School districts in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Buffalo, New York, have decided to update their history curricula and will include the material from the NY Times 1619 Project. Under the guidance of staff writer, Nikole Hannah-Jones, it posits that the institution of slavery was so embedded in the country’s DNA that the country’s true founding could be said to have occurred in 1619, rather than in 1776.
The country was actually founded in 1788 and it was not founded on slavery. The Constitution makes that clear.
New York Times, a former promoter of Joseph Stalin and current supporter of Chinese Communists, had their Magazine honor the 400th anniversary of what they claim is the official start of slavery in this country. That date was struck down by legitimate historians of all persuasions with sharp and swift cuts.
1619 is more ideology and emotion than factual history.
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HISTORIANS CITE SERIOUS ERRORS
Five famed historians, all left-wing, want major corrections. But the NY Times won’t make the changes and remarkably described facts as flexible.
Ted Cruz retweeted two historians, left-wing historians, discussing the significant errors. Two of the errors are that the country was founded on slavery as was capitalism. The curricula describe a hateful America.
5/x Renown historian James McPherson likewise described the astonishing falsehoods in the now absurdly Pulitzer-Prize winning NYT 1619 project: https://t.co/yNjtQtvBY3
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) May 4, 2020
Reason Magazine:
NPR correctly notes that the essays examine “lesser-known consequences of slavery,” like “how plantation economics led to modern corporate, capitalist culture.” From that, Hannah-Jones generalizes it to all capitalism
Five of them penned a letter to The New York Times expressing dismay “at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.” These historians said the project’s contention that the American Revolution was launched “in order to ensure slavery would continue” was flat-out wrong.
Another historian, Phil Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research, has criticized Matthew Desmond’s 1619 Project essay, which claimed that modern American capitalism has its roots in plantation slavery. Magness has persuasively argued that this claim lacks verification and that Desmond relied on bad data about cotton-picking rates in the pre-Civil War south.
“Desmond’s thesis relies exclusively on scholarship from a hotly contested school of thought known as the New History of Capitalism (NHC),” wrote Magness in a second article. “Although NHC scholars often present their work as cutting-edge explorations into the relationship between capitalism and slavery, they have not fared well under scrutiny from outside their own ranks.”
New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait hailed The 1619 Project as a valuable corrective but cautioned that it shouldn’t be taught in schools as history. Magness agrees.
“Mandating the use of The 1619 Project in K-12 curricula is at best premature until these issues are resolved and the Times makes a good faith effort to answer its critics,” Magness told Reason magazine. “While there is merit to some of the themes raised by The 1619 Project, it continues to be marred by its empirically debunked and explicitly anti-capitalist assessment of the economics of slavery.”
OPINION
It paints a picture of a hate-filled America founded on slavery and then it ties in capitalism as a system built on slavery, neither of which is true.
There are several narratives of American history, but Hannah-Jones only tells an angry African-American side. She denigrates the Founding Fathers and discredits Lincoln strictly as a racist who wanted to deport freed black slaves.
The project propagandizes American students against their own nation’s history and founding principles and it occurs far from the public stage. They clearly want a centralized government with the elite picking winners and losers.
Dan McLoughlin at National Review writes, “Ronald Reagan, in his farewell address, warned of the need to educate the next generation in an informed patriotism. The Union Narrative, properly supplemented by the Black Narrative, is the story of our history that is both true and inspiring. The 1619 Project could have aimed at that synthesis. Because it instead brought the Radical Narrative into the harsh glare of public controversy, it may have hastened an irrepressible conflict over American history.”
