What do you think?
Rate this book
Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America
It’s the New “Big Lie” According the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” America was not founded in 1776, with a declaration of freedom and independence, but in 1619 with the introduction of African slavery into the New World. Ever since then, the “1619 Project” argues, American history has been one long sordid tale of systemic racism. Celebrated historians have debunked this, more than two hundred years of American literature disproves it, parents know it to be false, and yet it is being promoted across America as an integral part of grade school curricula and unquestionable orthodoxy on college campuses. The “1619 Project” is not just bad history, it is a danger to our national life, replacing the idea, goal, and reality of American unity with race-based obsessions that we have seen play out in violence, riots, and the destruction of American monuments—not to mention the wholesale rewriting of America’s historical and cultural past. In her new book, Debunking the 1619 Project, scholar Mary Grabar, shows, in dramatic fashion, just how full of flat-out lies, distortions, and noxious propaganda the “1619 Project” really is. It is essential reading for every concerned parent, citizen, school board member, and policymaker.
382 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 7, 2021
95 people are currently reading
351 people want to read
About the author
Mary Grabar
9 books38 followersMary Grabar, the author of “Debunking Howard Zinn,” earned her PhD from the University of Georgia and taught college English for 20 years. She is now a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization in Clinton, New York. Her writing can be found at DissidentProf.com and at marygrabar.com.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews
September 13, 2021
While this is considerably more openly white supremacist than Peter W. Wood's treatment of this same subject matter, I'm going to structure my review similarly and will be starting with the exact same quote below:
"We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture." ~ Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
History isn't unbiased truth.
Its a perspective.
If the goal is to have the most complete record of what happened, history from ALL perspectives will have to be included.
US History as traditionally told leaves out every perspective that isn't white and usually male. US History as a subject is SO biased and dismissive of other perspectives of history that the US has had to supplement it by adding whole 'supplemental' history months to focus on the history that's admittedly omitted from standard US history curriculum.
Probably the most well known in the US is Black History Month which has had to be repeated across the Western World because white supremacy omits and warps the history of marginalized peoples everywhere it exists.
I am unsure why white supremacists are shocked by the idea that the descendants of those who were enslaved by the founding oppressors, view those same founding oppressors as monsters. We are entitled to see history from our experience and perspective.
This view of history is not harmful to white people as racist, white supremacist history still exists and is taught more widely.
The temper tantrum over the 1619 Project is the worst part of white supremacy.
Please just grow up.
Your ancestors committed genocide on a mass scale and if that hurts your feelings get the fuck over it.
I'm tired of the whining.
Your ancestors sucked, this country was founded on oppression and still runs on it.
Those facts aren't 'woke' or 'Marxist' this is history from our perspective.
We're not ever going to stop telling it and eventually your descendants will have to make amends.
It is what it is.
This, this is just a warped, racist and white supremacist view of history.
The truth can't hurt you, its just words on a page.
What is omitted from this white supremacist text is that The 1619 Project was first printed in the newspaper. The newspaper has an entire department that exists solely to fact check stories before they are printed. Any errors would've been corrected and the newspaper would print retractions.
History books however are only checked for spelling and other writing errors. This wasn't fact checked obviously or it wouldn't include the rhetoric about 'the great steal.🤷🏾♀️
This isn't truth or fact its just white supremacist nonsense.
Now as for details, this author just lies. Confederates rejected US citizenship, they committed treason against the USA so of course they're not heroes.
They were insurrectionists, separatists and treasonous cowards🤷🏾♀️
Which is why they lost the war.
White supremacists can get over that shit at anytime.
We're taking the statues down.
We're having our history taught mainstream🤷🏾♀️
Luckily I was able to get a pirated audiobook copy of this and the narrator is a very angry Karen, lol.
I enjoyed laughing at her faux outrage, what a fucking tool.
I can not be expected to treat this Nazi version of history as anything other than fit for wiping asses with.
"We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture." ~ Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
History isn't unbiased truth.
Its a perspective.
If the goal is to have the most complete record of what happened, history from ALL perspectives will have to be included.
US History as traditionally told leaves out every perspective that isn't white and usually male. US History as a subject is SO biased and dismissive of other perspectives of history that the US has had to supplement it by adding whole 'supplemental' history months to focus on the history that's admittedly omitted from standard US history curriculum.
Probably the most well known in the US is Black History Month which has had to be repeated across the Western World because white supremacy omits and warps the history of marginalized peoples everywhere it exists.
I am unsure why white supremacists are shocked by the idea that the descendants of those who were enslaved by the founding oppressors, view those same founding oppressors as monsters. We are entitled to see history from our experience and perspective.
This view of history is not harmful to white people as racist, white supremacist history still exists and is taught more widely.
The temper tantrum over the 1619 Project is the worst part of white supremacy.
Please just grow up.
Your ancestors committed genocide on a mass scale and if that hurts your feelings get the fuck over it.
I'm tired of the whining.
Your ancestors sucked, this country was founded on oppression and still runs on it.
Those facts aren't 'woke' or 'Marxist' this is history from our perspective.
We're not ever going to stop telling it and eventually your descendants will have to make amends.
It is what it is.
This, this is just a warped, racist and white supremacist view of history.
The truth can't hurt you, its just words on a page.
What is omitted from this white supremacist text is that The 1619 Project was first printed in the newspaper. The newspaper has an entire department that exists solely to fact check stories before they are printed. Any errors would've been corrected and the newspaper would print retractions.
History books however are only checked for spelling and other writing errors. This wasn't fact checked obviously or it wouldn't include the rhetoric about 'the great steal.🤷🏾♀️
This isn't truth or fact its just white supremacist nonsense.
Now as for details, this author just lies. Confederates rejected US citizenship, they committed treason against the USA so of course they're not heroes.
They were insurrectionists, separatists and treasonous cowards🤷🏾♀️
Which is why they lost the war.
White supremacists can get over that shit at anytime.
We're taking the statues down.
We're having our history taught mainstream🤷🏾♀️
Luckily I was able to get a pirated audiobook copy of this and the narrator is a very angry Karen, lol.
I enjoyed laughing at her faux outrage, what a fucking tool.
I can not be expected to treat this Nazi version of history as anything other than fit for wiping asses with.
October 11, 2021
Is an attempt to say the 1619 project is a lie, Mary lies and reverts to a lot of anecdotal evidence to paint an idea that slavery was just a product of its time and has no real bearing on today. She is kind of right about DiAngelo like grifters but is a grifter herself and has the academic integrity of a dried dog turd.
August 19, 2022
Review #900
The 1619 Project was published by the New York Times as groundbreaking new history. In reality, it has no history that wasn’t previously known. It is so riddled with errors, anyone with a discerning eye can see it is merely the newest wrapping of Marxist dogma. It has to destroy America’s founding principles so it can justify erasing America and starting over as a socialist dictatorship. This is the goal of the modern Left. It reduces all people to race: race determines your personality and destiny. All black people are identical. All white people are identical. This is the most insulting idea being pushed today to me; I can’t believe it’s given credibility. It’s an insult to every slave and abolitionist who resisted and changed things.
The book covers egregious historical inaccuracies in the Project, such as
• The arrival of the slave ship in 1619 is newly discovered history.
• Slavery never existed outside the U.S. in all of history.
• Slaves were kidnapped by whites from Africa.
• Jefferson’s anti-slavery statements prove he was pro-slavery.
• Jefferson fathered children with a slave, raping her. (This has been disproven yet persists.)
• Lincoln really wasn’t interested in ending slavery.
• The U.S. economy is based on slavery, then and now.
• All whites are racist; all blacks are victims.
There are some copyediting errors. Ms. Grabar sure loves dashes.
==============================
Debunking the 1619 Project by Mary Grabar
The real problem with The 1619 Project is not that it is in conflict with “our cherished mythologies.” It’s that, as this book will lay out in detail, The Project is in conflict with the historical facts and the actual truth about America—which, yes, we do cherish, if we have any gratitude for our lives of unexampled freedom and prosperity, and any hope to see those blessings continue into the future. Such concerns would seem to be far from the minds of The 1619 Project’s creators and promoters, judging by their continuing willingness to foment shame and hatred for America, racial division and hostility, and even violence—as copious evidence, beginning with Nikole Hannah-Jones’s unapologetic celebration of the “1619 riots,” amply demonstrates. The 1619 Project is a mortal danger to the American experiment in self-government. If we want to keep the republic, then the task at hand—for those Americans who still share that hope, and that gratitude—is to face and defeat the threat. We must understand The 1619 Project: its divisive aims and its dishonest methods, its sweeping historical misjudgments and its blatant errors of fact. And we must drive its lies and its poisonous race-baiting our of our public institutions, beginning with the official curricula of our schools.
The Project has a didactic feel. After all, as the introductory material proudly informs the reader, it was to be shipped to schools upon launch. The introduction is hardly inviting to the sophisticated reader. From the outset, it is insinuated that the skeptic who does not accept the history-shattering claims will fail the implied litmus test of compassion for slaves and their descendants. For a project that is intended to overturn over two hundreds years of traditional history, it has little of the scaffolding of scholarship. The essays are not in the Montaignian tradition of assaying topics and inviting readers to consider a new perspective.
With the breakdown of the disciplines under Common Core, the lines between fiction and nonfiction have been blurred. Similarly, under Common Core, interpretations matter more than facts, personal stories more than established history, and acceptance of diversity more than reason and logic. To such readers, the inclusion of poems written to order in a document that purports to be making a serious case for correcting errors in our understanding of history may not seem too odd. Serious historians, though, did find The 1619 Project odd—and, as we shall see in chapters 3-8 below, very wrong, not just in its emphases, but in its facts.
In spite of her pretensions of consideration for colleagues, Hannah-Jones had failed to acknowledge the three invitations sent to her by the National Association of Scholars to participate in its events. Genuine academic collegiality requires the willingness both to engage in discussion using evidence and logic and to subject one’s work to peer review. Hannah-Jones instead follows a pattern of behavior familiar to conservative professors on college campuses. She calls those with different views “crazy,” ignores the critiques of experts in the field, and demands that her black critics remain silent. Instead of answering her critics in collegial discussions, Hannah-Jones chose to smear them in a very active Twitter campaign that featured links to race-baiting articles and her own pungent and tendentious comments.
The focus on micro-histories—the details of the lives of individuals or small communities—led to a loss of the big picture and historical context. The injustices suffered by individuals could be blamed on oppressors without any investigation of the larger forces at work at that point in time. Lost in the focus on victims was an understanding of the momentous changes that would lead to the condemnation and remediation of the very injustices against which the historians were purportedly taking a stand.
The adversarial approach to history has come to prevail. Those historians who don’t pursue identity politics are now fighting a rearguard action from the margins to which they have been relegated by the leftists now holding power. The historian who attempts to recreate [sic] the past with understanding—that is, to get beyond her present view, rather than to see the past through “woke” moral standards—is maligned as “Old Guard,” or worse. Historical figures are no longer understood—they are either valorized or demonized.
The jaw-dropping allegation that the Revolution was fought in defense of slavery has been widely criticized by some of the most prominent historians in this field—including by left-leaning scholars, and even by one expert who served as a consultant on The 1619 Project and whose pre-publication warnings against printing the false claim were ignored. As a result, the Times has had to backpedal—to a certain extent. Hannah-Jones and her editor “adjusted” their original claim by adding two words. Thus the online version of Hannah-Jones’s inaugural essay now makes the scaled-back allegation that “one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”
In 1921, African American historian Benjamin Brawley offered a survey of the colonists’ efforts to end or curb the slave trade. The American colonies, for a variety of reasons, had passed laws against the slave trade, only to have them nullified by the British government. These attempts took place in the context of the hardening of slavery in the North American colonies, as the status of black laborers had evolved from that of the African captives purchased from Africans, captured from a Portuguese slave ship, brought to Virginia on the White Lion, and sold—as best we can tell—into some form of indentured servitude. The condition of race-based and life-long chattel slavery passed down from mother to child developed in a historical process of which The 1619 Project creators seem to be ignorant—even willfully ignorant.
Contrary to Hannah-Jones’s contention that a primary reason for America’s deciding for independence was to protect slavery from a Britain that was “deeply conflicted” over the slave trade, the truth is the opposite: anti-slavery opinion and efforts by the American colonists in the 1760s and 1770s contributed significantly to the formation of the movement to end the slave trade in London—a movement that did not formally begin there until 1787.
Was Jefferson an “immediatist abolitionist”? Did he call for abolition immediately, regardless of consequences? No. And, as we shall see, his reasons included concern for the welfare of the slaves—given the inescapable realities of the time. In many ways, Jefferson was a radical for his time. But he was also a pragmatist and understood that consequences of extreme actions by men in positions of leadership could have devastating effects. That may not satisfy the creator of The 1619 Project. But she and the other contributors have strayed far from historical scholarship done by historians of the past, including pathbreaking black historians. They well understood the suffering of their forebears. But they also understood the realities of the time, the context in which this nation was formed—and America’s unique promise. No doubt, they would have been stunned to hear the statement that slavery in America was “unlike anything that had existed in the world before.”
Though the characteristics of slavery that Hannah-Jones lists are the same as those Davis lists, her description is glaringly wrong in one critical particular. When she claims that the slaves at Monticello “struggled under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before,” she is making an error of such magnitude that only a profound ignorance of history can excuse it. ... In reality, chattel slavery has existed across the world and throughout history, at one end of a continuum of a wide variety of extreme forms of servitude, some of them … more oppressive and brutal than slavery in North America, and far beyond what the slaves at Monticello experienced. Hannah-Jones’s claim flies in the face of abundant evidence from thousands of years of human history. Her contention that chattel slavery in America was unique in the history of the world is simply, demonstrably false.
Church laws against abuse of slaves eventually evolved into a movement to abolish slavery itself among Quakers, Evangelicals, and Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century. The abolition of slavery was truly a radical idea in human history. Today, we rightly recognize slavery itself as a crime against humanity, deserving of our absolute condemnation in all its forms. But that understanding should not blind us to the undeniable fact that slavery was accompanied by more gruesome conditions in some places and times than in others—and that the conditions in the American South in general, and at Jefferson’s Monticello in particular, were far from the most “brutal” in history. Hannah-Jones attempts no balanced, fair-minded judgment on this issue. And her eagerness to define America by “a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before” leads her into innumerable historical misjudgments and errors of fact.
Overall, the slaves at Monticello enjoyed a greater amount of freedom than most slaves in Virginia, and a number of them were literate. Hannah-Jones’s claim is wildly overblown. Even from a strictly economic perspective, it made no sense to work slaves “to death.” In fact, as prices for slaves rose, masters in the American South kept slaves from doing the most dangerous jobs if cheap labor from Irish or German immigrants could be found to replace them. Thus, in he antebellum South, Irish immigrants were employed in jobs “considered too hazardous even for slaves,” such as coal-mining and building canals and railroads.
There was the enslavement of white Europeans and Americans by Muslims in North Africa, a topic which garners disbelief these days, as Bruce Bawer related in an August 1, 2020, article, written shortly after a statute of Miguel de Cervantes, the great Spanish writer who was enslaved for five years in Algiers, was defaced in San Francisco. Bawer’s post on Facebook about the fact that over one million whites had been sold into slavery in Africa from the 1400s to the 1800s was met with incredulity or dismissal. These slaves were abandoned by the European powers until the eighteenth century, when they began making payments to North African powers to protect their cirizens. But after declaring independence the United States refused to pay such tribute, and ultimately Thomas Jefferson as president sent the Marines to North Africa, where “under the command of William Eaton, U.S. Consul in Tripoli, they blockaded ports, attacked fleets, and won the decisive 1805 Battle of Derna” in the First Barbary War.
Throughout the seventeenth century, indentured servants made up 80 percent of Europeans arriving in Virginia and Maryland; between 1700 and 1775, they made up 90 percent. Thus we can say that in the seventeenth century white indentured servants were the major labor force. Even as late as 1649, blacks, numbering three hundred, made up only 2 percent of Virginia’s population of fifteen thousand.
In ancient Rome, individual Romans might be reduced to slavery as punishment for transgressions, but ordinarily slaves were non-Romans captured in battle or acquired in trade. Similarly, in a later era, it was common for the Ottoman Empire to enslave Europeans or Africans … or for people in Asia to enslave both non-Asians and Asians belonging to a different race or class. ... Except for debt-bondage or bondage as punishment, the process of enslavement has generally been one of enslaving outsiders of one sort or another, whether by race, religion, nationality, or other characteristics. For centuries in Europe, it was considered legitimate for the Christians of Western Europe to enslave “pagans” from the Balkans or Eastern Europe. (Thomas Sowell)
Hannah-Jones and the other creators of The 1619 Project fail to acknowledge this long history of commemorating 1619. Instead they post as groundbreakers who are revealing hitherto unknown history—now that “it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.” As we have seen, that “finally” is not accurate—and neither is “truthfully.” There are profound historical errors at the heart of The 1619 Project … It is clear that the history recounted by The 1619 Project is riddled with mistakes of fact, small and large.
Before Columbus’s first voyage, Africa probably had more slaves than any other continent. “There was slavery in Africa, [J. Saunders] Redding wrote, “long before the coming of the white man.” It was especially prevalent along the west coast of Africa, “an area that teemed with barbaric life,” where “millions of people” were “divided into hundreds of small, independent tribes. Proximity led to quarrels on the faintest pretext; quarrels led to war. Strong, victorious tribes, when they did not kill, took captives and made them slaves.”
Popular accounts of slavery, though detailed in their descriptions of the voyage and the travails of slaves on American plantations, strongly imply that white slave traders kidnapped Africans as they were enjoying being “free” with “families, and farms, and lives, and dreams,” as Hannah-Jones puts it. Rather than admitting the truth about a trade in which African peoples were deeply involved, she speaks generally of “people stolen from western and central Africa” and “kidnapped from their homes” and claims, of the 1619 arrivals in particular, that the Portuguese slave ship “had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola.” While it is literally true that the Portuguese slave ship had “forcibly taken” them from Africa—in the sense that they were being transported against their will—it is not true, as Hannah-Jones cleverly insinuates, that they were “taken” by the Portuguese sailors in the sense of being “kidnapped from their homes” and reduced to slavery by those European men. This fudging of the facts allows Hannah-Jones to sidestep the issue of African agency in the human trafficking.
The issue [of black slave owners] has been discussed very little—as [Calvin Dill] Wilson guessed, for “psychological” reasons. And also for political reasons. Attention on black slave owners would complicate the kind of narrative that The 1619 Project advances, which presents blacks and whites as monolithic groups of victims and exploiters, respectively. One rarely, if ever, finds mention of black slave owners in textbooks and curricula.
Thomas Jefferson may not have freed his slaves in the manner and time frame his critics demand centuries later, but his words helped set in motion a new philosophy that had worldwide repercussions. As Ira Berlin has noted, “Prior to the American Revolution and its idea of universal equality, there were few [abolitionist] movements to contemplate, let alone to join.” When blacks filed suits for freedom—as they did, for example, in Connecticut in 1779—they used the language of the Declaration of Independence.”
In the mid-1820s, colonization was supported by the Manumission Society and was viewed as a preventative for the moral degradation that it was thought would emerge as a result of an increasingly discriminatory society. According to historian Leslie Harris, some believed that colonization would provide opportunities for blacks to “prove their equality with whites by Christianizing native Africans and building up the economic infrastructure in Africa. Once blacks in Africa demonstrated their true abilities, whites in America would realize that slavery and racism were wrong and would welcome blacks in America. Other supporters of colonization argued that the possibility of sending freed blacks to Africa would increase voluntary emancipation in the southern states and ultimately end slavery.”
It is a measure of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s utter lack of historical perspective that in her telling both Jefferson and Lincoln are simply evil white men representing a racist America. Her “Idea of America” essay goes from discrediting the Apostle of Liberty to discrediting the Great Emancipator. In The 1619 Project, the broad brushstrokes used to paint a picture of Jefferson and “most of the founders” as racists are applied to “white Americans” generally, as history merges with dubious psychological theorizing.
Far from enshrining racism in America, the Dred Scott decision solidified and energized opposition to slavery—so much so that we had a civil war and ended it. Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist who had escaped from slavery, was actually “thrilled” with the Dred Scott decision because it won people over to the abolitionist cause. It also inspired Illinois Senate candidate Abraham Lincoln to change his outlook: he went from regarding the Supreme Court as “the nation’s supreme authority” to putting his “faith in natural law” as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
CONTINUED IN COMMENTS
The 1619 Project was published by the New York Times as groundbreaking new history. In reality, it has no history that wasn’t previously known. It is so riddled with errors, anyone with a discerning eye can see it is merely the newest wrapping of Marxist dogma. It has to destroy America’s founding principles so it can justify erasing America and starting over as a socialist dictatorship. This is the goal of the modern Left. It reduces all people to race: race determines your personality and destiny. All black people are identical. All white people are identical. This is the most insulting idea being pushed today to me; I can’t believe it’s given credibility. It’s an insult to every slave and abolitionist who resisted and changed things.
The book covers egregious historical inaccuracies in the Project, such as
• The arrival of the slave ship in 1619 is newly discovered history.
• Slavery never existed outside the U.S. in all of history.
• Slaves were kidnapped by whites from Africa.
• Jefferson’s anti-slavery statements prove he was pro-slavery.
• Jefferson fathered children with a slave, raping her. (This has been disproven yet persists.)
• Lincoln really wasn’t interested in ending slavery.
• The U.S. economy is based on slavery, then and now.
• All whites are racist; all blacks are victims.
There are some copyediting errors. Ms. Grabar sure loves dashes.
==============================
Debunking the 1619 Project by Mary Grabar
The real problem with The 1619 Project is not that it is in conflict with “our cherished mythologies.” It’s that, as this book will lay out in detail, The Project is in conflict with the historical facts and the actual truth about America—which, yes, we do cherish, if we have any gratitude for our lives of unexampled freedom and prosperity, and any hope to see those blessings continue into the future. Such concerns would seem to be far from the minds of The 1619 Project’s creators and promoters, judging by their continuing willingness to foment shame and hatred for America, racial division and hostility, and even violence—as copious evidence, beginning with Nikole Hannah-Jones’s unapologetic celebration of the “1619 riots,” amply demonstrates. The 1619 Project is a mortal danger to the American experiment in self-government. If we want to keep the republic, then the task at hand—for those Americans who still share that hope, and that gratitude—is to face and defeat the threat. We must understand The 1619 Project: its divisive aims and its dishonest methods, its sweeping historical misjudgments and its blatant errors of fact. And we must drive its lies and its poisonous race-baiting our of our public institutions, beginning with the official curricula of our schools.
The Project has a didactic feel. After all, as the introductory material proudly informs the reader, it was to be shipped to schools upon launch. The introduction is hardly inviting to the sophisticated reader. From the outset, it is insinuated that the skeptic who does not accept the history-shattering claims will fail the implied litmus test of compassion for slaves and their descendants. For a project that is intended to overturn over two hundreds years of traditional history, it has little of the scaffolding of scholarship. The essays are not in the Montaignian tradition of assaying topics and inviting readers to consider a new perspective.
With the breakdown of the disciplines under Common Core, the lines between fiction and nonfiction have been blurred. Similarly, under Common Core, interpretations matter more than facts, personal stories more than established history, and acceptance of diversity more than reason and logic. To such readers, the inclusion of poems written to order in a document that purports to be making a serious case for correcting errors in our understanding of history may not seem too odd. Serious historians, though, did find The 1619 Project odd—and, as we shall see in chapters 3-8 below, very wrong, not just in its emphases, but in its facts.
In spite of her pretensions of consideration for colleagues, Hannah-Jones had failed to acknowledge the three invitations sent to her by the National Association of Scholars to participate in its events. Genuine academic collegiality requires the willingness both to engage in discussion using evidence and logic and to subject one’s work to peer review. Hannah-Jones instead follows a pattern of behavior familiar to conservative professors on college campuses. She calls those with different views “crazy,” ignores the critiques of experts in the field, and demands that her black critics remain silent. Instead of answering her critics in collegial discussions, Hannah-Jones chose to smear them in a very active Twitter campaign that featured links to race-baiting articles and her own pungent and tendentious comments.
The focus on micro-histories—the details of the lives of individuals or small communities—led to a loss of the big picture and historical context. The injustices suffered by individuals could be blamed on oppressors without any investigation of the larger forces at work at that point in time. Lost in the focus on victims was an understanding of the momentous changes that would lead to the condemnation and remediation of the very injustices against which the historians were purportedly taking a stand.
The adversarial approach to history has come to prevail. Those historians who don’t pursue identity politics are now fighting a rearguard action from the margins to which they have been relegated by the leftists now holding power. The historian who attempts to recreate [sic] the past with understanding—that is, to get beyond her present view, rather than to see the past through “woke” moral standards—is maligned as “Old Guard,” or worse. Historical figures are no longer understood—they are either valorized or demonized.
The jaw-dropping allegation that the Revolution was fought in defense of slavery has been widely criticized by some of the most prominent historians in this field—including by left-leaning scholars, and even by one expert who served as a consultant on The 1619 Project and whose pre-publication warnings against printing the false claim were ignored. As a result, the Times has had to backpedal—to a certain extent. Hannah-Jones and her editor “adjusted” their original claim by adding two words. Thus the online version of Hannah-Jones’s inaugural essay now makes the scaled-back allegation that “one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”
In 1921, African American historian Benjamin Brawley offered a survey of the colonists’ efforts to end or curb the slave trade. The American colonies, for a variety of reasons, had passed laws against the slave trade, only to have them nullified by the British government. These attempts took place in the context of the hardening of slavery in the North American colonies, as the status of black laborers had evolved from that of the African captives purchased from Africans, captured from a Portuguese slave ship, brought to Virginia on the White Lion, and sold—as best we can tell—into some form of indentured servitude. The condition of race-based and life-long chattel slavery passed down from mother to child developed in a historical process of which The 1619 Project creators seem to be ignorant—even willfully ignorant.
Contrary to Hannah-Jones’s contention that a primary reason for America’s deciding for independence was to protect slavery from a Britain that was “deeply conflicted” over the slave trade, the truth is the opposite: anti-slavery opinion and efforts by the American colonists in the 1760s and 1770s contributed significantly to the formation of the movement to end the slave trade in London—a movement that did not formally begin there until 1787.
Was Jefferson an “immediatist abolitionist”? Did he call for abolition immediately, regardless of consequences? No. And, as we shall see, his reasons included concern for the welfare of the slaves—given the inescapable realities of the time. In many ways, Jefferson was a radical for his time. But he was also a pragmatist and understood that consequences of extreme actions by men in positions of leadership could have devastating effects. That may not satisfy the creator of The 1619 Project. But she and the other contributors have strayed far from historical scholarship done by historians of the past, including pathbreaking black historians. They well understood the suffering of their forebears. But they also understood the realities of the time, the context in which this nation was formed—and America’s unique promise. No doubt, they would have been stunned to hear the statement that slavery in America was “unlike anything that had existed in the world before.”
Though the characteristics of slavery that Hannah-Jones lists are the same as those Davis lists, her description is glaringly wrong in one critical particular. When she claims that the slaves at Monticello “struggled under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before,” she is making an error of such magnitude that only a profound ignorance of history can excuse it. ... In reality, chattel slavery has existed across the world and throughout history, at one end of a continuum of a wide variety of extreme forms of servitude, some of them … more oppressive and brutal than slavery in North America, and far beyond what the slaves at Monticello experienced. Hannah-Jones’s claim flies in the face of abundant evidence from thousands of years of human history. Her contention that chattel slavery in America was unique in the history of the world is simply, demonstrably false.
Church laws against abuse of slaves eventually evolved into a movement to abolish slavery itself among Quakers, Evangelicals, and Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century. The abolition of slavery was truly a radical idea in human history. Today, we rightly recognize slavery itself as a crime against humanity, deserving of our absolute condemnation in all its forms. But that understanding should not blind us to the undeniable fact that slavery was accompanied by more gruesome conditions in some places and times than in others—and that the conditions in the American South in general, and at Jefferson’s Monticello in particular, were far from the most “brutal” in history. Hannah-Jones attempts no balanced, fair-minded judgment on this issue. And her eagerness to define America by “a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before” leads her into innumerable historical misjudgments and errors of fact.
Overall, the slaves at Monticello enjoyed a greater amount of freedom than most slaves in Virginia, and a number of them were literate. Hannah-Jones’s claim is wildly overblown. Even from a strictly economic perspective, it made no sense to work slaves “to death.” In fact, as prices for slaves rose, masters in the American South kept slaves from doing the most dangerous jobs if cheap labor from Irish or German immigrants could be found to replace them. Thus, in he antebellum South, Irish immigrants were employed in jobs “considered too hazardous even for slaves,” such as coal-mining and building canals and railroads.
There was the enslavement of white Europeans and Americans by Muslims in North Africa, a topic which garners disbelief these days, as Bruce Bawer related in an August 1, 2020, article, written shortly after a statute of Miguel de Cervantes, the great Spanish writer who was enslaved for five years in Algiers, was defaced in San Francisco. Bawer’s post on Facebook about the fact that over one million whites had been sold into slavery in Africa from the 1400s to the 1800s was met with incredulity or dismissal. These slaves were abandoned by the European powers until the eighteenth century, when they began making payments to North African powers to protect their cirizens. But after declaring independence the United States refused to pay such tribute, and ultimately Thomas Jefferson as president sent the Marines to North Africa, where “under the command of William Eaton, U.S. Consul in Tripoli, they blockaded ports, attacked fleets, and won the decisive 1805 Battle of Derna” in the First Barbary War.
Throughout the seventeenth century, indentured servants made up 80 percent of Europeans arriving in Virginia and Maryland; between 1700 and 1775, they made up 90 percent. Thus we can say that in the seventeenth century white indentured servants were the major labor force. Even as late as 1649, blacks, numbering three hundred, made up only 2 percent of Virginia’s population of fifteen thousand.
In ancient Rome, individual Romans might be reduced to slavery as punishment for transgressions, but ordinarily slaves were non-Romans captured in battle or acquired in trade. Similarly, in a later era, it was common for the Ottoman Empire to enslave Europeans or Africans … or for people in Asia to enslave both non-Asians and Asians belonging to a different race or class. ... Except for debt-bondage or bondage as punishment, the process of enslavement has generally been one of enslaving outsiders of one sort or another, whether by race, religion, nationality, or other characteristics. For centuries in Europe, it was considered legitimate for the Christians of Western Europe to enslave “pagans” from the Balkans or Eastern Europe. (Thomas Sowell)
Hannah-Jones and the other creators of The 1619 Project fail to acknowledge this long history of commemorating 1619. Instead they post as groundbreakers who are revealing hitherto unknown history—now that “it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.” As we have seen, that “finally” is not accurate—and neither is “truthfully.” There are profound historical errors at the heart of The 1619 Project … It is clear that the history recounted by The 1619 Project is riddled with mistakes of fact, small and large.
Before Columbus’s first voyage, Africa probably had more slaves than any other continent. “There was slavery in Africa, [J. Saunders] Redding wrote, “long before the coming of the white man.” It was especially prevalent along the west coast of Africa, “an area that teemed with barbaric life,” where “millions of people” were “divided into hundreds of small, independent tribes. Proximity led to quarrels on the faintest pretext; quarrels led to war. Strong, victorious tribes, when they did not kill, took captives and made them slaves.”
Popular accounts of slavery, though detailed in their descriptions of the voyage and the travails of slaves on American plantations, strongly imply that white slave traders kidnapped Africans as they were enjoying being “free” with “families, and farms, and lives, and dreams,” as Hannah-Jones puts it. Rather than admitting the truth about a trade in which African peoples were deeply involved, she speaks generally of “people stolen from western and central Africa” and “kidnapped from their homes” and claims, of the 1619 arrivals in particular, that the Portuguese slave ship “had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola.” While it is literally true that the Portuguese slave ship had “forcibly taken” them from Africa—in the sense that they were being transported against their will—it is not true, as Hannah-Jones cleverly insinuates, that they were “taken” by the Portuguese sailors in the sense of being “kidnapped from their homes” and reduced to slavery by those European men. This fudging of the facts allows Hannah-Jones to sidestep the issue of African agency in the human trafficking.
The issue [of black slave owners] has been discussed very little—as [Calvin Dill] Wilson guessed, for “psychological” reasons. And also for political reasons. Attention on black slave owners would complicate the kind of narrative that The 1619 Project advances, which presents blacks and whites as monolithic groups of victims and exploiters, respectively. One rarely, if ever, finds mention of black slave owners in textbooks and curricula.
Thomas Jefferson may not have freed his slaves in the manner and time frame his critics demand centuries later, but his words helped set in motion a new philosophy that had worldwide repercussions. As Ira Berlin has noted, “Prior to the American Revolution and its idea of universal equality, there were few [abolitionist] movements to contemplate, let alone to join.” When blacks filed suits for freedom—as they did, for example, in Connecticut in 1779—they used the language of the Declaration of Independence.”
In the mid-1820s, colonization was supported by the Manumission Society and was viewed as a preventative for the moral degradation that it was thought would emerge as a result of an increasingly discriminatory society. According to historian Leslie Harris, some believed that colonization would provide opportunities for blacks to “prove their equality with whites by Christianizing native Africans and building up the economic infrastructure in Africa. Once blacks in Africa demonstrated their true abilities, whites in America would realize that slavery and racism were wrong and would welcome blacks in America. Other supporters of colonization argued that the possibility of sending freed blacks to Africa would increase voluntary emancipation in the southern states and ultimately end slavery.”
It is a measure of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s utter lack of historical perspective that in her telling both Jefferson and Lincoln are simply evil white men representing a racist America. Her “Idea of America” essay goes from discrediting the Apostle of Liberty to discrediting the Great Emancipator. In The 1619 Project, the broad brushstrokes used to paint a picture of Jefferson and “most of the founders” as racists are applied to “white Americans” generally, as history merges with dubious psychological theorizing.
Far from enshrining racism in America, the Dred Scott decision solidified and energized opposition to slavery—so much so that we had a civil war and ended it. Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist who had escaped from slavery, was actually “thrilled” with the Dred Scott decision because it won people over to the abolitionist cause. It also inspired Illinois Senate candidate Abraham Lincoln to change his outlook: he went from regarding the Supreme Court as “the nation’s supreme authority” to putting his “faith in natural law” as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
CONTINUED IN COMMENTS
January 29, 2022
If I did a shot every the time "woke" appears in this book, I'd be dead from alcohol poisoning.
This book is an unserious and bad faith attack that cares more about pandering to people already inclined to disagree with The 1619 Project rather than engage with the substance of this book.
If you're looking for such an attack, just watch Tucker Carlson.
This book is a complete waste of time.
DNF
This book is an unserious and bad faith attack that cares more about pandering to people already inclined to disagree with The 1619 Project rather than engage with the substance of this book.
If you're looking for such an attack, just watch Tucker Carlson.
This book is a complete waste of time.
DNF
October 26, 2022
The majority is an attack on the authors of the 1619 project rather than a refutation of the content of the 1619 project. Dozens of pages devoted to the existence of different forms of slavery around the world. A lot of effort was spent defending Thomas Jefferson and boiled-down it amounted to "well maybe one of his sons, uncles, or other family members raped Sally Hemmings and were the fathers of her children, not him!"
At points it seemed like the author just completely missed the point of the 1619 Project, but at other points it would have been impossible for her to not be intentionally misrepresenting it.
At points it seemed like the author just completely missed the point of the 1619 Project, but at other points it would have been impossible for her to not be intentionally misrepresenting it.
October 8, 2021
I first heard of the 1619 project by way of Glenn Loury's and John McWhorter's podcast. In recent years, there's been a desire to speak more on America's messy history. No argument there but those of us who are concerned with being morally and intellectually honest would agree that we would have show the whole face, warts and all. When Nicole Hannah-Jones, the person behind the 1619 project explicitly stated that her work denied (yes, DENIED) objectivity, one would think that the project wouldn't be so eagerly accepted, especially with the view that the true founding of the US was in 1619 as a Slavocracy. But it was, and it apparently is widely (and disturbingly) popular.
The project ran afoul of historians, both progressive (whom NHJ ignored) and conservative, who criticized the selective history that was used to create it. The author points out aspects of the 1619 project used to stir up sympathy and outrage through selective history and deliberate misinterpretation and reexamines them in exquisite detail. Historical figures and the context of their lives as well as the social/legalistic pursuits they followed and did not (in context of the limits of the realities of their era) are highlighted. The amount of information packaged in the book is great but it makes for slow reading if one is looking to assimilate the information. I would recommending reading Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals alongside this one as it provides even more historical context. Would also recommend for those who are fans of Ibram X Kendi's 'work' to provide some perspective.
A important read for people to consider. No doubt it is necessary to discuss and to be knowledgeable of historical wrongs, but for a work to be accepted as academia without passing rigors of scholarship, allowing for a wholesome historical view, should be cause for worry, as distorted history fuels outrage and grievance which empowers the fanatic.
The project ran afoul of historians, both progressive (whom NHJ ignored) and conservative, who criticized the selective history that was used to create it. The author points out aspects of the 1619 project used to stir up sympathy and outrage through selective history and deliberate misinterpretation and reexamines them in exquisite detail. Historical figures and the context of their lives as well as the social/legalistic pursuits they followed and did not (in context of the limits of the realities of their era) are highlighted. The amount of information packaged in the book is great but it makes for slow reading if one is looking to assimilate the information. I would recommending reading Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals alongside this one as it provides even more historical context. Would also recommend for those who are fans of Ibram X Kendi's 'work' to provide some perspective.
A important read for people to consider. No doubt it is necessary to discuss and to be knowledgeable of historical wrongs, but for a work to be accepted as academia without passing rigors of scholarship, allowing for a wholesome historical view, should be cause for worry, as distorted history fuels outrage and grievance which empowers the fanatic.
March 30, 2022
2.0/ In my efforts to understand all facets of the 1619 Project, I invested almost as much time in its “debunking” as I did the original narrative. I expected a diametric perspective. It is common for public figures or hot topics to generate polar reviews independent of the quality of the text, so no surprises there. Here is a brief summary of what I found by chapter/topic. My goal is not a comprehensive debunking of the debunking, just addressing topics that stood out as I read. Please forgive me if I mix content between chapters:
I listened to the audiobook version. Whether intended or not, the reader starts the book with 9/10 spite. She softens when reminiscing about 4th of July celebrations, apple pie, and rides on fire trucks. Luckily, in the middle of the book the reader briefly expands her tonal bandwidth a bit. Although not read by the author, the tone creates undeniable bias and rapid listener fatigue. The first and last several chapters sound like the SNL Church Lady condemning Satan.
Ch. 1: The 1619 Riots - Dr. Grabar is very concerned about the Summer 2020 BLM protests. She doesn’t like any of the major antiracism texts. She feels Whites and only Whites are portrayed as the root of all evil in this movement, and guilty of the “original sin” of slavery. The premise - that 1619 marked the beginning of our country’s anti-black racism - made 2020 “rioters, in a Taliban-like fury, [tear] down and [deface] any and all traditional representations of American history.” [Tense altered]. She acknowledges the George Floyd and other police killings were partly to blame. As a result, President Trump appointed the “1776 Commission to create a patriotic and more accurate curriculum to serve as a corrective of the America-bashing 1619 Project…”. She seems frustrated the 1776 Commission was not an effective countermeasure to the 1619 Project.
Ch. 2: The Project is Launched - Here the pettiness begins. We hear about size of the title/text in the article and lack of credentials of the 1619 Project authors. She shames journalists (like 1619 Project editor Hannah-Jones) who write authoritatively about history. Of note, Dr. Grabar has a Ph.D in English, not History, and her major writings are authoritative condemnations of books about history. She spends a lot of time on Hannah-Jones’s hair color, skin products, clothes, jewelry, and speaking fees. She is upset the Project had an educational agenda they actively promoted. The earliest critics of the Project were ironically leftist historian critics, we are told, but no specifics were given except confirming the errors were egregious. A memorable fact check focused on the allegation the White House and Capitol were built by slaves. She felt this was unfair because the very last parts of the project (Capitol dome completed in 1866) occurred after slavery was abolished in Washington DC in 1862, so those workers were technically free. Despite the White House historical archives firmly embracing the 70 years of slave labor on the project, Dr. Grabar clings to small details like this.
Ch. 3: Cancelling Jefferson - This section, and the later section about Lincoln, constitutes the greatest contributions to the topic matter in the 1619 Project (in my humble opinion). Dr. Grabar has a lot of national pride and takes great offense to any slights against the 4th of July, or any of the Presidents on Mt. Rushmore (+/- Roosevelt). She doesn’t like any suggestion that Jefferson was a hypocrite or anything other than the divinely inspired author of the Declaration of Independence. A few quotes summarize her position:
“Because Jefferson represents that [democratic] experiment as no other founder does, it is no wonder that the ire of the mob that has been taught to hate America is directed at him in particular - … at his sins (both real and imaginary), at his supposed ‘hypocrisy’”.
“Never mind that Jefferson’s declaration that all men are created equal - however he might have fallen short of it-has resounded through history as the battle cry for the liberation of the oppressed.”
I thought she espoused Jefferson’s “hypocrisy” in the second quote, but apparently she feels any criticisms are inappropriate. You would think a slave holder writing about “all men created equal” would imply an undeniable conflict at minimum, but no. She later takes an Orwellian tack in line with “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” (Animal Farm) Getting back to Jefferson, she spends most of the chapter defending against all post-WWII suggestions that Jefferson had children with Sally Flemming (his slave) or wasn’t a true abolitionist. Most of this is chapter focuses on other authors. Despite citing DNA evidence supporting Jefferson’s likely paternity, she blames his brother. The end result of countless historical criticisms after WWII is a “revisionist false history”. I am not sure why she digs herself a hole fighting a large body of historical study when her premise was to debunk the 1619 Project specifically. Doing so authenticates the Project suppositions and undermines her own.
As I mentioned, this section did demonstrate an important point equally applicable to Lincoln: both men must be judged within the time they lived and the political turmoil in which they were pivotal leaders. At minimum, Jefferson was born into Virginia aristocracy, and he was probably considered very liberal by his constituents. He included several quotes against slavery or its expansion in the Constitution that were subsequently stricken by Southern delegates. He understood that slavery and the subsequent issue of free Blacks was a major destabilizer to the country he fought hard to build and maintain. However, he had to concede many issues as part of partisan politics, and too much leverage probably would have removed him from public office or thrown the country into anarchy. He represented the people and commerce of Virginia and South Carolina after all. It is true he only freed a few slaves. Somehow Washington got a pass from 1619 Project scorn despite being a slave holder - perhaps because he released his slaves when he died. Madison, the greatest contributor to the Constitution (also a slave holder) was similarly exempt. Ten of the first twelve presidents had slaves. At the time, slave states carried immense political clout, and their wealthy political leaders were born into this culture. Therefore, I agree with Hannah-Jones that these men should be judged for this fact, but also agree with Grabar that they were not “only” slavers. All these men must be judged for the totality of their words and actions, not their birth stain of “slaver”. On many levels Jefferson personifies the 1619 Project’s premise: proponent of justice and injustice, equity and inequity.
Chs. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8: Slavery. She spends a lot of time discussing Virginia’s attempts to limit slave trading (before the invention of the cotton gin and the geometric increases in cotton production that became a major impetus for slavery expansion). She disputes the phrase that American slavery was “unlike anything that had existed in the world before.” She discusses centuries of chattel slavery all over the world throughout time and Spanish slavery in the Americas long before 1619. Perhaps Hannah-Jones’s emphasis was referring to the trans-Atlantic slave trade (enormous distance as opposed to conquered territories) in addition to sheer number of slaves (10 million) acquired from Africa. In any case, the bulk of this section represents minor criticisms in the larger narrative. She quibbles that Hannah-Jones said 20-30 slaves were on the original slave ship when others say “20 and odd”. She criticizes that H-J implied she was the first to realize 1619 was important when celebrations went on for centuries, and whether the Dutch were privateers (government sponsored pirates of other nation’s vessels) or simple pirates. She criticizes the original statements that the Revolutionary War was fought in defense of slavery (later modified) or 1619 was the true birth year of the country (later modified). Apparently the modifications in later drafts were insufficient. She later notes how some Blacks had slaves (very rare) so Whites cannot receive all the blame. Similarly, Africans imprisoned their own people for sale, so Whites must share some of the responsibility.
Ch. 9: Colonization. She lends little new information on the topic.
Ch. 10: Taking Down Lincoln - Similar issues to Jefferson. Lincoln had a long road to the presidency living in a border state on the cusp of the Civil War. Like Jefferson, he had to adapt his politics to the volatility of the day. I agree with Grabar that his role in politics must be considered while the country was on the verge of war.
She criticizes H-J for not including the Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech (1858). While the speech demonstrated amazing foresight, leadership, and candor, it likely cost him the U.S. Senate seat. I agree the speech is worth thorough review. I am a bit surprised to see conservative writers celebrating a position considered hyper-liberal at the time.
While addressing the Dred Scott decision, she defends Chief Justice Roger Taney’s words that “[all blacks] might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery” as not being his opinion, and he has been misrepresented for 160 years. His goal apparently was to energize opposition to slavery. Considering the decision ruled all limits on slavery unconstitutional, this suggests remarkable confirmation bias. Confusion remains as other scholars scold him for imposing a judicial solution to a political problem and consider the case the worst decision (and majority opinion) in Supreme Court history.
Ch. 11: Choosing Resentment - or Freedom? She feels the 1619 Project used the 400th anniversary to advance political grievances. She notes the African slavers tepid responses to the anniversary or discussions about compensation for past deeds. She feels the 1619 Project divides this country by race. Interestingly, she goes out of her way to celebrate Frederick Douglass (implying today’s restraints are nothing like true slavery). She encourages students to understand slavery in its historical context.
In summary, this book was a waste of time. I rated the book 2/5 because, at best, Dr. Grabar nibbles at the fringes of the 1619 Project arguments. She goes off on tangents and “but what about” histories that are interesting on their own, but do nothing to debunk the Project premises. Her constant attacks on credentials remain mind boggling considering her Ph.D is in English, not History. I agree with her that Jefferson and Lincoln must be seen as politicians in turbulently unstable times, and their positions were not static. We must examine the totality of their work, not dismiss them because of their birth sin. I do not agree with Dr. Grabar that the Project is trying to replace or destroy the 4th of July holiday - it was obviously the founding of an independent union. But this doesn’t undermine the Project’s premise that Black subjugation to Whites began in 1619, and its overtones are the continuous root of racism today. I also do not agree the Project’s goals were to condemn all Whites throughout history. I encourage Dr. Grabar to focus her energy on positive content instead of attacking other texts. I couldn’t help but wonder why she condemns modern anti racists while emphasizing Jefferson the Abolitionist, Lincoln the Emancipator, or Douglass the patron saint of racial protest, social justice reform and modern antiracism.
To pull from my previous review of McWhorter’s “Woke Racism”: I think Kendi got it right when he noted “the singular racial history of the US is therefore a dual racial history of two opposing forces: historical steps toward equity and justice and historical steps toward inequity and injustice.” (1619 Project). To me this justifies the tug of war between the 1619 Project and 1776 Commission (or “patriotic” history). History requires us, at minimum, to atone for the past of our nation, and only resolute reflection will pay homage to the Americans that lived before us. In this regard, I feel reading the “Debunking” had value. However, in truth, any moderate reader who reads beyond the 1619 sources would have come to the same conclusion with no enlightenment from this book. I am hopeful there is a more authoritative source as this writing was more in line with propaganda journalism than academic fervor. In fairness, she would say the same about the 1619 Project.
I listened to the audiobook version. Whether intended or not, the reader starts the book with 9/10 spite. She softens when reminiscing about 4th of July celebrations, apple pie, and rides on fire trucks. Luckily, in the middle of the book the reader briefly expands her tonal bandwidth a bit. Although not read by the author, the tone creates undeniable bias and rapid listener fatigue. The first and last several chapters sound like the SNL Church Lady condemning Satan.
Ch. 1: The 1619 Riots - Dr. Grabar is very concerned about the Summer 2020 BLM protests. She doesn’t like any of the major antiracism texts. She feels Whites and only Whites are portrayed as the root of all evil in this movement, and guilty of the “original sin” of slavery. The premise - that 1619 marked the beginning of our country’s anti-black racism - made 2020 “rioters, in a Taliban-like fury, [tear] down and [deface] any and all traditional representations of American history.” [Tense altered]. She acknowledges the George Floyd and other police killings were partly to blame. As a result, President Trump appointed the “1776 Commission to create a patriotic and more accurate curriculum to serve as a corrective of the America-bashing 1619 Project…”. She seems frustrated the 1776 Commission was not an effective countermeasure to the 1619 Project.
Ch. 2: The Project is Launched - Here the pettiness begins. We hear about size of the title/text in the article and lack of credentials of the 1619 Project authors. She shames journalists (like 1619 Project editor Hannah-Jones) who write authoritatively about history. Of note, Dr. Grabar has a Ph.D in English, not History, and her major writings are authoritative condemnations of books about history. She spends a lot of time on Hannah-Jones’s hair color, skin products, clothes, jewelry, and speaking fees. She is upset the Project had an educational agenda they actively promoted. The earliest critics of the Project were ironically leftist historian critics, we are told, but no specifics were given except confirming the errors were egregious. A memorable fact check focused on the allegation the White House and Capitol were built by slaves. She felt this was unfair because the very last parts of the project (Capitol dome completed in 1866) occurred after slavery was abolished in Washington DC in 1862, so those workers were technically free. Despite the White House historical archives firmly embracing the 70 years of slave labor on the project, Dr. Grabar clings to small details like this.
Ch. 3: Cancelling Jefferson - This section, and the later section about Lincoln, constitutes the greatest contributions to the topic matter in the 1619 Project (in my humble opinion). Dr. Grabar has a lot of national pride and takes great offense to any slights against the 4th of July, or any of the Presidents on Mt. Rushmore (+/- Roosevelt). She doesn’t like any suggestion that Jefferson was a hypocrite or anything other than the divinely inspired author of the Declaration of Independence. A few quotes summarize her position:
“Because Jefferson represents that [democratic] experiment as no other founder does, it is no wonder that the ire of the mob that has been taught to hate America is directed at him in particular - … at his sins (both real and imaginary), at his supposed ‘hypocrisy’”.
“Never mind that Jefferson’s declaration that all men are created equal - however he might have fallen short of it-has resounded through history as the battle cry for the liberation of the oppressed.”
I thought she espoused Jefferson’s “hypocrisy” in the second quote, but apparently she feels any criticisms are inappropriate. You would think a slave holder writing about “all men created equal” would imply an undeniable conflict at minimum, but no. She later takes an Orwellian tack in line with “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” (Animal Farm) Getting back to Jefferson, she spends most of the chapter defending against all post-WWII suggestions that Jefferson had children with Sally Flemming (his slave) or wasn’t a true abolitionist. Most of this is chapter focuses on other authors. Despite citing DNA evidence supporting Jefferson’s likely paternity, she blames his brother. The end result of countless historical criticisms after WWII is a “revisionist false history”. I am not sure why she digs herself a hole fighting a large body of historical study when her premise was to debunk the 1619 Project specifically. Doing so authenticates the Project suppositions and undermines her own.
As I mentioned, this section did demonstrate an important point equally applicable to Lincoln: both men must be judged within the time they lived and the political turmoil in which they were pivotal leaders. At minimum, Jefferson was born into Virginia aristocracy, and he was probably considered very liberal by his constituents. He included several quotes against slavery or its expansion in the Constitution that were subsequently stricken by Southern delegates. He understood that slavery and the subsequent issue of free Blacks was a major destabilizer to the country he fought hard to build and maintain. However, he had to concede many issues as part of partisan politics, and too much leverage probably would have removed him from public office or thrown the country into anarchy. He represented the people and commerce of Virginia and South Carolina after all. It is true he only freed a few slaves. Somehow Washington got a pass from 1619 Project scorn despite being a slave holder - perhaps because he released his slaves when he died. Madison, the greatest contributor to the Constitution (also a slave holder) was similarly exempt. Ten of the first twelve presidents had slaves. At the time, slave states carried immense political clout, and their wealthy political leaders were born into this culture. Therefore, I agree with Hannah-Jones that these men should be judged for this fact, but also agree with Grabar that they were not “only” slavers. All these men must be judged for the totality of their words and actions, not their birth stain of “slaver”. On many levels Jefferson personifies the 1619 Project’s premise: proponent of justice and injustice, equity and inequity.
Chs. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8: Slavery. She spends a lot of time discussing Virginia’s attempts to limit slave trading (before the invention of the cotton gin and the geometric increases in cotton production that became a major impetus for slavery expansion). She disputes the phrase that American slavery was “unlike anything that had existed in the world before.” She discusses centuries of chattel slavery all over the world throughout time and Spanish slavery in the Americas long before 1619. Perhaps Hannah-Jones’s emphasis was referring to the trans-Atlantic slave trade (enormous distance as opposed to conquered territories) in addition to sheer number of slaves (10 million) acquired from Africa. In any case, the bulk of this section represents minor criticisms in the larger narrative. She quibbles that Hannah-Jones said 20-30 slaves were on the original slave ship when others say “20 and odd”. She criticizes that H-J implied she was the first to realize 1619 was important when celebrations went on for centuries, and whether the Dutch were privateers (government sponsored pirates of other nation’s vessels) or simple pirates. She criticizes the original statements that the Revolutionary War was fought in defense of slavery (later modified) or 1619 was the true birth year of the country (later modified). Apparently the modifications in later drafts were insufficient. She later notes how some Blacks had slaves (very rare) so Whites cannot receive all the blame. Similarly, Africans imprisoned their own people for sale, so Whites must share some of the responsibility.
Ch. 9: Colonization. She lends little new information on the topic.
Ch. 10: Taking Down Lincoln - Similar issues to Jefferson. Lincoln had a long road to the presidency living in a border state on the cusp of the Civil War. Like Jefferson, he had to adapt his politics to the volatility of the day. I agree with Grabar that his role in politics must be considered while the country was on the verge of war.
She criticizes H-J for not including the Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech (1858). While the speech demonstrated amazing foresight, leadership, and candor, it likely cost him the U.S. Senate seat. I agree the speech is worth thorough review. I am a bit surprised to see conservative writers celebrating a position considered hyper-liberal at the time.
While addressing the Dred Scott decision, she defends Chief Justice Roger Taney’s words that “[all blacks] might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery” as not being his opinion, and he has been misrepresented for 160 years. His goal apparently was to energize opposition to slavery. Considering the decision ruled all limits on slavery unconstitutional, this suggests remarkable confirmation bias. Confusion remains as other scholars scold him for imposing a judicial solution to a political problem and consider the case the worst decision (and majority opinion) in Supreme Court history.
Ch. 11: Choosing Resentment - or Freedom? She feels the 1619 Project used the 400th anniversary to advance political grievances. She notes the African slavers tepid responses to the anniversary or discussions about compensation for past deeds. She feels the 1619 Project divides this country by race. Interestingly, she goes out of her way to celebrate Frederick Douglass (implying today’s restraints are nothing like true slavery). She encourages students to understand slavery in its historical context.
In summary, this book was a waste of time. I rated the book 2/5 because, at best, Dr. Grabar nibbles at the fringes of the 1619 Project arguments. She goes off on tangents and “but what about” histories that are interesting on their own, but do nothing to debunk the Project premises. Her constant attacks on credentials remain mind boggling considering her Ph.D is in English, not History. I agree with her that Jefferson and Lincoln must be seen as politicians in turbulently unstable times, and their positions were not static. We must examine the totality of their work, not dismiss them because of their birth sin. I do not agree with Dr. Grabar that the Project is trying to replace or destroy the 4th of July holiday - it was obviously the founding of an independent union. But this doesn’t undermine the Project’s premise that Black subjugation to Whites began in 1619, and its overtones are the continuous root of racism today. I also do not agree the Project’s goals were to condemn all Whites throughout history. I encourage Dr. Grabar to focus her energy on positive content instead of attacking other texts. I couldn’t help but wonder why she condemns modern anti racists while emphasizing Jefferson the Abolitionist, Lincoln the Emancipator, or Douglass the patron saint of racial protest, social justice reform and modern antiracism.
To pull from my previous review of McWhorter’s “Woke Racism”: I think Kendi got it right when he noted “the singular racial history of the US is therefore a dual racial history of two opposing forces: historical steps toward equity and justice and historical steps toward inequity and injustice.” (1619 Project). To me this justifies the tug of war between the 1619 Project and 1776 Commission (or “patriotic” history). History requires us, at minimum, to atone for the past of our nation, and only resolute reflection will pay homage to the Americans that lived before us. In this regard, I feel reading the “Debunking” had value. However, in truth, any moderate reader who reads beyond the 1619 sources would have come to the same conclusion with no enlightenment from this book. I am hopeful there is a more authoritative source as this writing was more in line with propaganda journalism than academic fervor. In fairness, she would say the same about the 1619 Project.
January 13, 2022
I did not finish this book -- but that's not because it's not good. It's because I've already read so many other critiques of The 1619 Project that I didn't need any more convincing that there are many flaws in the Project. Grabar provides copious footnotes and citations to back up her points. I consider myself more left-wing in philosophy than right-wing, but I had to concede that the flaws in the Project's scholarship were significant.
February 16, 2023
I"ll leave a review alone for now, because I'm interviewing Dr. Grabar about this book soon.
November 18, 2021
-This is a book that will change our idea of the history of slavery in the US. The narratives that were explained to us, and the images portrayed in movies and on television of the history of our nation as it pertains to the black community only tell a small part of the story. In addition, the riots that we were forced to witness, with the blessings of the established Democratic politicians to complain against what was termed as the history of racism in the US was a major distortion of the true events that occurred in our past, and were also a distortion of major characters in our history who are being vilified for acts that they were innocent of.
-The author, Mary Graber, has put together a detailed history, and cited historians that the author of The 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, had consulted for verification, and then ignored, when they told Hannah-Jones that she was distorting history by either changes to the facts, or omission. As Graber herself stated: “The Project also drew immediate criticism. The most telling objections came not from conservatives but from respected historians on the left who were in sympathy with The 1619 Project’s aims but concerned that the historical inaccuracies with which it was riddled would undermine its impact.” (Page 34) Cases are listed as well as data that totally refutes the “1619” version of history.
-Where Nikole Hannah-Jones would have us believe that the US was the cesspool that was created for the sole purpose of perpetuating the slave trade and that the founding fathers were complicit with this idea, Graber takes us on a tour of history, with the admonition to look at history from the perspective of the views held at those points in time. She then reviews the history of slavery from the 1600’s and how slavery of both white and black, was a common practice on the African continent.
-Just a side note: For me to touch briefly on her examination of history in a book review will cause whatever I write to fall far short of the impact that the full details that she has unearthed will have on the reader.
-Contrary to the rendition of history portrayed by Hannah-Jones, where she sees Caucasians as harsh overlords who captured and enslaved the blacks of Africa in order to have cheap labor in North America, the reality, which is confirmed by numerous historians who Hannah-Jones asked to review her story, but who she ignored, is very different. The various tribes of Africa would wage war against each other and the losers would then be killed or enslaved in the most cruel manner, and would later be sold to the Arabs on the Barbary Coast (northern Africa). Those Arabs would consider anyone who was not a believer in Mohammed to be fair game for capture and enslavement, and it included Caucasians as well. When the African tribesmen brought their conquered enemies to the Arabs for sale, the Arabs willingly purchased them, as to both seller and buyer, slaves were a standard commodity.
-Higgins-Jones had then tried to make a case that the arrival of slaves on a ship to Virginia in 1619 set the tone for a pro-slavery mindset for the colonies and then the country, but the case falls apart very quickly. It turns out that most new arrivals to the new land were anti slavery. As we proceed to the 18th century, we find that a very low percentage of the black population were slaves. They developed communities of professionals, tradesmen, and farmers. Many became wealthy themselves, despite the discrimination that all agree were leveled at many of the black community. But the discrimination and even oppression, were still admittedly present in pockets of the country but were not a whole movement by all of the white communities.
-There is much criticism against Thomas Jefferson by Higgins-Jones, and she focuses on him as the center of her faulty proofs, but she neglected to state that Jefferson always fought against slavery and attempted to include an anti slavery provision for the new US, but he was forced to remove it. “ Jefferson was irked about the deletion, complaining in his notes that his section “reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina & Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves.…”. (Page 69)
-Rather than being founded on the perpetuation of slavery, we learn that Jefferson, and the founding fathers were trying to end the practice of slavery as we can see from the provisions that were taken out of Jefferson’s original document, in order to keep South Carolina and Georgia in the original union. “The deleted passage, which expands on Jefferson’s preamble to the Virginia Constitution, begins, “He [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature, violating it’s most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain, determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.” Jefferson was known for his kind treatment to all in his household, but knew that former slaves should learn a trade in order to be able to thrive in the outside world, and he endeavored to do that with all the slaves in his household until they were ready to exist as successful freemen in society. Because of the compassion that he felt for the blacks who were enslaved, and his efforts to free them in a manner where they could succeed, the attacks against him carry no weight.
-In a separate essay by another writer, Professor Rob Natelson, whose papers have been used as a basis for decisions in courts throughout the US, including the Supreme Court, it was brought out that the main fear of the new nation was from an attack by a European power. The British were still in the north; France held land in the west; and Spain held land to the south. Only by uniting as a combined unit did they stand a chance of repelling an invasion. To do so, they needed all of the 13 colonies to unite, and so, they had no choice but to delay the discussion of slavery so that Georgia and S Carolina would join. They felt slavery was a practice that would soon be eliminated anyway as public opinion throughout the world was turning against it.
-Rather than being a practice solely by whites, in what turned out to be a major revelation, the author reveals that slave owners were not limited to the white population. Blacks also owned slaves. “Many of the “well-to-do free Negroes… owned slaves, who cultivated their large estates. Of 360 persons of color in Charleston, 130 of them were, in 1860, assessed with taxes on 390 slaves.” (P 129). “They found that correct comparisons between white slaveholders and black slaveholders showed that “slave owning was fairly widespread among the free black population.” The 3,699 black slave owners constituted “almost exactly 2 percent of 182,070, the total of free black population of the South.” Admitting that the number may appear small, they point out that it is actually a significant proportion, given “the small percentage of the total white population who were slaveholders,” 223,898 out of a total population of 3,660,758—or “almost exactly 6 percent.” (P 145)
-Rather than our image of the blacks only working the plantations as slave laborers, the reality is that the black community in many areas enjoyed a great deal of success, including in the south. “New Orleans, was one of the places with the best opportunities for free blacks, who “invested heavily in real estate and slaves.” As John W. Blassingame noted in his 1973 study Black New Orleans, 1860–1880, “Negroes” owned $ 2,214,020 worth of New Orleans real estate in 1850, much of it in the center of the city.” (P 136). In the north, blacks enjoyed a great deal of freedom and in areas like Harlem, in New York, “Like Marxists and similar propagandists who have obscured the diversity and conflicts within groups in order to present a narrative of bad rich whites versus good poor blacks (or kulaks versus proletarians), Hannah-Jones ignores the black upper classes, not only in the antebellum South but also in Northern cities such as Philadelphia and New York. “By the Civil War,” wrote one historian, “the Negro community in New York ‘had a small social aristocracy which seems to have led a gay life, emphasizing balls, soirées, dancing classes and musicales.’” (P 214)
-The most compelling argument against the 1619 Project, comes from Frederick Douglas. He was formerly a slave who became an educated speaker in the North. According to Douglas “Unlike The 1619 Project writers, Douglass believed that Lincoln and the founders, including those who owned slaves, should be honored. They were not saints or gods, but they set in motion something “glorious,” something apart from the bondage of the rest of the world. And it was a monumental undertaking. At a time when few did, “[ t] he patriots of the American Revolution clearly saw and… had the grace to confess, the abhorrent character of Slavery.” (P 232)
-The author goes further in defense of all the white abolitionists that fought on the side of the blacks, and who are ignored by Hannah/Jones; she explains the stance of Abe Lincoln and why the blacks of his era chose to honor him by paying for a monument which BLM proponents have now chosen to mistakenly reject; she goes deeper into our current times and all of the mistaken ideas of the past which are promoted by those who would look to destroy the reputations of those who fought so hard to end the practice of slavery.
-This is a must read book for all who are interested in the history of our country, in which we should all show great pride in being counted among its citizens.
-The author, Mary Graber, has put together a detailed history, and cited historians that the author of The 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, had consulted for verification, and then ignored, when they told Hannah-Jones that she was distorting history by either changes to the facts, or omission. As Graber herself stated: “The Project also drew immediate criticism. The most telling objections came not from conservatives but from respected historians on the left who were in sympathy with The 1619 Project’s aims but concerned that the historical inaccuracies with which it was riddled would undermine its impact.” (Page 34) Cases are listed as well as data that totally refutes the “1619” version of history.
-Where Nikole Hannah-Jones would have us believe that the US was the cesspool that was created for the sole purpose of perpetuating the slave trade and that the founding fathers were complicit with this idea, Graber takes us on a tour of history, with the admonition to look at history from the perspective of the views held at those points in time. She then reviews the history of slavery from the 1600’s and how slavery of both white and black, was a common practice on the African continent.
-Just a side note: For me to touch briefly on her examination of history in a book review will cause whatever I write to fall far short of the impact that the full details that she has unearthed will have on the reader.
-Contrary to the rendition of history portrayed by Hannah-Jones, where she sees Caucasians as harsh overlords who captured and enslaved the blacks of Africa in order to have cheap labor in North America, the reality, which is confirmed by numerous historians who Hannah-Jones asked to review her story, but who she ignored, is very different. The various tribes of Africa would wage war against each other and the losers would then be killed or enslaved in the most cruel manner, and would later be sold to the Arabs on the Barbary Coast (northern Africa). Those Arabs would consider anyone who was not a believer in Mohammed to be fair game for capture and enslavement, and it included Caucasians as well. When the African tribesmen brought their conquered enemies to the Arabs for sale, the Arabs willingly purchased them, as to both seller and buyer, slaves were a standard commodity.
-Higgins-Jones had then tried to make a case that the arrival of slaves on a ship to Virginia in 1619 set the tone for a pro-slavery mindset for the colonies and then the country, but the case falls apart very quickly. It turns out that most new arrivals to the new land were anti slavery. As we proceed to the 18th century, we find that a very low percentage of the black population were slaves. They developed communities of professionals, tradesmen, and farmers. Many became wealthy themselves, despite the discrimination that all agree were leveled at many of the black community. But the discrimination and even oppression, were still admittedly present in pockets of the country but were not a whole movement by all of the white communities.
-There is much criticism against Thomas Jefferson by Higgins-Jones, and she focuses on him as the center of her faulty proofs, but she neglected to state that Jefferson always fought against slavery and attempted to include an anti slavery provision for the new US, but he was forced to remove it. “ Jefferson was irked about the deletion, complaining in his notes that his section “reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina & Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves.…”. (Page 69)
-Rather than being founded on the perpetuation of slavery, we learn that Jefferson, and the founding fathers were trying to end the practice of slavery as we can see from the provisions that were taken out of Jefferson’s original document, in order to keep South Carolina and Georgia in the original union. “The deleted passage, which expands on Jefferson’s preamble to the Virginia Constitution, begins, “He [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature, violating it’s most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain, determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.” Jefferson was known for his kind treatment to all in his household, but knew that former slaves should learn a trade in order to be able to thrive in the outside world, and he endeavored to do that with all the slaves in his household until they were ready to exist as successful freemen in society. Because of the compassion that he felt for the blacks who were enslaved, and his efforts to free them in a manner where they could succeed, the attacks against him carry no weight.
-In a separate essay by another writer, Professor Rob Natelson, whose papers have been used as a basis for decisions in courts throughout the US, including the Supreme Court, it was brought out that the main fear of the new nation was from an attack by a European power. The British were still in the north; France held land in the west; and Spain held land to the south. Only by uniting as a combined unit did they stand a chance of repelling an invasion. To do so, they needed all of the 13 colonies to unite, and so, they had no choice but to delay the discussion of slavery so that Georgia and S Carolina would join. They felt slavery was a practice that would soon be eliminated anyway as public opinion throughout the world was turning against it.
-Rather than being a practice solely by whites, in what turned out to be a major revelation, the author reveals that slave owners were not limited to the white population. Blacks also owned slaves. “Many of the “well-to-do free Negroes… owned slaves, who cultivated their large estates. Of 360 persons of color in Charleston, 130 of them were, in 1860, assessed with taxes on 390 slaves.” (P 129). “They found that correct comparisons between white slaveholders and black slaveholders showed that “slave owning was fairly widespread among the free black population.” The 3,699 black slave owners constituted “almost exactly 2 percent of 182,070, the total of free black population of the South.” Admitting that the number may appear small, they point out that it is actually a significant proportion, given “the small percentage of the total white population who were slaveholders,” 223,898 out of a total population of 3,660,758—or “almost exactly 6 percent.” (P 145)
-Rather than our image of the blacks only working the plantations as slave laborers, the reality is that the black community in many areas enjoyed a great deal of success, including in the south. “New Orleans, was one of the places with the best opportunities for free blacks, who “invested heavily in real estate and slaves.” As John W. Blassingame noted in his 1973 study Black New Orleans, 1860–1880, “Negroes” owned $ 2,214,020 worth of New Orleans real estate in 1850, much of it in the center of the city.” (P 136). In the north, blacks enjoyed a great deal of freedom and in areas like Harlem, in New York, “Like Marxists and similar propagandists who have obscured the diversity and conflicts within groups in order to present a narrative of bad rich whites versus good poor blacks (or kulaks versus proletarians), Hannah-Jones ignores the black upper classes, not only in the antebellum South but also in Northern cities such as Philadelphia and New York. “By the Civil War,” wrote one historian, “the Negro community in New York ‘had a small social aristocracy which seems to have led a gay life, emphasizing balls, soirées, dancing classes and musicales.’” (P 214)
-The most compelling argument against the 1619 Project, comes from Frederick Douglas. He was formerly a slave who became an educated speaker in the North. According to Douglas “Unlike The 1619 Project writers, Douglass believed that Lincoln and the founders, including those who owned slaves, should be honored. They were not saints or gods, but they set in motion something “glorious,” something apart from the bondage of the rest of the world. And it was a monumental undertaking. At a time when few did, “[ t] he patriots of the American Revolution clearly saw and… had the grace to confess, the abhorrent character of Slavery.” (P 232)
-The author goes further in defense of all the white abolitionists that fought on the side of the blacks, and who are ignored by Hannah/Jones; she explains the stance of Abe Lincoln and why the blacks of his era chose to honor him by paying for a monument which BLM proponents have now chosen to mistakenly reject; she goes deeper into our current times and all of the mistaken ideas of the past which are promoted by those who would look to destroy the reputations of those who fought so hard to end the practice of slavery.
-This is a must read book for all who are interested in the history of our country, in which we should all show great pride in being counted among its citizens.
April 29, 2023
The author presents a good argument for the falsities and/or dramatizations of the 1619 project. As with any “debunking” type novel, one should read both pieces of literature and determine for themselves where the correctness lies. I personally believe it is somewhere in the middle of the original piece and the response by this author.
Overall good book, good presentation and arrangement throughout. My biggest complaint is that the author often gets too in the weeds in certain sections and can cause the reader to lose interest.
Overall good book, good presentation and arrangement throughout. My biggest complaint is that the author often gets too in the weeds in certain sections and can cause the reader to lose interest.
November 1, 2022
Nothing is fair and balanced anymore. Well, except this honestly written book. Well researched!
April 10, 2022
I will not attempt to review this book as copious notes are provided at the end of it for any who are not too lazy to look up the factual support for the assertions laid out in it. I will just say that a debacle such as the 1619 project is a perfect example of what occurs when you refuse to teach ALL of history, from the ancients through to modern, in context. As that famous saying goes: those who do not learn from history (or even learn OF history) are doomed to repeat it. Teachers doing a unit on ancient Egypt and then a unit on the Maya and next a unit on the Mexican-American War and then a unit on the Revolution (US) are just creating a meaningless mess in the minds of children. Without learning the full scope and sequence of cultures over time across the globe - IN CONTEXT WITH EACH OTHER ACROSS TIME - you are going to get - well, just the sort of disordered mess we find today whenever any young (and many old) person/people is asked any question about history or civics. And literature study every year should also be tied to the same historical period under study, which would greatly enhance understanding of both the work of literature AND the time period in which it was written, in many instances. (Daniel Defoe, Lewis Carroll, for instance, out of a myriad of such examples that could be given.) Children should start in first grade with an age appropriate study of the Ancients, followed by Medieval, Early Modern and Modern periods over the succeeding three years. That should be repeated in fifth through eighth and again in high school, with an increase in depth each time. And ALL MAJOR cultures of the world at each period should be touched upon, as well as some of the more unique. The absurdity of the idea that slavery in what became the USA was, at any period - 1500’s (when it ACTUALLY came here), 1600’s, 1700’s or 1800’s - substantially different from the slavery, indenture, or human trafficking (including for use as sacrificial offerings) that could be found on every inhabited continent in EVERY time period of history (and for those of all races, ethnicities, colors, etc., etc.) is completely absurd.
May 1, 2022
Great book, a must-read.
March 26, 2022
This is a very important book to read, especially for people who have read the 1619 Project. This author exposes the factual inaccuracies and flat-out lies that were published by the New York Times. It really is astonishing that the author was granted a Pulitzer Prize when she literally ignored historians who were trying to help her so she could push her own agenda. I am saddened that some school children are being asked to read it in school. In this book, I learned so much about the history of slavery, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and others, who left letters, speeches, and other documents for us to read to see just how complicated our history was and how much they struggled to eventually end slavery. The 1619 Project paints our founding fathers and Lincoln in such a horrible light, but this book explains their points of view and work in a meaningful, historical context.
November 3, 2021
This is a great book. It debunks the noxious 1619 project, which claims that the Revolutionary War was fought to create a slavocracy in America. Slavery was not good, but it is definitely not an American invention. Native Americans did it, Africans did it, and in fact our American forefathers were unusually prescient. Jefferson was very troubled by the reality of slavery and said he trembled at the coming justice of God. Frederick Douglas, instead of condemning the Constitution as protecting slavery, called it the glorious document of liberty. Blacks prospered in the United States and sometimes owned slaves themselves. Slavery was just a small component of the GDP. Hannah-Jones presents a divisive and over-simplified narrative which pits innocent blacks against evil whites. Grabar argues that it was political strategy that prevented great leaders like Jefferson and Lincoln from acting right away to abolish slavery. Precipitate action would have made the situation worse.
April 16, 2022
I read this book because I want to learn about why the 1619 project came about. I believe black lives DO MATTER. Spreading false history is not the way to help people. The people who want to believe all racism stems from slavery are grasping at false ideals. More prominent historians need to speak out. Education is the best way to solve issues that divide our society. Black people deserve better spokesmen than NHJ. Demi-gods only invoke more hatred. Taking down statues is outrageous. Distortions about historical figures in our past history because they were slave owners are wrong. We still have a long way to achieve actual diversity. Tolerance of all cultures is an excellent way to get to inclusiveness. Our differences are teaching moments not shameful events.
February 22, 2025
If I could give it 0 stars I would.
Are we going back to using the term "Indians" because we just want to be stubbornly incorrect?
I also find the idea that "slaves had it good because some people in the world had it worse" as completely asinine. I've seen photos of disfigurement from slaves been lashed: the scars along people's backs, treated as property and not as human. This book makes light of slavery in general and isn't much in the way of fact.
Plus, I was listening to the audiobook version and the tone used is condescending and mocking towards the book it's trying to respond to. If the answer is to mock, there's not much to be taken seriously.
Are we going back to using the term "Indians" because we just want to be stubbornly incorrect?
I also find the idea that "slaves had it good because some people in the world had it worse" as completely asinine. I've seen photos of disfigurement from slaves been lashed: the scars along people's backs, treated as property and not as human. This book makes light of slavery in general and isn't much in the way of fact.
Plus, I was listening to the audiobook version and the tone used is condescending and mocking towards the book it's trying to respond to. If the answer is to mock, there's not much to be taken seriously.
December 15, 2021
Really enjoyed this rebuttal to the New York Times' 1619 Project. It is well reasoned and I found myself excited to read some more historical works that the author cited. "This exploitation, misrepresentation, and misapplication of historic injustices can only tear Americans further apart. How can we live together when we see each other as exploiter and exploited? ... Yes, students need to learn about slavery! But they need to learn about it in it's historical context- as a global, transracial, transhistorical phenomenon."
December 20, 2021
This book shows that The 1619 Project is journalistic propaganda. This is evident not only because it lies, ignores established history, deceives readers by leaving out parts of documents that would prove they are frauds, but mostly because the historian they hired who is black) tried to get them to retract a lot of the inaccuracies and they refused to do so. Meyer Grabar unmasks the true purpose of the propaganda journalism that is trying to change the United States' true history.
December 31, 2021
This book is only partially a political polemic.
To my personal shock, Graber is an historical scholar looking to set the record straight. There is something novel and interesting here.
I'll never doubt a Kevin Gutzman recommendation again.
To my personal shock, Graber is an historical scholar looking to set the record straight. There is something novel and interesting here.
I'll never doubt a Kevin Gutzman recommendation again.
December 10, 2021
1619 a book of lies
Awesome book. Proves the 1619 book is nothing but lies and the 1619 book is a racist read, I recommend this book
Awesome book. Proves the 1619 book is nothing but lies and the 1619 book is a racist read, I recommend this book
March 7, 2025
Credible historians have trashed the 1619 Project for a variety of reasons - mostly that it's a polemic full of lies and/or distortions meant to divide Americans. After reading Grabar's book - I can say they are correct.
This is not an edge-of-your-seat kind of book - full of excitement. Rather, it's a work that pinpoints the lies and distortions of the 1619 Project - and backs it up with plenty of evidence. It also goes on the offensive against to protect our nation's founding - our Founding Fathers - and our founding documents. You read about Frederick Douglass - and what he had to say on the subject. You read about countless others... and how previous commemorations for 1619 were marked. You read about the business of slavery around the world - mostly in Africa - long before Christopher Columbus sailed in 1492. You read about the African chiefs and their tribes - and their constant warfare and treatment of those captured. Unless you lived in a powerful tribe - life was full of misery. To be captured meant to be sacrificed in a ritual - or to be murdered - or to be sold into slavery... again, long before the Atlantic slave trade.
And yes, there was slavery in the United States - which she discusses. There were also black slaveowners. There was also the abolitionist movement - born in the west. There was the Civil War - and Abraham Lincoln. So many things to read about... something everyone should know. The real history of the abomination known as slavery.
With that said - read this book. You will learn the truth - and it will better prepare you for the debates that are sure to follow once you start defending this nation, our Constitution, and our nation's founders.
This is not an edge-of-your-seat kind of book - full of excitement. Rather, it's a work that pinpoints the lies and distortions of the 1619 Project - and backs it up with plenty of evidence. It also goes on the offensive against to protect our nation's founding - our Founding Fathers - and our founding documents. You read about Frederick Douglass - and what he had to say on the subject. You read about countless others... and how previous commemorations for 1619 were marked. You read about the business of slavery around the world - mostly in Africa - long before Christopher Columbus sailed in 1492. You read about the African chiefs and their tribes - and their constant warfare and treatment of those captured. Unless you lived in a powerful tribe - life was full of misery. To be captured meant to be sacrificed in a ritual - or to be murdered - or to be sold into slavery... again, long before the Atlantic slave trade.
And yes, there was slavery in the United States - which she discusses. There were also black slaveowners. There was also the abolitionist movement - born in the west. There was the Civil War - and Abraham Lincoln. So many things to read about... something everyone should know. The real history of the abomination known as slavery.
With that said - read this book. You will learn the truth - and it will better prepare you for the debates that are sure to follow once you start defending this nation, our Constitution, and our nation's founders.
September 13, 2022
If your familiar with the 1619 Project then this read will be a recap combined with today's right and left issues. A few being the George Floyd riots, Breonna Taylor and BLM movements.
As a black women, my only criticism is not all black people think the same. To lump the whole culture together is not giving everyone within the culture their own identity to stand alone in these issues.
1619 Project is an agenda to divide America. In essence America stays divided. You have the right vs. left. Right vs. wrong. Moral vs. Immoral etc. At the end of the day, the media doesn't give Americans free liberty to draw their own conclusions and to give such intriguing details to the mass population is wisdom on a suicide mission.
If your looking for a 1619 project exposition this may be your read. But for me, my concern is that we keep putting racism in the headlines which keeps communities hostile. History repeats itself. However, individuals who value a sense of culture and community will flee the matrix of the conspiracy theories to enjoy a good life.
As a black women, my only criticism is not all black people think the same. To lump the whole culture together is not giving everyone within the culture their own identity to stand alone in these issues.
1619 Project is an agenda to divide America. In essence America stays divided. You have the right vs. left. Right vs. wrong. Moral vs. Immoral etc. At the end of the day, the media doesn't give Americans free liberty to draw their own conclusions and to give such intriguing details to the mass population is wisdom on a suicide mission.
If your looking for a 1619 project exposition this may be your read. But for me, my concern is that we keep putting racism in the headlines which keeps communities hostile. History repeats itself. However, individuals who value a sense of culture and community will flee the matrix of the conspiracy theories to enjoy a good life.
March 10, 2025
Did not finish either this one or The 1619 Project (was reading both somewhat simultaneously). I agree with some of Grabar's points, one of the early ones being "the practice of dividing persons into demons and saints excludes the possibility of learning about the good our forebears did." However, Grabar lost me when she started attacking Nikole Hannah-Jones for her dress style and for making money off of The 1619 Project (which is a little rich coming from someone who turned the contents of what could have been a pretty good magazine article into a book that presumably she made money selling, or is Grabar's complaint that Hannah-Jones is just much better at selling herself and her project?). The book mostly felt like a lot of propaganda we're hearing on both sides of the aisle: rather than present a logical argument, let's incite the reader's emotions. It's exhausting, and I don't have the patience for it.
December 7, 2023
Grabar presents the argument against the 1619 project. Well-reasoned, substantive. Key points are presented with documented support from a long series of professional historians.
Unfortunately, Grabar does not have the support of the very powerful New York Times (why is a newspaper sponsoring this issue?). There is the little issue of the Pulitzer Prize, and the adoption of the 1619 point of view by a number of school systems.
It would be really, really helpful if the 1619 folks would engage in a series of debates with professional historians. Argue the issues point by point.
This is a very important discussion, especially because it argues for reparations. Oh boy...this is the real nugget.
Unfortunately, Grabar does not have the support of the very powerful New York Times (why is a newspaper sponsoring this issue?). There is the little issue of the Pulitzer Prize, and the adoption of the 1619 point of view by a number of school systems.
It would be really, really helpful if the 1619 folks would engage in a series of debates with professional historians. Argue the issues point by point.
This is a very important discussion, especially because it argues for reparations. Oh boy...this is the real nugget.
April 15, 2025
To think that a white woman has decided to write a book about how America isn’t based on racism and wasn’t built as a racist nation is insane. This is equal to saying the white people that established America did so by embracing the Native Americans and working with them to build a nation. Instead they stole their lands and shoved them into designated reservations. America is a racist, classist nation that has been inherited and continues this path without significant change. Mary obviously does not understand this as she has lived a life privileged from these experiences. This book is dismissive of the challenges that black people have faced and continue to face. It also drips with a white supremacist attitude.
December 5, 2022
The first few chapters are very slow, and she focuses a bit too much on Jefferson at times, but the section on slavery was phenomenal! She went back and forth with the nuance of history, providing ample context for major events, and directly showing where the 1619 project makes errors and distortions. Grabar did research on Hannah Jones's "intellectual" development, too, so that was insightful. Overall, the 1619 Project is bias, ahistorical bunk, that is purposefully dishonest, fraught with embarrassing, rudimentary errors, and should ejected from all institutions of learning.
October 3, 2022
Grabar provides the proof why the 1919 Project is propaganda, not history. We should not view it as something that should be taught in schools. Historiography 101 teaches that we don't cherry-pick sources to shape our narrative. The narrative should flow out of the research just as we we box-in the answer to an algebraic equation. Poor history (or ideology disguised as history) causes ridiculousness such as the tearing down the statue of Hans Christian Heg, an abolitionist.
February 23, 2023
Fantastic! Loaded with fact after fact. I listened to the audiobook and cannot wait to purchase my own hard copy. There’s so much good info that I want to go back through it academically with a highlighter and pen, and then pass it down to my descendants. America’s true history is being erased in our culture. This well-documented account is important for helping to reclaim truth.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews