NYT’s 1619 Project Riles Mainstream Historians As Ideological Framing and Misleading Interpretation

“Academic historians, conservatives, and Trotskyist socialists rightly reject The New York Times’ reframing of the past,” reported Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic, in a compilation of serious criticisms of the 1619 Project. The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer was equally acerbic. “The fight over the 1619 Project is not about the facts. A dispute between a small group of scholars and the authors of The New York Times Magazine’s issue on slavery represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of American society.”

“The 1619 Project, and Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay in particular, offer a darker vision of the nation, in which Americans have made less progress than they think, and in which black people continue to struggle indefinitely for rights they may never fully realize. Inherent in that vision is a kind of pessimism, not about black struggle but about the sincerity and viability of white anti-racism. It is a harsh verdict, and one of the reasons the 1619 Project has provoked pointed criticism alongside praise,” Serwer observed.

Noting that the project has inspired a podcast, a high-school curriculum, and a series of books, Serwer and Friedersdorf offers links to prominent criticisms of the project. Serwer describes the project’s perspective as “profound pessimism about white America.”

• • Princeton historian Sean Wilentz in a lecture called the project cynical.
  • A letter signed by Wilenz and four other prominent historians — James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes — and published in the NYT — takes the project to task for suggesting, inaccurately, that politically powerful slave-owners started the American revolution to rebel against Britain’s increasingly abolitionist court rulings, such as the Somerset decision in England in 1772, or the proclamation by the Virginia royal governor, Lord Dunmore, in late 1775 that slaves would receive their freedom if they fought for the British.
  • Wood, a prominent scholar of the period, objected in particular to the Times’ claim that a primary reason American colonists favored independence was to protect slavery. “I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves,” he wrote. “No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776.”
  • In City Journal, the historian Allen Guelzo said the project “offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—not history.”
  • Editors of the World Socialist Web Site contend that the NYT is engaged in a reactionary, politically motivated “falsification of history” that wrongly centers racial rather than class conflict. “A reader of the 1619 Project would not know that the struggle against slave labor gave way to a violent struggle against wage slavery, in which countless workers were killed,” one of its published critiques declared. The 1619 Project omits “major events in the American class struggle—from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 to the founding of the Socialist Party to the massive industrial battles of the 1930s…”
  • “The politics of racial, gender and other forms of identity is the politics of the upper-middle class, of all races and genders,” Socialist Equality Party National Secretary Joseph Kishore argued in a lecture on the 1619 Project.
  • Damon Linker in The Week argued that the Times treated history “in a highly sensationalistic, reductionistic, and tendentious way, with the cumulative result resembling agitprop more than responsible journalism or scholarship.”
  • Friedersdorf links to “other early critics worth engaging”: Rich Lowry, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and Phillip W. Magness at National Review; Andrew Sullivan at New York; Glenn Loury and John McWhorter at Bloggingheads.tv; Lucas Morel at The American Mind; Wilfred M. McClay at Commentary; Timothy Sandefur at Reason; and Magness at the American Institute for Economic Research.”
  • Nell Irvin Painter, a professor emeritus of history at Princeton objected to the 1619 Project’s portrayal of the arrival of African laborers in 1619 as slaves. “How we think about the term ‘enslaved’ matters — 400 years ago, the first Africans who came to America were not ‘enslaved’, they were indentured – and this makes a crucial difference when we think about the meanings of our past.”
  • Jake Silverstein, the editor of the Times Magazine, offered a detailed rebuttal to the historians.
  • “Fact Checking the 1619 Project and Its Critics” by Phillip W. Magness.
  • A 2017 Smithsonian Magazine article by Michael Guasco critiqued “the overstated significance of 1619,” noting that the elevation of that date “erases the memory of many more African peoples than it memorializes.” In 1526, he wrote, a rebellion by enslaved Africans crippled and ultimately thwarted plans for a Spanish settlement on the coast of what is now South Carolina. Long before Jamestown, Guasco pointed out, African actors wielded the power to destroy European colonial ventures. He went on to argue that “telling the story of 1619 as an ‘English’ story also ignores the entirely transnational nature of the early modern Atlantic world.”

A book is planned from the project. Hannah-Jones is a journalist, not a full-time scholar of American history. Many of these criticisms could be incorporated into the final manuscript as an illustration of peer review, critical thinking and historical debate.