“Has a book ever come into the world when at least four other books were already in print attacking it? Admittedly, these broadsides were against earlier incarnations of The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which appeared in this newspaper two years ago, followed by a podcast, public forums, lesson plans for schools and a Pulitzer Prize for the originator, Nikole Hannah-Jones. The project asserted that the full origin story of the United States begins not with the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620, but with that of the White Lion and its cargo of captive Africans in Virginia the year before. This declaration provoked a Twitter firestorm of angry accusations from critics and combative replies from Hannah-Jones. ... The appearance now of an expanded version of the project in book form is sure to provoke yet more assaults. I picked up ‘The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story’ with some apprehension. Not because I disagree with the project’s basic aim, but because I had been troubled by some overstatements and factual errors in the newspaper version, such as the claim that there were ‘growing calls to abolish the slave trade’ in Britain in 1776. ...”
2021 April: The 1619 Project
A panel by Jacob Lawrence from his series “Struggle: From the History of the American People” (1954-56)
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