Nikole Hannah-Jones The 1619 Project purports to be a historical analysis of how slavery shaped American political, social, and economic institutions. My concern is that it has spawned a high-school curriculum. While I remain all for efforts to address the foundational centrality of slavery and racism to American history, my view of the project is that its displacing of historical understanding with ideology, and thus lacks credibility as historical analysis. I concede that slavery’s legacy still shapes American life. If used to supplement traditional curricula, I have no problem with the project at all. What I take issue with specifically is Ms. Hannah-Jones’s essay recounting black Americans’ struggle to “make democracy real,” and sociologist Matthew Desmond’s essay linking the crueler aspects of American capitalism to the labor practices that arose under slavery, thoroughly refuted by Professor Oakes. Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay says that “one of the primary reaso...

Was America founded as a slavocracy, and are current racial inequities the natural outgrowth of that? Or was America conceived in liberty, a nation haltingly redeeming itself through its founding principles? Having, for better or for worse, spent the majority of my adult life as a teacher of history, I think it apropos to suggest the relevance of the study of history for students in these troubled times, in no small par the result of the debate centered around how one answers the question stated above.           The 1619 Project is a venture developed by The New York Times Magazine in 2019 toward the end of re-examining the legacy of slavery in the United States, timed for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans in Virginia. It is a collaborative project of Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times staff writer, with contributions by the Times’ writers, including essays on the history of different facets of contemporary...