The 1619 Project Forum

Abstract

Why has the American Historical Review commissioned nineteen scholars to review the 1619 Project? There is no precedent in the history of the journal for a review forum of this scope and magnitude. Without question, the 1619 Project has become a very public flash point within academic and public debates centered on the work history does in the world. Its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, won a Pulitzer Prize for her lead essay that opened the project in an August 14, 2019, special issue of the New York Times Magazine.1 And some historians of the United States credited the 1619 Project with opening up new ways of looking at the American past and with helping to give the work of academic historians on slavery a broader audience. But many specialists in early American and antebellum history offered sharp criticism of the project for what they termed interpretive overreach and factual slippage. “Was slavery really the salient cause of the American Revolution?” some of them asked. For other American historians, the 1619 Project did not go far enough in its efforts to reconceptualize the larger meanings of the Black experience in North America.