“Recently, I have been concerned at the pushback by a few historians of note. First, I should say, as a disclaimer, that my article on The Weeping time slave auction appears at the end of the issue, but my body of work and commitment to public history is such that I would be a supporter of 1619 whether I was a part of it or not.  I should also say that these historians and others are free to debate various points raised in The 1619 Project, but the hope is that neither they nor anyone else will dismiss its importance.

“One of the things that I liked about the project is that though they asked me and a few other historians including Kevin M. Kruse from Princeton and Tiya Miles from Harvard to make contributions – the lead article was from one of their esteemed journalists and MacArthur Fellow, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has been researching these issues for over 20 years.  She was the person to first pitch the story to Editor in Chief of The New York Times Magazine, Jake Silverstein, who enthusiastically took on the challenge.  The fact that they also consulted several noted historians and other scholars early on in the process was also evidence of their due diligence, but again, to lead with a journalist’s take on the history of America through the lens of her own African American family was a stroke of genius…c

Read the rest: Anne Bailey “The 1619 Project and Bringing History to the People” | FifteenEightyFour | Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2020/01/the-1619-project-and-bringing-history-to-the-people/