Month: April 2020

Nikole Hannah-Jones, staff writer and originator of The 1619 Project writes, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.  Black Americans have fought to make them true.”  In the leading article, Hannah-Jones asserts, “One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”  (7 months after the initial publication, the Times issued a correction, adding two words “some of” before “the colonists.”)  Hannah-Jones also states as fact that the word “slavery” is not in the Constitution because the framers did not want to explicitly “enshrine their hypocrisy.”  

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html

On October 30, the Times co-hosted a symposium with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. The event was described as “a day of performance, panel discussions, presentations, and conversation about how history is defined – and redefined – featuring historians, journalists, and policymakers.”

The Times also partners with the prestigious Pulitzer Center to disseminate curriculum to public schools. The Center provides free reading guides, extension activities, lesson plans, and physical copies of the magazine to educators across the country. The Center’s website says, “Teachers across all 50 states have accessed the Pulitzer Center educational resources since the project’s launch, and many have shared their students’ work by posting to Twitter […] Educators from hundreds of schools and administrators from six school districts (including Chicago and D.C.) have also reached out to the Center for class sets of the magazine.” The administrators of the Buffalo School District believe that “The 1619 Project will help render a true history of the institution of slavery for all students, a history which is often silenced in mainstream curriculum and textbooks.”

https://pulitzercenter.org/projects/1619-project-pulitzer-center-education-programming

https://pulitzercenter.org/builder/lesson/evaluating-and-reshaping-timelines-1619-project-new-york-times-kids-edition-26647

https://blog.cps.edu/2019/09/17/the-1619-project-and-chicago-public-schools/

According to the Times, The 1619 Project “has been read widely across the country, has been discussed in the Senate and is changing how American history is taught in schools today.” A news article published by the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard adds that The 1619 Project issue is becoming “a must have physical item.” Nikole Hannah-Jones, the driving force behind The 1619 Project, is a much sought after expert on African American History by the mainstream media and academia.

https://pulitzercenter.org/blog/nikole-hannah-jones-university-chicago

Expecting demands from parents, publishing giant Random House plans four 1619 themed books for young readers; its Clarkson Potter imprint is readying a 1619 Project special illustrated edition. Moreover, Ten Speed Press, part of the Crown Publishing Group, is set to publish a “graphic novelization” of The 1619 Project.

However, not all responses are positive. Twelve historians responded to The 1619 Project pointing out numerous instances where authors have misinterpreted events to fit their narrative.

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/174140

Five other historians sent a letter to the editor of The 1619 Project, criticizing the factual errors that the project’s essays rely on to make their points. They write, “These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or framing.” At the end of his lengthy response, Jake Silverstein writes, “What we hoped our project would do: expand the reader’s sense of the American past.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones contends that history is not objective. She argues, “People who wrote history are not simply objective arbiters of facts, and that white scholars are no more objective than any other scholars, and that they can object to the framing and we can object to their framing…”

Lincoln once said, “History is not history unless it is the truth.” Is objective truth in history, like objective truth in morality, a myth that belongs to the pre-Progressive era? Is reframing history just another way of rewriting history? How shall American History to be taught? I will tackle these questions in my next essay. As George Orwell writes in 1984, “Who controls the past controls the futures; who controls the present controls the past.” Much is at stake.