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The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story Hardcover – November 16, 2021

by Nikole Hannah-Jones (Creator), The New York Times Magazine (Creator), Caitlin Roper (Editor),

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER • A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present.

“[A] groundbreaking compendium . . . bracing and urgent . . . This collection is an extraordinary update to an ongoing project of vital truth-telling.”—Esquire

NOW AN EMMY-WINNING HULU ORIGINAL DOCUSERIES • FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, Esquire, Marie Claire, Electric Lit, Ms. magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist

In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty people stolen from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States.

The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning 1619 Project issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself.

This book that speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today. It reveals long-glossed-over truths around our nation’s founding and construction—and the way that the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation, but continues to shape contemporary American life.

Featuring contributions from: Leslie Alexander • Michelle Alexander • Carol Anderson • Joshua Bennett • Reginald Dwayne Betts • Jamelle Bouie • Anthea Butler • Matthew Desmond • Rita Dove • Camille T. Dungy • Cornelius Eady • Eve L. Ewing • Nikky Finney • Vievee Francis • Yaa Gyasi • Forrest Hamer • Terrance Hayes • Kimberly Annece Henderson • Jeneen Interlandi • Honorée Fanonne Jeffers • Barry Jenkins • Tyehimba Jess • Martha S. Jones • Robert Jones, Jr. • A. Van Jordan • Ibram X. Kendi • Eddie Kendricks • Yusef Komunyakaa • Kevin M. Kruse • Kiese Laymon • Trymaine Lee • Jasmine Mans • Terry McMillan • Tiya Miles • Wesley Morris • Khalil Gibran Muhammad • Lynn Nottage • ZZ Packer • Gregory Pardlo • Darryl Pinckney • Claudia Rankine • Jason Reynolds • Dorothy Roberts • Sonia Sanchez • Tim Seibles • Evie Shockley • Clint Smith • Danez Smith • Patricia Smith • Tracy K. Smith • Bryan Stevenson • Nafissa Thompson-Spires • Natasha Trethewey • Linda Villarosa • Jesmyn Ward

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One World
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November 16, 2021
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0593230574
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978-0593230572
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Popular Highlights in this book

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This belief, that Black people were not merely enslaved but a slave race, is the root of the endemic racism we cannot purge from this nation to this day.
Highlighted by 2,958 Kindle readers
Over the course of the war, thousands of enslaved people would join the British—far outnumbering those who joined the Patriot cause.
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I wanted people to know the date 1619 and to contemplate what it means that slavery predates nearly every other institution in the United States.
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From the Publisher

A dramatic expansion of the Pulitzer Prize-winning project from The New York Times Magazine;1619

Books from The 1619 Project

________________________________________________________________


	The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story	The 1619 Project: Born on the Water

Customer Reviews	15,657	3,490
Price	$19.43	$13.25
	A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present.	The 1619 Project’s picture book in verse chronicles the consequences of slavery and the history of Black resistance in the U.S., by Pulitzer Prize-winner Nikole Hannah-Jones, Newbery honor-winner Renée Watson, and illustrations by Nikkolas Smith

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Pleasingly symmetrical . . . [a] mosaic of a book, which achieves the impossible on so many levels—moving from argument to fiction to argument, from theme to theme, and backward and forward in time, so smoothly.”—Slate

“A wide-ranging, landmark summary of the Black experience in America: searing, rich in unfamiliar detail, exploring every aspect of slavery and its continuing legacy . . . Again and again, The 1619 Project brings the past to life in fresh ways. . . . Multifaceted and often brilliant.”—The New York Times Book Review

“The groundbreaking project from The New York Times, which created a new origin story for America based on the very beginnings of American slavery, is expanded into a very large, very powerful full-length book.”—Entertainment Weekly

“The ambitious project that got Americans rethinking our racial history—and sparked inevitable backlash—even before the reckoning that followed George Floyd’s murder, is expanded into a book incorporating essays from pretty much everyone you want to hear from about the country’s great topic and great shame.”—Los Angeles Times

“This fall’s required reading.”—Ms.

“[A] groundbreaking compendium . . . These bracing and urgent works, by multidisciplinary visionaries ranging from Barry Jenkins to Jesmyn Ward, build on the existing scholarship of The 1619 Project, exploring how the nation’s original sin continues to shape everything from our music to our food to our democracy. This collection is an extraordinary update to an ongoing project of vital truth-telling.”—Esquire

“By teaching how the country’s history has been one of depriving the rights of one group for the gain of another, and how those marginalized worked to claim those rights for all, The 1619 Project restores people erased from the national narrative, offering a motivating, if sobering, origin story we need to understand if we are ever going to truly achieve ‘liberty and justice for all.’”—Women’s Review of Books

“Those readers open to fresh and startling interpretations of history will find this book a comprehensive education.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Powerful . . . This invaluable book sets itself apart by reframing readers’ understanding of U.S. history, past and present.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“Pulitzer winner Hannah-Jones . . . and an impressive cast of historians, journalists, poets, novelists, and cultural critics deliver a sweeping study of the ‘unparalleled impact’ of African slavery on American society.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“For any lover of American history or letters, The 1619 Project is a visionary work that casts a sweeping, introspective gaze over what many have aptly termed the country’s original sin.”—BookPage (starred review)

“Readers will discover something new and redefining on every page.”—Booklist (starred review)

About the Author

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter covering racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine, and creator of the landmark 1619 Project. In 2017, she received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, known as the Genius Grant, for her work on educational inequality. She has also won a Peabody Award, two George Polk Awards, three National Magazine Awards, and the 2018 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism from Columbia University. In 2016, Hannah-Jones co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, a training and mentorship organization geared toward increasing the number of investigative reporters of color. Hannah-Jones is the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University, where she has founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy. In 2021, she was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world.

The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the four hundredth anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It is led by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, along with New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein and editors Ilena Silverman and Caitlin Roper.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Democracy

Nikole Hannah-Jones

My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard. The blue paint on our two-story house was sometimes chipped; the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door might occasionally fall into disrepair, but that flag always flew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the federal government, was along the river that divided the Black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the edge of our lawn, high on an aluminum pole, soared the flag, which my dad would replace with a new one as soon as it showed the slightest tatter.

My dad was born into a family of sharecroppers on a white plantation in Greenwood, Mississippi, where Black people bent over cotton from can’t-see-in-the-morning to can’t-see-at-night, just as their enslaved ancestors had done not long before. The Mississippi of my dad’s youth was an apartheid state that subjugated its Black residents—almost half of the population—through breathtaking acts of violence. White residents in Mississippi lynched more Black people than those in any other state in the country, and the white people in my dad’s home county lynched more Black residents than those in any other county in Mississippi, for such “crimes” as entering a room occupied by white women, bumping into a white girl, or trying to start a sharecroppers union. My dad’s mother, like all the Black people in Greenwood, could not vote, use the public library, or find work other than toiling in the cotton fields or toiling in white people’s houses. In the 1940s, she packed up her few belongings and her three small children and joined the flood of Black Southerners fleeing to the North. She got off the Illinois Central Railroad in Waterloo, Iowa, only to have her hopes of the mythical Promised Land shattered when she learned that Jim Crow did not end at the Mason-Dixon Line.

Grandmama, as we called her, found a Victorian house in a segregated Black neighborhood on the city’s east side and then found the work that was considered Black women’s work no matter where Black women lived: cleaning white people’s homes. Dad, too, struggled to find promise in this land. In 1962, at age seventeen, he signed up for the army. Like many young men, he joined in hopes of escaping poverty. But he went into the military for another reason as well, a reason common to Black men: Dad hoped that if he served his country, his country might finally treat him as an American.

The army did not end up being his way out. He was passed over for opportunities, his ambition stunted. He would be discharged under murky circumstances and then labor in a series of service jobs for the rest of his life. Like all the Black men and women in my family, he believed in hard work, but like all the Black men and women in my family, no matter how hard he worked, he never got ahead.

So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense to me. How could this Black man, having seen firsthand the way his country abused Black Americans, the way it refused to treat us as full citizens, proudly fly its banner? My father had endured segregation in housing and school, discrimination in employment, and harassment by the police. He was one of the smartest people I knew, and yet by the time I was a work-study student in college, I was earning more an hour than he did. I didn’t understand his patriotism. It deeply embarrassed me.

I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that the flag wasn’t really ours, that our history as a people began with enslavement, and that we had contributed little to this great nation. It seemed that the closest thing Black Americans could have to cultural pride was to be found in our vague connection to Africa, a place we had never been. That my dad felt so much honor in being an American struck me as a marker of his degradation, of his acceptance of our subordination.

Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, when in fact I understood so little. My father knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us.

In August 1619, just twelve years after the English settled Jamestown, Virginia, one year before the Puritans landed at Plymouth, and some 157 years before English colonists here decided they wanted to form their own country, the Jamestown colonists bought twenty to thirty enslaved Africans from English pirates. The pirates had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship whose crew had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola. Those men and women who came ashore on that August day mark the beginning of slavery in the thirteen colonies that would become the United States of America. They were among the more than 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced migration in human history until the Second World War. Almost two million did not survive the grueling journey, known as the Middle Passage.

Before the abolition of the international slave trade, more than four hundred thousand of those 12 million enslaved Africans transported to the Americas would be sold into this land. Those individuals and their descendants transformed the North American colonies into some of the most successful in the British Empire. Through backbreaking labor, they cleared territory across the Southeast. They taught the colonists to grow rice and to inoculate themselves against smallpox. After the American Revolution, they grew and picked the cotton that, at the height of slavery, became the nation’s most valuable export, accounting for half of American goods sold abroad and more than two-thirds of the world’s supply. They helped build the forced labor camps, otherwise known as plantations, of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, sprawling properties that today attract tens of thousands of visitors from across the globe captivated by the history of the world’s greatest democracy. They laid the foundations of the White House and the Capitol, even cast with their unfree hands the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome. They lugged the heavy wooden tracks of the railroads that crisscrossed the South and carried the cotton picked by enslaved laborers to textile mills in the North, fueling this country’s Industrial Revolution. They built vast fortunes for white people in both the North and the South—at one time, the second-richest man in the nation was a Rhode Island “slave trader.” Profits from Black people’s stolen labor helped the young nation pay off its war debts and financed some of our most prestigious universities. The relentless buying, selling, insuring, and financing of their bodies and the products of their forced labor would help make Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance, and trading sector, and New York City a financial capital of the world.

But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of Black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: it is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.

The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of Black people in their midst. A right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” did not include fully one-fifth of the new country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, Black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of Black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves—Black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.

Without the idealistic, strenuous, and patriotic efforts of Black Americans, our democracy today would look very different; in fact, our country might not be a democracy at all.

One of the very first to die in the American Revolution was a Black and Indigenous man named Crispus Attucks who himself was not free. In 1770, Attucks lived as a fugitive from slavery, yet he became a martyr for liberty in a land where his own people would remain enslaved for almost another century. In every war this nation has waged since that first one, Black Americans have fought—today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military.

My father, one of those many Black Americans who answered the call, knew what it would take me years to understand: that the year 1619 is as important to the American story as 1776. That Black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true founding fathers. And that no people has a greater claim to that flag than we do.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ One World (November 16, 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 624 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593230574
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593230572
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 1 year and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.32 x 1.47 x 9.38 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,747 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #7 in Discrimination & Racism
- #8 in Black & African American History (Books)
- #9 in African American Demographic Studies (Books)

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Nikole Hannah-Jones
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NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES is the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the 1619 Project and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. She has spent her career investigating racial inequality and injustice, and her reporting has earned her the MacArthur Fellowship, known as the Genius grant, a Peabody Award, two George Polk Awards and the National Magazine Award three times. Hannah-Jones also earned the John Chancellor Award for Distinguished Journalism and was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists and the Newswomen's Club of New York. In 2020 she was inducted into the Society of American Historians and in 2021, into the North Carolina Media Hall of Fame. She was also named a member of the prestigious Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 2016, Hannah-Jones co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, which seeks to increase the number of reporters and editors of color. She holds a Master of Arts in Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina and earned her BA in History and African-American studies from the University of Notre Dame.
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Customers find the book very informative, scholarly, and interesting. They describe it as an amazing, enjoyable read with gripping writing. Readers also mention the details and perspective are eye-opening. Opinions are mixed on the accuracy, with some finding it accurate and others saying there are historical inaccuracies.

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247 customers mention "Information quality"244 positive3 negative

Customers find the book highly informative, scholarly, and interesting. They say it's thought-provoking and a well-crafted historical work with some poetry interwoven. Readers also mention the arguments are backed by research and the book has decent historical value.

"...Academically crafted, the text unpacks America's history in accordance with American law with the addition of statements from a number of the country..." Read more

"...a slow read and am only about a quarter of the way in, but it's very informative in regards to how this country that became the US, and the world in..." Read more

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"Professor Hannah-Jones Book is a vital and important document review and insight into the history of our time and the black peoples lived experience..." Read more

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Customers find the book interesting, important, and valuable. They say it's well worth reading, has good information, and is a must-read for anyone.

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94 customers mention "Writing quality"73 positive21 negative

Customers find the writing quality of the book well-written, gripping, and easy to read. They mention it's well-footnoted and each chapter is individually written. Readers also appreciate the bold, brilliant, and brazen way of retelling the lives of African Americans in the USA.

"Well written chapters on many important topics." Read more

"...still have the rest of the book to read, I find that the author wrote this in great detail, with much research of the chronicles events that took..." Read more

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Customers find the book eye-opening, brilliant, and well-presented. They appreciate the details and perspective. Readers describe the book as thoughtful, in-depth, and scholarly.

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matthew a. barrett

If it's BANNED, it must be DAMN GOOD!

Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2022

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"Would America have been America without her Negro people?"
–W.E.B. Dubois

In exposing our nation’s troubled roots, the 1619 Project challenges us to think about American exceptionalism that we treat as the unquestioned truth. It asks us to consider who sets and shapes our shared national memory and what and particularly who gets left out.

Ana Lucia Araujo writes in Slavery in the Age of Memory, “despite its ambitions of objectivity,” public history is molded by the perspectives of the most powerful members of society. And in the United States, public history has often been “racialized, gendered and interwoven in the fabric of white supremacy." Yet it is still posed as objective.

This critique is not to imply that this generation of America's white citizens are personally responsible for slavery, or to suggest that the current generation of whites are ALL racist. Instead, this serves as a historical analysis of legal violence, subjugation, legal discrimination, and terrorism performed on behalf of white supremacist ideology. The 1619 Project provides a diagnosis and proposes a cure to the chronic illness of anti-black racism that continues to plague this country through hostile policy and hostile institutions.

Academically crafted, the text unpacks America's history in accordance with American law with the addition of statements from a number of the country’s leaders, and other relevant documentation to make its case. In addition, Nikole Hannah Jones has assured that the data is present to match her argument as further evidence of a prolonged intentional injustice that has evolved into modern day abstractions designed with similar malicious intentions. She and an all-star cast of writers layout the causes and effects of policy that has placed us at this current racial reckoning moment in the US, in which many had claimed to be post-racial after the election of Barack Obama.

The very fact that numerous Republican states have made united efforts to ban this book is a testament to censoring voices that offer productive solutions that sincerely attempt to lead to a more perfect union. A union that is unapologetically braggadocious about its freedom of speech. That is until it's time to deconstruct what is implied to "Make America Great Again?"

For who?
When was it great?
Why was it great?

... Are just a few of the questions that entangles mythology with reality for the sake of political aims. The 1619 Project disrupts that line of thinking by arguing on behalf of so much human potential made to unreasonably suffer because of primitive debunked logic that has not improved the lot of the country as a whole.

Included are poems, photographs, and essays that argue, humanize, question and romanticize moments in Black American history. Also included, is relentless pain, suffering and ridicule, yet Black Americans continue believing in the idea of democracy truly fulfilled one day for all Americans. And it will require an authentic moment of truth and reconciliation from us all to get there.

A truly monumental book!

72 people found this helpful

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Michael Haas

Excellent compendium of information.

Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2024

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Well written chapters on many important topics.

One person found this helpful

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karen bond

Excellent

Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2024

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Excellent book i found alot of things I didn't know

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MizzB

How the world was shaped by so-called white supremacy.

Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2024

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I bought this book a few months ago and have started reading it last month. It's a slow read and am only about a quarter of the way in, but it's very informative in regards to how this country that became the US, and the world in general, was created by Europeans who convinced themselves to be superior.

Some of what I've read I already knew from learning about it over the years and there were many accounts my never knew about, but not surprised. And despite what history has been taught, due to how European descendants choose to have history written, this book goes into deep detail of the previously untold history, or should I say the whitewashing of history, as never before told nor will ever be in history books.

Although I still have the rest of the book to read, I find that the author wrote this in great detail, with much research of the chronicles events that took place from across the pond to the land that's called the US.

19 people found this helpful

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JerWinners

Informative

Reviewed in the United States on September 18, 2024

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Very Informative

3 people found this helpful

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Ricardo Mio

Read it and weep

Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2023

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His name was Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a New York entertainer who performed under the stage name of T. D. Rice. In 1828, Rice had been a nobody actor in his early twenties, touring with a theater company in Cincinnati, when he saw a decrepit, disfigured old Black man singing while grooming a horse on the property of a white man whose last name was Crow. "On went the light bulb," writes Wesley Morris, one of several authors who composed essays for "The 1619 Project". "Rice took in the tune and the movements but failed, it seems, to take down the old man's name. So in his song, the horse groomer became who Rice needed him to be."

"Weel about and turn about jus so," went his tune, "ebery time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow."

With that, this white man invented the character who would become the mascot for two centuries of legalized racism in America.

Morris continues: "That night, Rice made himself up to look like the old Black Man, or some such thing like him, because for this getup, Rice most likely concocted skin blacker than any actual black person's; he invented a gibberish dialect meant to imply Black speech, and he turned the old man's melody and hobbled movements into a song-and-dance routine that no white audience had ever experienced before. What they saw caused a sensation. The crowd demanded twenty encores.

"Rice had a hit on his hands," continues Morris. "He repeated the act again, night after night, for audiences so profoundly jolted that he was frequently mobbed during performances. Across the Ohio River, a short distance from all that adulation, was Boone County Kentucky, which was largely populated by enslaved Africans. As they were being worked, sometimes to death, white people, desperate with anticipation, were paying to see a terrible distortion of the enslaved depicted at play."

With that, a new form of entertainment was born, involving hundreds of white actors who, like T. D. Rice, night after night, on stages across America, would blacken their faces and perform song-and-dance routines, skits, and gender parodies. Writes Morris; "Its stars were the nineteenth-century versions of Elvis, the Beatles, and 'N Sync."

Film critic Wesley Morris is among the ten writers who wrote an essay for "The 1619 Project". All of these writers are graduates of mostly Ivy League universities; many are professors, and journalists who contribute regularly to a number of big-city newspapers, notably the New York Times. Under the creative leadership of journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New Times helped developed "The 1619 Project", beginning with an article it ran in an August 2019 issue. With help from ten contributors, "The 1619 Project" was compiled into a book. On May 4, 2020, the Pulitzer Prize was awarded to Ms. Hannah-Jones for her introductory essay.

The book is considered by some to be controversial because it challenges conventional U.S. history, beginning with the year 1619 when the first enslaved Africans were brought to America and sold into slavery. Indeed, the book has been banned in some state schools, notably in Florida. According to Florida governor, Ron Desantis, the book was banned because it made students "uncomfortable." Without question, the book will make you uncomfortable, as the slavery story--of African Americans working from sun-up to sun-down in the stifling heat of the southern states, without pay and with no chance of escape--is painful to read. On top of that it doesn't speak well of the Europeans who settled this land, and employed slave labor to work the fields of their southern plantations, which made them rich.

Today, those of European descent are called "whites" and those of African descent are called "blacks". Neither term existed when the first Africans were brought here. The labels were later applied to differentiate between the two races, making the ruling whites out to be good God-fearing Christians, and the blacks as little more than beasts of burden, deserving of their fate. People still use these labels, not realizing they are artificial and have no bases in anthropology.

It should be noted that "white" slavery existed in the American colonies before Africans arrived. For "white" workers, it was enslavement that lasted only for seven years. At the end of seven years, the enslaved worker would be set free. It was how many Europeans got here; they were mostly impoverished people who could not afford to pay for passage to America. To get here they agreed to serve their benefactor for seven years as payment for the ocean journey.

On the other hand, Africans were bound and brought here against their will, were then whipped into submission, and destined for a life-time of slavery. If they managed to escape (as some did), when caught, they would be put to death. For the unfortunate African slave, it was a life without hope.

However uncomfortable this makes readers feel, it's important to learn about this particularly ugly part of American history, rather than to downplay it, as some have, by deny its veracity.
And there's more. After reading about the inhumane treatment of African-American slaves, you'll learn about things you thought you knew of the inhumane treatment of indigenous Americans, which will make you equally uncomfortable.

As bad as this is, it's how American enslavers, who called themselves Christians, justified their actions based on a few selected passages in the Old Testament. They did this while conveniently ignoring the New Testament, in particular Christ Jesus' precepts in the Sermon on the Mount, the Apostle Paul's "Ode to love", or John's revelation, that "God is Love", not to mention Moses and the Ten Commandments (every commandment of which slave masters repeatedly broke). If nothing else, had enslavers only followed Christ Jesus' Golden Rule, they never could have lived with themselves, nor enjoyed the ill-gotten fruits they were enjoying from the sweat of African-American slaves.

You'll also learn how the Founding Father's justified slavery, while waging a war to free themselves from the perceived tyranny of England's King George III. Several of the more enlightened Southern Founders, relieved their guilt by believing that slavery would eventually die out on its own, as it had in the Northern states. Take for example Thomas Jefferson, who brilliantly crafted The Declaration of Independence.

Like other plantation owners he wasn't prepared to release his slaves from bondage. He was counting on gradual emancipation to somehow solve the problem for him. What no one seemed to have considered at the time, was the vastly greater number of slaves living in the south as opposed to the few slaves who lived in the north, and that the south--particularly the Deep South--was still importing African slaves while the northern workforce was filling its depleted ranks with immigrant European free labor.

Years later, when it was clear that southern slavery was not fading away but spreading into the western territories, Jefferson grew alarmed. In his final years, it awoke him, as he put it, "like a fire bell in the night," filling him with terror. He believed the two races could not live together in harmony. Once freed, Jefferson believed the former slaves would take revenge on their former captors. "We have the wolf by the ears," he lamented, "and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go."

The good news in this book, is that they could free them without fear of reprisal, as witness the horrific violence that struck the A.M.E. Church in South Carolina, in 2015, by a white supremacist named Dylann Roof. Roof entered the Black church and opened fire on a Bible study group. The group included Clement Pinckney, both pastor of the church and a state legislator.

What was striking to many observers was the speed with which some of the families were willing to forgive Roof. They told him so at his bond hearing just days later. "I forgive you," said Anthony Thompson, whose wife was killed. "My family forgives you." The daughter of Ethel Lance, who was also killed, told Roof, "May God forgive you. And I forgive you." That Sunday, Reverend Norvel Golf, Sr., told the congregation, "We still believe that prayer can change things . . . prayer not only changes things, it changes us."

When the slaves were freed after the Civil War, it was not African Americans who attacked their former enslavers (as Jefferson had feared), but the former enslavers who attacked African Americans. Often they would hide their true identity cloaked in white gowns and white hoods (as the Ku Klux Klan) and wait until the cover of night to attack: burning down homes, businesses, and churches, and from their farms stealing livestock, wagons, plows, and other valuables.

These white marauders reserved their worst punishment for any black man suspected of looking on a white woman. The authors point out that this fear was in fact projection on the part of white men, who, as enslavers had a long history of raping back women.

The good news in this book is how African-Americans embraced Christianity, despite having never been taught to read (learning to read and write was outlawed in most southern states). How did this happen? Learning to understand and love the Bible, was a long process that had begun when some unknown enslaver decided his slaves needed to learn Scripture to save their souls, and began reading tracts from the Bible (but not stories from Exodus that told of Moses leading the Hebrews out of slavery and into freedom.) From this meek beginning, African-Americans learned Bible stories by heart, and put the words into songs, which they would sing in the cotton fields all day long, which would give them a certain amount of relief. These songs evolved into what would become known as Gospel Music, and eventually Blues and Jazz, and in our century, Rock 'N' Roll, Soul, and Hip Hop.

Also discussed is their influence on American cuisine, cuisine that tended to be bland. They enlivened it with an imaginative use of herbs, spices, and peppers. They did it by making use of pigs feet, knuckles, rib meet, and other cuts of pork and beef that their white enslavers deemed as unfit to eat.

As much as Black Americans strived to be accepted, and to participate in American democracy by simply voting, they struggled to achieve this goal through much of the twentieth century, despite faithfully fighting in two world wars, only to return home to find nothing of substance had changed. It wasn't until the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, that meaningful change began to take place. It was evident, first by the success of a number of black entertainers, college professors, and black businessmen, and culminated in the election of the first Black man to he elected president in 2008.

Still the struggle is not over, as Obama was succeeded by a white supremacist in 2016. Also Black Americans find themselves still targeted by white police officers, and being stopped for DWB (driving while black), that continues to be a real problem if your skin is black.

Fittingly, Ms Hannah-Jones concludes her book with a chapter entitled "Justice", from which I have excerpted the following paragraph:

"The efforts of Black Americans to seek freedom through resistance and rebellion against violations of their rights have always been one of this nation's defining traditions. But the country had rarely seen it this way, because for Black Americans, the freedom struggle has been a centuries-long fight against their own fellow Americans and against the very government intended to uphold the rights of its citizens. Though we are seldom taught this fact, time and time throughout our history, the most ardent, courageous, and consistent freedom fighters have been Black Americans."

- END -

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Stephen Johannensen

I’d call it a must read

Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2024

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I understand why some places are using this book in classrooms. It can open your eyes to a different interpretation of our history. We should never be afraid of someone else’s views and in fact we should celebrate them. I would love it if we could put this ugly history behind us, I’m optimistic it’s coming. This book and others like it are important for everyone to read.

5 people found this helpful

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Michael Scott JP MP

Our History

Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2024

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Professor Hannah-Jones Book is a vital and important document review and insight into the history of our time and the black peoples lived experience especially the underpinning of the American economic miracle born of 18 century Black energy innovation and creativity and the lived experience of the Baldwinesq "after times"

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John

The book explains how thing have come to be.

Reviewed in Canada on September 16, 2024

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Full of history about slavery in America and how this influences all of us to this day. A must read for every citizen.

Liv

BOOK: The 1619 Project

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 9, 2024

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Great, book. Very insightful!

Patrick C. K.

One of the best I have read.

Reviewed in Italy on October 30, 2023

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This is one of the best books I have read. Full of history, compassion, suffering, hope and triumphs. As many already stated in the reviews, this should be required reading for students (rather than banned as it is in some schools that were forced to do so by their state governments).

Andreas

Wichtiger Beitrag zum Verständnis der US-amerikanischen Geschichte und Gegenwart

Reviewed in Germany on December 28, 2021

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Viele setzen den Beginn der US-amerikanischen Geschichte auf das Jahr 1776, den Sieg über die Kolonialmächte, die Verfassung. Das 1619-Projekt datiert den Ursprung der USA zurück auf die Ankunft des ersten Schiffes, gefüllt mit afrikanischen Sklav*innen zur Ausbeutung im beginnenden amerikanischen Wirtschaftssystem. Was Nikole Hannah-Jones im NY Times Magazin begann, liegt nun ausgearbeitet als Buch vor. Wie brisant das Projekt ist, zeigt sich auch an den heftigen Gegenreaktionen des konservativen Lagers in den USA, das mit Macht versucht, den Einsatz des 1619-Projekts in Schulen zu unterbinden.

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Lamiya Bata

Important | heartbreaking | A must read

Reviewed in Australia on January 13, 2022

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This is a phenomenal book- coming from someone who predominantly reads fiction. It provides a critical analysis of North American history and answers a lot of questions about why the USA is the way it is in present day.
It is heartbreaking to read at times. But it would be a disservice to the enslaved people to look away from their story, a story that isn’t often told or given its due respect.

P.s. the 1619 podcast is exceptional too!

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