The initial project.

The curriculum.

The podcast.

The book.

The children’s book.

The documentary.

Historical Debates

Shortly following the release of the 1619 Project in August of 2019, the World Socialist Website ignited a debate by criticizing the project and interviewing a number of prominent historians. These historians did not criticize the project as a whole, but certain details in the opening essay. You can find those interviews here.

Following those interviews, The American Historical Association came to the defense of the 1619 Project, as did the New York Times Magazine. In December of 2022, The American Historical Review also published the 82-page 1619 Project Forum.

Here’s a small collection of other historians weighing in as the mostly rightwing backlash picked up steam throughout 2020:

Joseph M. Adelman: The 1619 Project and the Work of the Historian.

Seth Cotlar: a historian’s Twitter thread exploring the conservative backlash to 1619.

Sarah Ellison: How the 1619 Project took over 2020.

Kevin Gannon: The 1619 Project, the Founders-Industrial Complex, and History Pedagogy.

Nicholas Guyatt: 1619, Revisited: The loudest criticism of the Times project has been neither productive nor scholarly.

The New York Times Magazine, October 16, 2020: On Recent Criticism of The 1619 Project.

Joshua D. Rothman: a historian’s Twitter thread (of other historians Twitter threads) weighing in on #1619.

David Waldstreicher: The Hidden Stakes of the 1619 Controversy: Seeking to discredit those who wish to explain the persistence of racism, critics of the New York Times’s 1619 Project insist the facts don’t support its proslavery reading of the American Revolution. But they obscure a longstanding debate within the field of U.S. history over that very issue—distorting the full case that can be made for it.