in America was created by slavery and also consisted of slaves themselves, who provided not only labor but served as collateral for loans that funded expansion. Third, almost all the Presidents until Lincoln were from slave-holding states and twelve of our early Presidents were slave-holders themselves. Fourth, except for a few years after the Civil War, during Reconstruction, the same system and race relations that existed before the Emancipation Proclamation reappeared after the Civil War, just in a different form and enforced, with the support of most of White society, via laws and violence.
The 1619 Project effectively makes the case that slavery isn’t just a bad thing in the mix of otherwise mostly good things in American history, but is a defining feature of what America is. Republican think tanks are working overtime to attack this book and Republicans are in a frenzy to pass laws to keep what the book says out of schools. Compare what The New York Times says about the book at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/15/books/review/the-1619-project-nikole-hannah-jones-caitlin-roper-ilena-silverman-jake-silverstein.html
with what the conservative Heritage Foundation says at https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/report/review-the-1619-project-curriculum
There’s more than ivory tower academic theories at stake in this debate.
