Just like the original project, the book relies heavily on historical scholarship, not in a conventional history. Instead, it combines history with journalism, criticism, and imaginative literature to show how history molds, influences and haunts us in the present.
In exposing our nation's troubled roots, the 1619 project challenges us to think about a country whose exceptionalism we treat as unquestioned truth.
How do you romanticize a revolution made possible by forced labor of your ancestors, one that built white freedom on a black slavery that would persist for another century after Jefferson wrote, we hold these truths to be be self evident, that all men are created equal.
Eight in ten black people would not be in the US were it not for the institution of slavery in a society founded on ideals of freedom.
Frederick Douglas said, "there is not a nation on earthy guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of the US at this very hour."
African people had lived here, on the land that in 1776 would form the United States, since the White Lion dropped anchor in the year 1619. They'd arrived one year before the iconic ship carrying the English people who got the credit for building it at all.
What would it mean to reframe our understanding of US history by considering 1619 as our country's origin point, the birth our our defining contradictions, the seed of so much o what has made us unique?
We were the founding fathers. We put so much into the US and we made the foundation. (Student interviewed in the book)
While history is what happened, it is also, just as important, how we think about what happened and what we unearth and choose to remember about what happened."
[The founding mythology] conveniently omits the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.
The first twelve presidents were enslaveres. In fact, some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy, but as slavocracy.
Black people [in the US] were enslaved here longer than we have been free.
Our las names often derive from the white people who once owned us. That is why the insistence of many black Americans... to give our children names that we create, that are neither European nor from Africa, a placer we have never been, is an act of self determination.
Until 1870, the passage of the 15th Amendment, no Black people had ever been allowed to serve in any elected office in the US congress or in most states and so their names do not often appear in the political histories.
Socratic Kids: Now that you've read excerpts from the book, watch this video that contradicts The 1619 Project: