My last post addressed the New York Times’ 1619 Project. Published in August 2019—400 years after the arrival of African slaves in Virginia—the project‘s essays took up almost the entire New York Times Magazine plus a ‘broadsheet” of African-American history prepared with the Smithsonian Institution. It was a show-stopper. It argued that modern America, from capitalism to health care, was shaped almost entirely by slavery.[1]
Many praised this tour-de-force and it received the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. But criticism also emerged very quickly, and that is the subject of this post. Continue reading “The Furor over the 1619 Project”
I’m a year late, but I’ve finally had the time and motivation to read the New York Times Magazine’s 2019 compendium called “The 1619 Project.”[1] As you may know, nearly the entire 100-page issue on Sunday, August 18, 2019, was devoted to the project. Its astonishing goal was—and is—to reset the true founding date of this country to 1619 rather than 1776.
In August 1619, the arrival of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans to the British colony of Virginia inaugurated slavery in this country. As the Times writes in its introduction, chattel slavery “is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin.”[2]Continue reading “Regarding the Times’ 1619 Project”
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Jay Schalin, director of policy analysis at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal in Raleigh, North Carolina.
As somebody who is right in the middle of the “boomer” generation, I often hear or read my peers lamenting the good old days in education, before the radicalization of the late 1960s and 1970s ushered in disastrous changes.
What they fail to realize is that the K-12 education we received in the post-World War II era was not only already severely degraded, but it paved the way for the radicalization they decry. Here’s how it happened. Continue reading “The (Not So) Good Old Days in Education”
The Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., which depicts Abraham Lincoln standing over a kneeling freed slave, is being scrutinized and reconsidered these days. But the dispute over the statue (also called the Freedmen’s statue) has had a remarkable result for historians: An 1876 letter by Frederick Douglass has been found in which he expressed disappointment in the statue.
For me, what is so intriguing is how it was discovered and how that illustrates the wonderful world that digital technology has brought to historians—a world in which artifacts of the past are readily available.
