Beginning in October 2019, the World Socialist Web Site published a series of interviews with prominent historians critical of the 1619 Project, including Victoria E. Bynum, James M. McPherson, Gordon S. Wood, James Oakes, Richard Carwardine and Clayborne Carson.[6][5][27][28] In an essay for The New York Review of Books, historian Sean Wilentz accused the 1619 Project of cynicism for its portrayal of the American Revolution, the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, who Wilentz wrote is "rendered as a white supremacist."[29]
In December 2019, five leading American historians, Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum and James Oakes, sent a letter to the Times expressing objections to the framing of the project and accusing the authors of a "displacement of historical understanding by ideology". The letter disputed the claim, made in the Hannah-Jones' introductory essay to the 1619 Project, that "one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery".
The Times published the letter along with a rebuttal from the magazine's editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein.[7][5] Wood responded in a letter, "I don't know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves [...] No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776."[6][30] In an article in The Atlantic, Wilentz responded to Silverstein, writing, "No effort to educate the public in order to advance social justice can afford to dispense with a respect for basic facts", and disputing the factual accuracy of Silverstein's defense of the project.[31]
Also during December 2019, twelve scholars and political scientists specializing in the American Civil War sent a letter to the Times saying that "The 1619 Project offers a historically-limited view of slavery." While agreeing to the importance of examining American slavery, they objected to the portrayal of slavery as a uniquely American phenomenon, to construing slavery as a capitalist venture despite documented anti-capitalist sentiment among many Southern slaveholders, and to presenting out-of-context quotes of a conversation between Abraham Lincoln and "five esteemed free black men". The following month, Times editor Jake Silverstein replied with notes from the research desk, concluding that the scholars had requested the inclusion of additional information, rather than corrections to existing information.[32][33]
In March 2020, historian Leslie M. Harris, who was consulted for the Project, wrote in Politico that she had warned that the idea that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery was inaccurate, and that the Times made avoidable mistakes, but that the project was "a much-needed corrective to the blindly celebratory histories".[8] Hannah-Jones has also said that she stands by the claim that slavery helped fuel the revolution, though she concedes she might have phrased it too strongly in her essay, in a way that could give readers the impression that the support for slavery was universal.[5][8] On March 11, 2020, Silverstein authored an "update" in the form of a "clarification" on Times' website, correcting Hannah-Jones's essay to state that "protecting slavery was a primary motivation for some of the colonists".[34]
Journalistic reaction
The 1619 Project received positive reviews by Alexandria Neason in the Columbia Journalism Review,[14] and by Ellen McGirt in Fortune magazine, which declared the project "wide-reaching and collaborative, unflinching, and insightful" and a "dramatic and necessary corrective to the fundamental lie of the American origin story".[20] Andrew Sullivan critiqued the project as an important perspective that needed to be heard, but one presented in a biased way under the guise of objectivity.[35] Writing in The Week, Damon Linkler found the 1619 Project's treatment of history "sensationalistic, reductionistic, and tendentious."[36] Timothy Sandefur deemed the project's goal worthy, but observed that the articles persistently went wrong trying to connect everything with slavery.[37] In the National Review, Phillip W. Magness wrote that the Project provided a distorted economic history borrowed from "bad scholarship" of the New History of Capitalism (NHC),[38] and Rich Lowry wrote that Hannah-Jones' lead essay left out unwelcome facts about slavery, smeared the revolution, distorted the Constitution and misrepresented the founding era and Lincoln.[39] The World Socialist Web Site criticized what its editors consider the Times' reactionary, politically motivated "falsification of history" that wrongly centers around racial rather than class conflict.[6][5][40] Marxist political scientist Adolph Reed dismissed the 1619 Project as "the appropriation of the past in support of whatever kind of ‘just-so’ stories about the present are desired."[41]
In February 2020, a rival project called the 1776 Project, published under the aegis of The Washington Examiner, was launched by a number of African-American academics who dispute the narrative of the 1619 Project.[42]
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