Historians continue to criticize the highly inaccurate and deeply politically correct interpretation of US history. meanwhile, schools are silent and plan on using the 1619 Project in their school curriculum. One of the main points of objection is the idea that the Revolutionary War was fought in order to preserve slavery. Even liberal historians point out that this pure malarkey and ungrounded in truth or facts.
In order to believe the Times you have to believe it was slavery and not the Boston Massacre, the killing of 14 Minute Men in Lexington or the British raid on Col Barrett’s farm in Concord in a state where slavery was frowned upon that led to the Revolutionary War. In their text, they fail to explain that if slavery was the reason for the war why Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina were three of the last hold out states who opposed going to war.
There have been numerous complaints about the inaccuracies of the project and huge volumes of proof to explain why but still the Times has yet to make even on correction to the project that was written by opinion writers and editorial staff without one main historian in the bunch. This is a propaganda sheet, not a study of history.
“On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against,” reads the first sentence of Friday’s essay by Leslie Harris, a history professor at Northwestern University.
Harris is just the latest in a string of academics to levy criticism on Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project. She is the first, however, who actually took part in the project as a fact-checker. During the publication process for 1619, Harris “vigorously disputed” the idea that the American Revolution was actually about preserving slavery. Nonetheless, there it was in print come August 2019.
Written by journalists and opinion writers, the project attempts “to reframe the country’s history” by suggesting America’s “true founding” was when the first slaves arrived in 1619.
Within days of its launch, multiple top historians pointed out glaring factual inaccuracies. Their concerns, however, went largely ignored, save for one response from NYT editor Josh Silverstein essentially dismissing a letter sent by five such historians.