1619 Project
The New York Times launched the 1619 Project "in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative." Though its creators claim that "it is finally time to tell our story truthfully," expert scholars of American history have suggested that this project does the opposite.
Notable criticism:
Letter from prominent historians criticizing the 1619 Project:
“These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing’ ...They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology. Dismissal of objections on racial grounds — that they are the objections of only ‘white historians’ — has affirmed that displacement.”
"A Matter of Facts: The New York Times’ 1619 Project launched with the best of intentions, but has been undermined by some of its claims"
-From Historian Sean Wilentz in The Atlantic
"The 1619 Project is Not History; It Is Conspiracy Theory: The 1619 Project offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—not history"
- Historian Allen Guelzo in City Journal
"[T]he 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory. And like all conspiracy theories, the 1619 Project announces... that it has acquired the explanation to everything, and thus gives an aggrieved audience a sense that finally it is in control, through its understanding of the real cause of its unhappiness. But... it bodes ill for the 1619 Project that while conspiracy theories arouse tidal waves of attention in their first unveiling, they also—like the Grassy Knoll or the Blood Libel—wear out quickly, because their ability to explain everything usually ends up explaining nothing...
[T]he 1619 Project is not history; it is ignorance. It claims that the American Revolution was staged to protect slavery, though it never once occurs to the Project to ask, in that case, why the British West Indies (which had a far larger and infinitely more malignant slave system than the 13 American colonies) never joined us in that revolution. It claims that the Constitution’s three-fifths clause was designed by the Founders as the keystone that would keep the slave states in power, though the 1619 Project seems not to have noticed that at the time of the Constitutional Convention, all of the states were slave states (save only Massachusetts), so that the three-fifths clause could not have been intended to confer such a mysterious power on slavery unless the Founders had come to the Convention equipped with crystal balls. It behaves as though the Civil War never happened, that the slaves somehow freed themselves, and that a white president never put weapons into the hands of black men and bid them kill rebels who had taken up arms in defense of bondage. The 1619 Project forgets, in other words, that there was an 1863 Project, and that its name was emancipation.
Finally: the 1619 Project is not history; it is evangelism, but evangelism for a gospel of disenchantment whose ultimate purpose is the hollowing out of the meaning of freedom, so that every defense of freedom drops nervously from the hands of people who have been made too ashamed to defend it. No nation can live without a history... What the 1619 Project offers instead is bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—not history.
It is the bitterest of ironies that the 1619 Project dispenses this malediction from the chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America, because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers. The 156 years since emancipation are less than a second on human history’s long clock, so that such a transformation is more in the nature of a miracle to be celebrated than a failure to be deplored for any seeming slowness."
"Fact Checking the 1619 Project and Its Critics" - A balanced take from the American Institute for Economic Research.
Notable criticism:
Letter from prominent historians criticizing the 1619 Project:
“These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing’ ...They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology. Dismissal of objections on racial grounds — that they are the objections of only ‘white historians’ — has affirmed that displacement.”
"A Matter of Facts: The New York Times’ 1619 Project launched with the best of intentions, but has been undermined by some of its claims"
-From Historian Sean Wilentz in The Atlantic
"The 1619 Project is Not History; It Is Conspiracy Theory: The 1619 Project offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—not history"
- Historian Allen Guelzo in City Journal
"[T]he 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory. And like all conspiracy theories, the 1619 Project announces... that it has acquired the explanation to everything, and thus gives an aggrieved audience a sense that finally it is in control, through its understanding of the real cause of its unhappiness. But... it bodes ill for the 1619 Project that while conspiracy theories arouse tidal waves of attention in their first unveiling, they also—like the Grassy Knoll or the Blood Libel—wear out quickly, because their ability to explain everything usually ends up explaining nothing...
[T]he 1619 Project is not history; it is ignorance. It claims that the American Revolution was staged to protect slavery, though it never once occurs to the Project to ask, in that case, why the British West Indies (which had a far larger and infinitely more malignant slave system than the 13 American colonies) never joined us in that revolution. It claims that the Constitution’s three-fifths clause was designed by the Founders as the keystone that would keep the slave states in power, though the 1619 Project seems not to have noticed that at the time of the Constitutional Convention, all of the states were slave states (save only Massachusetts), so that the three-fifths clause could not have been intended to confer such a mysterious power on slavery unless the Founders had come to the Convention equipped with crystal balls. It behaves as though the Civil War never happened, that the slaves somehow freed themselves, and that a white president never put weapons into the hands of black men and bid them kill rebels who had taken up arms in defense of bondage. The 1619 Project forgets, in other words, that there was an 1863 Project, and that its name was emancipation.
Finally: the 1619 Project is not history; it is evangelism, but evangelism for a gospel of disenchantment whose ultimate purpose is the hollowing out of the meaning of freedom, so that every defense of freedom drops nervously from the hands of people who have been made too ashamed to defend it. No nation can live without a history... What the 1619 Project offers instead is bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—not history.
It is the bitterest of ironies that the 1619 Project dispenses this malediction from the chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America, because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers. The 156 years since emancipation are less than a second on human history’s long clock, so that such a transformation is more in the nature of a miracle to be celebrated than a failure to be deplored for any seeming slowness."
"Fact Checking the 1619 Project and Its Critics" - A balanced take from the American Institute for Economic Research.