The 1619 Project, an ideologically-driven revisionist history of the United States, has been getting a lot of attention over the last several days as Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton threatened legislation to defund any school that uses any curriculum based on it.
While I advise against actually putting forward any such legislation, Cotton’s threat appears to have forced the creator of the controversial project to go on the defensive where others – including historians critical of the premise she built the project from – did not.
Nikole Hannah-Jones took to Twitter Monday morning to walk back the assertion that the 1619 Project was “a history,” insisting that it was a project of journalism.
That tweets here are part of a larger thread where Hannah-Jones tries to clarify the purpose of the project. However, the treatment of the 1619 Project has been pushed by her, the New York Times, and supporters as THE definitive history of the United States, arguing that the “true” history of the nation stemmed from the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619, rather than from the actual Declaration of Independence from Great Britain and the subject structuring of the United States Constitution.
Hannah-Jones is attempting to deflect that this was ever an attempt to revise history, despite the fact that her project was turned into a curriculum specifically to be taught in schools.
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