But the sad if almost incredible truth is that in some quarters such an award still confers prestige upon the recipient, as even publishing in The New York Times does, or so we are told. We are a bit late in getting to that dog's breakfast called 'The 1619 Project," The New York Timers effort to "reframe"--read, "wildly distort"--die history and governing impetus of the American Founding. A new podcast from the Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion. Indeed, various public school districts, including some in Chicago, have announced that they will supplement their curricula by distributing copies of The 1619 Project to students, thereby promulgating the racialist worldview expounded by that “major” “reframing” of our history. “Histories,” we read in 1066 and All That, “have previously been written with the object of exalting their authors. Tumblr is a place to express yourself, discover yourself, and bond over the stuff you love. The fact that “some might argue” X does not mean that X is credible. Deeply personal and egregiously false. “Awarded itself”? The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world.”, Princeton’s Allen C. Guelzo, writing in City Journal, echoed these sentiments. But the real lesson of the Times’s new Pulitzer is that something can be farcical without being funny—or, more to the point, it can be farcical while still being malicious. Last summer, he huddled with his staff in a town-hall-style meeting—the proceedings of which were promptly leaked—and acknowledged a sad truth: “We built our newsroom to cover one story” (the now-debunked story that Donald Trump had “colluded” with Russia to steal the 2016 election). In January, we noted that “various public school districts, including some in Chicago” had announced that they would supplement their curricula by distributing copies of The 1619 Project to students. Considered as an intellectual artifact, The 1619 Project has been thoroughly, utterly discredited. And that is the problem. Copyright © 1982-2020 All rights reserved, We are a bit late in getting to that dog’s breakfast called “The 1619 Project,” The New York Times’s effort to “reframe”—read, “wildly distort”—the history and governing impetus of the American Founding. Of course there is. Copyright © 1982-2020 All rights reserved. . T here is something almost antique about progressives in 2019, at least when they are defending the New York Times ’ 1619 Project, a series of essays examining the legacy of … You might say, Who cares about insane rantings in The New York Times? In August 2019, the New York Times Magazine launched The 1619 Project on the 400 th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to Jamestown. The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project is a gross misrepresentation of history. The 1619 Project from The New York Times Magazine is inaugurated with a special issue that examines the modern-day legacy of slavery through over 30 essays and creative works. Eminent historians from the Left, Right, and Center lined up to repudiate this racially charged distortion of American history. Photo: Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer. It was to console its core readership that The New York Times undertook The 1619 Project in a special flood-the-zone issue of its Sunday magazine in August and then in a snazzy, graphics-heavy series of features on its website. We said that The 1619 Project was stupefying. Perhaps an unintended collateral benefit of this malign folly will be—finally, at last—to dissolve the vestiges of that prestige and expose the paper to the condign contempt of the public whose trust they have so extravagantly betrayed. Nevertheless, the paper is not entirely without influence, even today. Not officially, perhaps. The 1619 Project Curriculum The 1619 Project, inaugurated with a special issue of The New York Times Magazine, challenges us to reframe U.S. history by marking the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as our nation's foundational date. T Quoth the Pulitzer citation: For a sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution. Published in August 2019—400 years after the arrival of African slaves in Virginia—the project‘s essays took up almost the entire New York Times Magazine plus a ‘broadsheet” of African-American history prepared with the Smithsonian Institution. Your first response is a spluttering incredulity. "The 1619 Project is not a history," Nikole Hannah-Jones said in an MSNBC interview on Sunday. This was something that Dean Baquet, Executive Editor of the Times, grasped instantly. . The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world.” The 1619 Project pretends that the British were great crusaders in the campaign against slavery. It's where your interests connect you with your people. Maybe the Times could by writing about race in a “thoughtful,” i.e., obsessive and one-sided, way—“something,” Baquet added “we haven’t done in a large way in a long time.”, So there you have it. Someone tells you that the Apollo 11 moon landing was a carefully staged hoax perpetrated by nasa or the Trilateral Commission or whatever. In January, we reported on The 1619 Project. Here is a portion of a take on it from the New Criterion: It was to console its core readership that The New York Times undertook The 1619 Project in a special flood-the-zone issue of its Sunday magazine in August and then in a snazzy, graphics-heavy series of features on its website. Nikole Hannah-Jones will make a fitting addition to that gallery. Isn’t there an independent committee that decides who and what institutions receive what prize? The New Criterion magazine called it “a stupefying race-based fantasy about the origins of the United States.” One of the most sophisticated critiques of the 1619 Project came in the form of a letter from five respected historians, headed by Sean Wilentz of Princeton. The American colonists might talk about liberty. My last post addressed the New York Times’ 1619 Project. “[A]ny report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” Duranty wrote at the height of Stalin’s forced famine in the early 1930s. The lead essay, by the black journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the “architect” of The 1619 Project, set the tone. a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. What followed was a stupefying race-based fantasy about the origins of the United States. So supposing the Americans hadn’t broken away, there would have been a larger number of slaveholders in the greater British world who might have been able to prolong slavery longer than 1833.”, The truth is that in 1776, the American Founders, Southerners as much as Northerners, believed that slavery was on its way out. This is true. Many sober observers would have dismissed it as beneath comment were it not that the residual prestige of the Times lends currency if not credibility to its illiterate and partisan contentions. Articles featured in The New Criterion on 1619-project. They were wrong about the timing of that, but the fact remains, as Wood notes, that the Constitution (Article I, Section 9) set an end date on the importation of slaves and that “most Americans were confident that the despicable transatlantic slave trade was definitely going to end in 1808.”. History is written by the victors. The American colonists might talk about liberty. We didn’t know the half of it. "The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. For two years, the Times had invested heavily in the vaudeville entertainment called “Trump–Russia.” The spectacular failure of its leading man, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, to deliver a happy ending to that fiasco underscored the essential futility of the entire enterprise. As a reader of our efforts, you have stood with us on the front lines in the battle for culture. Magazine article New Criterion. . For Hannah-Jones, what is wanted is an expression that simultaneously justifies the endless whining of black radicals about how victimized they are because of things that happened a few centuries ago while also stressing the perpetually renewable guilt (like the liver of Prometheus) of whites, all whites, those living today even more than those actually involved in the African slave trade in the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries. Roger Kimball introduces the June issue K ar l Marx did not make many witty remarks. All this is the tragedy. As we write, the wildly tendentious, historically dubious tenets of The 1619 Project have been insinuated into the curricula of more than 3,500 school districts across the country. . The idea that the American Revolution was fomented in order to protect slavery is simply ridiculous. “The 1619 Project,” he wrote, “is not history: it is polemic, born in the imaginations of those whose primary target is capitalism itself and who hope to tarnish capitalism by associating it with slavery.”. But Wood points out, first, that the “British don’t get around to freeing the slaves in the West Indies until 1833,” and, second, that “if the Revolution hadn’t occurred,” they “might never have done so then, because all of the southern colonies would have been opposed. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about … Et voilà, The 1619 Project, which the paper described in a preface as a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. The 1619 Project represents a new nadir in the politically correct, anti-American machinations of The New York Times. The object of this History is to console the reader.”. Both recoiled from its distortions, simplifications, and outright falsehoods. That is part of the farce. There is a sense in which the Pulitzer Prizes and The New York Times deserve one another. Forget about the Stamp Act, the, Boston Tea Party, the Intolerable Acts, “No taxation without representation,” etc. It is as despicable as it is mendacious. Fortunately, a rational, historically informed response to The 1619 Project has been building. But truth does not matter when there is a political agenda to be advanced. For the Times, it fits in with what Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff called its “irresistible urge to delegitimize America.” That is the ultimate aim of The 1619 Project: to deliver another blow in the campaign to besmirch and diminish the political and moral achievement that is the United States of America. Henceforth, or at least “for the next two years”—the remainder of Trump’s first term—the Times was going all in on “race, and other divisions.” Robert Mueller couldn’t get Trump. Roger concludes his take down of the 1619 project on a mildly optimistic note: The 1619 Project represents a new nadir in the politically correct, anti … And odd Negroes, w[hich] the Governo[r] and Cape Merchant bought for victuals.” 1619 & All That . But his oft-quoted observation that history tends to repeat itself “first as tragedy, then as farce” is a mot for the ages. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are. It is the same with the contention that 1619, the year that the first African slaves were brought to America, marked “the beginning of the system of slavery on which the country was built.” But there were already slaves and various other forms of indentured labor in the Americas as there were all over the world. Neither was consulted by the perpetrators of The 1619 Project. What they really cared about, according to this malignant fairy tale, was preserving and extending the institution of slavery. a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery, which was clearly, obviously, not an exclusively American institution, but existed throughout history. And slavery in the United States was only a small part of a larger world process that unfolded over many centuries. 1619 & all that. What we meant was that the claims it makes are so outlandish, at once so ostentatiously at odds with historical reality while also being carefully framed in a corset of politically correct verbiage, that any critical response is at first stunned. As a writer for The Federalist noted, giving the Times a Pulitzer Prize for a part of The 1619 Project “gives schools one more excuse to hate America.” For the Times and its allies, we suspect, that is reason enough to celebrate. The 1619 Project and the denial of history ... among the early wave of the more than 12 million Africans sent across the Atlantic to live and die in slavery in the New World. Jun 03, 2020 Roger Kimball introduces the June issue by Roger Kimball. This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 38 Number 10, on page 1 Copyright © 2020 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/6/the-dark-side-of-farce, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care, Last of the Whigs: Churchill as historian, https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/6/the-dark-side-of-farce. . On The New York Times's recent disinformation campaign. Considered as an intellectual artifact, The 1619 Project has been thoroughly, utterly discredited. The dishonest 1619 project would have you believe that America was founded in 1619 when a British privateer landed at Point Comfort in Virginia with “…20. On the contrary, “it is the northern states in 1776 that are the world’s leaders in the antislavery cause. It … … Learn how your support contributes to our continued defense of truth. Posted By: StormCnter, 12/23/2019 1:22:22 PM We are a bit late in getting to that dog’s breakfast called “The 1619 Project,” The New York Times’s effort to “reframe”—read, “wildly distort”—the history and governing impetus of the American Founding. So it is with the preposterous idea that America was founded as a “slavocracy.” Hannah-Jones asserts that “anti-black racism runs in the very dna of this country.” The claim is obviously metaphorical; countries do not possess dna. “[S]ome might argue,” as Hannah-Jones coyly puts it, “that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.” Gosh. There is more to come, including new calls for race-based “reparations” on the basis of the falsehoods promulgated by The 1619 Project. Learn how your support contributes to our continued defense of truth. Now, scholars are pushing back. Considered as a call to action, however, it has gone from success to success. When they are not giving awards to anti-capitalist, racially charged fictions masquerading as history—or tendentious politicized fictions like their “investigations” into non-existent collusion between Donald Trump and “the Russians,” for which they awarded themselves a Prize last year—they are giving them to twisted new-age self-dramatizations such as The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care, by Anne Boyer, “An elegant and unforgettable narrative about the brutality of illness and the capitalism of cancer care in America.” The “capitalism of cancer care”? Among the Times’s allies in this effort to revolutionize the teaching of American history on the basis of a malign racialist fantasy is The Pulitzer Center, which declared that it was “proud to be the education partner for The 1619 Project.” All the news reports noting the participation of the Pulitzer Center were careful to point out that it was unaffiliated with the Pulitzer Prizes. It’s just that it is controlled—de facto, if not de jure—by the Times and a handful of like-minded entities.Which of course is the reason that the Times has accumulated so many of them. Karl Marx did not make many witty remarks. It would be like complaining about the roundness of a circle or the wetness of water. The National Association of Scholars has inaugurated the “1620 Project,” not just to commemorate the signing of the Mayflower Compact—a much more significant event in the history of the United States—but also to provide an occasion for thoughtful responses to some of the more outlandish claims made by Hannah-Jones and the other writers involved in the Times’s latest campaign of disinformation. And though the copies will be paid for by the Times and donors, taxpayers will still be indirectly funding a version of history that is politically tendentious and wildly at odds with the facts. The revisions to the project have generated a lot of coverage and commentary, including by the most senior figures at the NY Times (CNN called the statement - later retracted - by the NY Times Writers' Guild an "extraordinary move": "1619 Project faces renewed criticism — this time from within The New York Times"). The Pulitzer Center (not affiliated with the famed prizes) has announced that it “is proud to be the education partner for The 1619 Project.” As we write, the Center’s website is full of little valentines to Hannah-Jones and her racialist, ahistorical fantasy about the founding of the United States. Read preview. Readers of the satirical classic 1066 and All That know what fun can be had if you go about your job as a storyteller serving up “all the History you can remember” and pretending that it is the truth. But the question is whether truth even comes into consideration in what passes for mainstream journalism today. “That, to me,” Baquet concluded, “is the vision for coverage. Josh Christenson - MAY 10, 2020 2:35 PM The creator of the controversial 1619 Project, a New York Times Magazine commentary series on the impact of slavery in America, is now saying her work was meant to be "journalism" and "not a history." There they all were, from Walter Duranty, the Times’s man in the Soviet Union under Stalin, on down. On the contrary, Wood noted, “it is the northern states in 1776 that are the world’s leaders in the antislavery cause. The New Criterion: "1619 And All That: On The NYT's Recent Disinformation Campaign" Brutal , but deserved: We are a bit late in getting to that dog’s breakfast called “The 1619 Project,” The New York Times’s effort to “reframe”—read, “wildly distort”—the history and governing impetus of the American Founding. Its stated goal was “to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” With us on the 1619 Project is not a history, '' Hannah-Jones. Defense of truth from success to success contributes to our continued defense of truth, Right, and falsehoods. 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