Trump Was Implicated in a Vote Machine Theft. Trump May Have Just Cooked Himself in the Mar-a-Lago Case The 5th Circuit Is Furious That the Supreme Court Put It in Timeout The magazine issue had some timeline elements, but in the book the cards have proliferated, with many new key events added: the Virginia House of Burgesses’ passage of the law that established the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, 1662 Lord Dunmore’s proclamation, 1775 the first gathering of Black activists that would become known as the Colored Conventions, 1830. Timeline pages provide a necessary chronological anchor for the essays, which move backward and forward in time. With this, the editors (Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Silverstein) have tried to address many of the critiques leveled at the project when it was still a magazine special issue-a past iteration that Silverstein, in his recent contextualizing essay, called a “first effort.” The new book is much, much longer than the magazine version, and easier to read, despite its heft. Now the project has become a book: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. This frame, it turns out, was brilliant: sticky, provocative, generative. The discourse draped the project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, already a respected journalist, with all of its prizes the discourse also made her presence on college and high-school campuses into a culture-war issue.

That discourse has, in its third year of life, produced an exceedingly lumpy grab-bag of cultural byproducts: mentions in state, local, and federal bills aimed at prohibiting the project’s teaching in schools response interviews with prestigious, 1619-critical historians on the Trotskyist World Socialist Web Site (?) an unusually lively debate between two historians of the founding era at the Massachusetts Historical Society and, recently, a lengthy essay explaining the project’s origins, and locating it within centuries of American historiography, from Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein. The New York Times’ 1619 Project arrived in August 2019-somehow, barely more than two years ago-and created a discourse that nearly obscured the thing itself. Slate has relationships with various online retailers.īut note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change.Īll prices were up to date at the time of publication.

The 1619 book