A Case for Historical Clarity
Editor's Note
The 1619 Project marked a turning point in America’s cultural conflict — a bid to replace the nation’s moral inheritance with a story of grievance and power. Its purpose was not to reinterpret history but to reorder allegiance, teaching citizens to see the American experiment as illegitimate from the start.
Peter Wood’s essay traces how this narrative gained authority and what it reveals about a society losing faith in its own beginnings. In revisiting 1620, he recalls a founding vision rooted in covenant, aspiration, and the conviction that freedom demands moral discipline — an inheritance now largely forgotten.
In the first days of the spring 2020 national shutdown, as the country froze in fear of the Chinese virus, I sat down with Nikole Hannah-Jones’ production: the Sunday, August 18, 2019 issue of The New York Times Magazine. It was branded The 1619 Project, consisting of 100 pages of pseudo-history, photo-essays, poetry, and an announcement from the Pulitzer Center that this extravaganza was on its way to school classrooms around the country.
This was not my first dive into Hannah-Jones’ fantasy world. I read the magazine cover to cover on its day of publication, and concluded then and there that someone would have to summon resistance to this effort to adulterate American history. From its first page, The 1619 Project set itself out to dethrone the Declaration of Independence as a statement of America’s founding principles. And not just the Declaration.
Through the lens of The 1619 Project, all of American history — from the arrival of the first English settlers — was to be seen as a tale of slavery, excuses for racial oppression, articulations of fake principles, and lies intended to mask continuing exploitation.
The following day I called my staff at the National Association of Scholars together to discuss how to respond. One member suggested that we frame our response as the “1620 Project,” after the arrival in New England of the Mayflower and the signing of the Mayflower Compact. That was one way to say that America had roots in a completely non-racial establishment of freedom and self-government.
It was a good call. The result of my Covid sequester became a volume titled 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project.
The New York Times had plainly made a significant investment in promoting its new mythology, and it wasn’t hard to discern the motive. The newspaper was intent on ginning up racial resentment. Later, it would transpire that the editorial board that had gone all-in on the Trump Russia collusion hoax, had been crestfallen when it failed, and decided to replace it with a turn to an America-is-implacably-racist storyline.
The predicates were near at hand. Black Lives Matter emerged in 2013 after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting of Trayvon Martin. BLM gained new purchase the next year when cop killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. By January 2017, the leaders of BLM were in the national spotlight enunciating on national television their opposition to the Trump presidency.
In 2015, Ta-Nehisi Coates had published his heartfelt advice to his son on how to navigate a society dominated by white racism, Between the World and Me. 2016 saw the publication of Ibram X. Kendi’s massive volume Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. The Zeitgeist was filled with racial indignation on the part of blacks and self-incrimination on the part of liberal whites, the latter exemplified by Robin DiAngelo’s 2018 volume, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism.
The 1619 Project was partly stirring a pot that was already well-heated. But it did a few things that BLM, Cates, Kendi, and DiAngelo could not do. It gave the new racial resentment a simple and easily digested storyline, from Jamestown to Ferguson in one easy stride. It gave that storyline the propulsion of the nation’s leading liberal newspaper, including unlimited financial backing. And it recast the theme of “America is systemically racist” as a curriculum tailored to K-12 classrooms.
Soon there would be no public school student in America who was unacquainted with it. Above all, it gave the nation — in Hannah-Jones’ own words — a new “origin story.”
That talismanic phrase only grew in importance as the campaign to establish The 1619 Project metastasized. In 2021, The New York Times expanded the original magazine piece into a 500-page-plus hardback title A New Origin Story: The 1619 Project. Oprah Winfrey even turned the thing into a television miniseries. Hannah-Jones had garnered a Pulitzer Prize, and rocketed to national celebrity. I tagged along at a distance with a second edition of my 1620 book, tracking the revisions and the new essays in Jones’ hardback.
Anyone interested in the chicanery of the original — the fact checker who was ignored, the Times’ stealth-editing of the text, and the ex post facto efforts to substantiate assertions that ranged from the dubious to the preposterous — can find all of it in the writings of its critics. This list includes eminent historians such as James McPherson, James Oakes, and Gordon Wood; Marxist stalwarts such as Thomas Mackaman and David North; economic historians such as Phillip Magness; and Mary Grabar’s no-holds-barred Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America.
What, if anything, is left to say?
The most important matter is not the hopscotch presentation of injuries and injustices that litter the history of America’s treatment of black slaves and their descendants. No one denies that history and long before Hannah-Jones took up the story, historians had plumbed it to its depths, and new generations of historians devoted their careers to excavating new details however incidental.
No, the key matter is the transformation of this material into a myth that excludes crucial context and diminishes events of even greater importance. What context and what events could be more important than centuries of racial injustice? The history of American freedom, without which Nikole Hannah-Jones own writing would have been impossible.
Many American children now believe that America is responsible for the invention of slavery. Hannah-Jones and her fellow 1619 writers are too sophisticated to present such an absurdity, but they are also sophisticated enough to leave that impression by never mentioning how pervasive slavery was in the world before Englishmen ever set foot in Virginia, and that slavery was endemic to Africa.
She offers no hint that Native Americans were enslaving one another and stray Europeans long before the White Lion brought African captives to the Virginia colony. She forgets that Jamestown released those captives who the assimilated to the colony. Actual slavery began in Virginia about half a century later.
But that gap would spoil the “origin story.” She needed the start date of 1619 to get an even 400 years to 2019.
She forgets that Virginia had just begun its experiment in self-government with the creation of its House of Burgesses, which was a step towards the rule of law under a representative government. She forgets that elsewhere on the continent, especially on the Massachusetts coast, settlers were living in peace with Native Americans under a charter of self-government they devised for themselves.
Such precedents don’t mean everything. Colonial life in the New World was harsh, often deadly, and riddled with local injustices. But there was something stirring in those early days that would eventually crystalize in the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. These weren’t events of delusion or false ideals. As it happened, African-Americans played a part in the Revolution and fought for liberty alongside their white neighbors in many of the crucial battles, large and small.
Not far from my home in Vermont is the Hubbardton Battlefield, where a rearguard contingent of the Continental Army held of General Burgoyne’s invading force long enough for the main American forces to escape, and later prevail at Bennington and Saratoga.
This is where 25-year-old Private Aaron Oliver, who had fought at Bunker Hill, was captured by the British and as a prisoner starved to death. Oliver was a black farmer from Temple, New Hampshire. But his sacrifice and those of men like him is erased by the 1619 Project, which reduce him to someone deluded by the lies of his white neighbors. Nevertheless, he was a man, like them, fighting for his freedom and the freedom of his family.
The 1619 Project erases those noble lives and all that followed in the long struggle for emancipation and for civil rights. It is a disgrace that this twisted tale ever found its way into our schools, and worse, has infected the national memory.