1619 Reconsidered
“The New York Times has quietly backed off of its claim that August, 1619, when the first slaves were brought to Virginia–not July 4, 1776–is America’s “true founding’….Historians savaged the project, showing that these claims are simply untrue. Liberal historians joined conservative historians in debunking the project. It turns out, the New York Times ignored the report of its own fact-checker!” - Veith
With regards to when the American experiment began, it’s an odd argument that any one date would be primary, as you’ve got the various dates of Spanish discovery and conquest—is it 1492, 1517, or…—the various dates of English discovery and colonization, various dates of French discovery and colonization, the various dates of progress in U.S. colonial and national government, and a whole bunch more.
We might conclude that the attempt to decide that one point of history is a sole determinant of the nation’s character is to first of all ignore the rest of history (as if the Puritans, Pilgrims, and the like did not matter at all), and is implicitly moreover a denial of the moral agency of all those other actors in history. What a mess.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
Here are a few articles that also bring to light Nikole Hannah-Jone’s revision of history, including the fact-checker that Hannah-Jones and the NY Times ignored.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-project-new-york-times-mistake-122248
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/letter-calls-for-withdrawal-of-1619-project-pulitzer/
Interestingly for years, American history books sugarcoated the brutalities of American chattel slavery and the intentional government laws at the national, state, and local levels in every state (especially in the Jim Crow era) that segregated blacks as 2nd class citizens. But now we have Hannah-Jones, an investigative NY Times reporter that revised history to swing the pendulum completely the other way and make everything about the founding of America about racism. Maslow’s hammer comes to mind.
Discussion