The New York Times’ 1619 Project
Online forum with David North and Professor Adolph Reed
What is Left of American Democracy on the Eve of the 2020 Elections?
28 October 2020
The event, hosted by San Diego State University’s Department of Political Science, is taking place Wednesday, October 28 at 7:00 pm Eastern, 4:00 pm Pacific.
It is all just a metaphor: The New York Times attempts yet another desperate defense of its discredited 1619 Project
By Tom Mackaman and David North, 23 October 2020
In spite of Times editor Jake Silverstein’s deletion of the “true founding” claim and his other word changes, the Times’ essential position remains the same: The American Revolution was a retrograde event in which the defense of slavery was the primary motivation.
Factional warfare erupts in New York Times over the 1619 Project
By Tom Mackaman and David North, 15 October 2020
Following the publication of a highly critical essay by a New York Times columnist, the public statements issued by the publisher and leading editors reflect tensions provoked by the exposure of the 1619 Project’s falsification of history.
The New York Times and Nikole Hannah-Jones abandon key claims of the 1619 Project
By Tom Mackaman and David North, 22 September 2020
The Times has abandoned, without any public announcement or explanation, the central thesis that 1619, not 1776, was the “true founding” of the United States.
Student paper defends plan for segregated living spaces at New York University
By Niles Niemuth, 2 September 2020
Responding to the outpouring of public opposition triggered by the WSWS’s exposure of plans for separate housing for black students, the Washington Square News published a defense of the initiative Monday.
Fraudulent Associated Press “fact-check” targets WSWS article on student housing segregation project at NYU
By the WSWS Editorial Board, 26 August 2020
The AP’s “fact-check” of the WSWS is a dishonest piece of hack journalism aimed at discrediting an accurate account of New York University’s plans to accept segregated student housing.
The cancellation of professor Adolph Reed, Jr.’s speech and the DSA’s promotion of race politics
By Niles Niemuth, 18 August 2020
The effective ban on criticism of identity politics within the DSA and vicious denunciations of Marxism as “class reductionism” are in line with the Democratic Party’s broader goals of promoting racialist divisions.
Bernard Bailyn, historian of American colonial and revolutionary periods, 1922–2020
By Tom Mackaman, 13 August 2020
Bailyn leaves behind a significant body of work that broadened the understanding of the intellectual conceptions that found expression in the American Revolution.
The two American Revolutions in world history
By David North, 4 July 2020
Today marks the 244th anniversary of the public proclamation of the Declaration of Independence, on July 4, 1776, which established the United States of America. It is not only the direct political impact of the document, but, rather, the principles it proclaimed that determined its world historical stature.
New York Times’ Charles Blow demands the removal of monuments to Washington and other “amoral monsters”
By Niles Niemuth, 1 July 2020
The Times’ latest assault on the American Revolution is a part of the effort by the Democratic Party and its operatives to derail the popular multiracial protests against police violence in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.
The Times’ 1619 Project is damned with faint praise
Hannah-Jones receives Pulitzer Prize for personal commentary, not historical writing
By Tom Mackaman and David North, 9 May 2020
The Pulitzer awards took no notice of the New York Times’ pretentious claims that the 1619 Project is an important contribution to the understanding of American history. It granted Hannah-Jones an award for “Commentary.”
American Historical Review publishes letter on 1619 Project by Tom Mackaman and David North
20 April 2020
The letter was a reply to AHR Editor Alex Lichtenstein, who previously wrote a column defending the 1619 Project.
New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein attempts to slither away from central 1619 Project fabrication
By Tom Mackaman, 16 March 2020
Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein is attempting to palm off a minor semantic change as a cure for a totally false presentation of the American Revolution.
New York Times ignored objections raised by 1619 Project fact-checker
By Eric London, 9 March 2020
A fact-checker for the 1619 Project has revealed that the Times ignored her objection to the Project’s claim that the American Revolution was a counterrevolution waged to defend slavery.
Tom Mackaman interviewed on 1619 Project by history podcast
18 February 2020
John Fea interviewed Mackaman on his podcast “The Way of Improvement Leads Home.”
On the eve of the Academy Awards ceremony
New York Times’ Wesley Morris complains that eight of the films nominated for Best Picture “are about white people”
By David Walsh, 8 February 2020
Morris, the ideological product of decades of selfish identity politics, espouses a thoroughly racialist interpretation of history and culture. He seemingly cannot perceive anything else aside from race.
A reply to the American Historical Review’s defense of the 1619 Project
By David North and Tom Mackaman, 31 January 2020
The disrespect expressed by editor Alex Lichtenstein toward leading historians reveals the extent to which racialist mythology, which has provided the “theoretical” foundation of middle-class identity politics, has been accepted, and even embraced, by a substantial section of the academic community as a legitimate basis for the teaching of American history.
My Response to Alex Lichtenstein Regarding the 1619 Project
By Victoria Bynum, 31 January 2020
Bynum, one of the many academics who have raised fundamental criticisms of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, wrote this letter to the editor of the American Historical Review in reply to his defense of the project published online last week.
Martin Luther King Jr. and the fight for social equality
By Tom Mackaman and Niles Niemuth, 23 January 2020
King’s conception of a mass democratic movement for civil rights based on the unified action of all the oppressed sections of the population is being replaced with an essentially racialist narrative that presents all of American history in terms of a struggle between whites and blacks.
Google suppressing World Socialist Web Site content in its search results for the New York Times’ 1619 Project
By Kevin Reed, 20 January 2020
The popular, authoritative and original content published by the World Socialist Web Site on the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project is being manually suppressed by Google in search results.
“The saddest part of this is that the response of the Times is simply to defend their project”
An interview with historian Clayborne Carson on the New York Times’ 1619 Project
By Tom Mackaman, 15 January 2020
Professor Carson is professor of history at Stanford University and director of its Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. He is the author and editor of numerous books on King and the civil rights movement.
The New York Times’ 1619 Project promoted in schools across the US
By Genevieve Leigh, 10 January 2020
Despite its historical errors and omissions, major efforts are underway to establish the 1619 Project as the official narrative of American history at schools and major academic institutions.
“A preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”
Oxford historian Richard Carwardine on the New York Times’ 1619 Project
By Tom Mackaman, 31 December 2019
The World Socialist Web Site recently spoke with leading Lincoln biographer Richard Carwardine about the Times’ 1619 Project
The 1619 Project and the falsification of history: An analysis of the New York Times’ reply to five historians
By David North and Eric London, 28 December 2019
New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein, reviving discredited racialist distortions of the American Revolution and Civil War, refuses to correct historical errors in the 1619 Project.
“We all want justice, but not at the expense of truth”
Historian Gordon Wood responds to the New York Times’ defense of the 1619 Project
24 December 2019
The Times refused a request to correct what five leading historians described as “factual errors” which evinced “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.” This is Professor Wood’s response.
“It’s a much more complicated story than reducing it down to slavery being the engine of capitalism”
An interview with historian Dolores Janiewski on the New York Times’ 1619 Project
By Tom Peters and John Braddock, 23 December 2019
Professor Janiewski is a lecturer in American history at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand with a focus on the post-Civil War reconstruction, the Civil Rights movement and anti-communist witch hunts.
Historian Victoria Bynum replies to the New York Times
A historian’s critique of the 1619 Project
By Victoria Bynum, 22 December 2019
Historian Victoria Bynum, author of Free State of Jones and distinguished emerita professor of history at Texas State University, wrote the following reply to the New York Times’ 1619 Project.
“Reinventing the past to suit the purposes of the present”
An interview with political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. on the New York Times’ 1619 Project
By Tom Mackaman, 20 December 2019
The World Socialist Web Site recently spoke with Professor Reed at his University of Pennsylvania office.
The New York Times’ “1619 Project”
Nikole Hannah-Jones, Shell Oil and mass killings in Africa
By Trévon Austin and Bill Van Auken, 18 December 2019
Hannah-Jones, the principal spokesperson for the “1619 Project,” appeared on a platform sponsored by Shell Oil, which is implicated in massive crimes against the human rights of the Ogoni people in Nigeria.
“I don’t believe this stuff about ‘intrinsic differences’ between people”
Workers respond to New York Times’ 1619 Project’s claim of an unbridgeable racial divide in US
By our reporters, 17 December 2019
In contrast to the Times’ dystopian portrayal of American society as riven by different races with unbridgeable differences, workers who spoke to the World Socialist Web Site expressed a broad striving for unity.
Perspectives for the coming revolution in America: Race, class and the fight for socialism
By Joseph Kishore, 2 December 2019
This is an edited version of a report delivered by Socialist Equality Party National Secretary Joseph Kishore to meetings in Michigan and California on the New York Times’ “1619 Project.”
“When the Declaration says that all men are created equal, that is no myth”
An interview with historian Gordon Wood on the New York Times’ 1619 Project
By Tom Mackaman, 28 November 2019
Gordon Wood is professor emeritus at Brown University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, as well as Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815.
Audio recording refutes Hannah-Jones’ claim that she was falsely quoted by the World Socialist Web Site
By Eric London, 27 November 2019
The World Socialist Web Site publishes the audio of Hannah-Jones’ remarks.
1619 Project director speaks at New York University
Nikole Hannah-Jones, race theory and the Holocaust
By Eric London and David North, 26 November 2019
There was not a single statement made by Hannah-Jones at NYU on historical issues that withstands serious examination.
IYSSE holds meeting on “Race, Class, and the fight for Socialism” at New York University
By Owen Mullan and Sandy English, 21 November 2019
The meeting was addressed by socialist scholar Tom Mackaman who responded to the historical falsifications put forward by the New York Times’ 1619 Project.
An interview with historian James Oakes on the New York Times’ 1619 Project
By Tom Mackaman, 18 November 2019
The World Socialist Web Site recently spoke to James Oakes, Distinguished Professor of History and Graduate School Humanities Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, on the New York Times’ 1619 Project.
“Opposition to slavery has also been an important theme in American history”
An interview with historian James McPherson on the New York Times’ 1619 Project
By Tom Mackaman, 14 November 2019
The World Socialist Web Site recently spoke to McPherson, professor emeritus of history at Princeton University, on the New York Times’ 1619 Project.
The “Irrepressible Conflict:” Slavery, the Civil War and America’s Second Revolution
By Eric London, 9 November 2019
The following is the second in a series of three lectures delivered in response to the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which presents a falsified, racialist interpretation of American history.
Slavery and the American Revolution: A Response to the New York Times 1619 Project
By Tom Mackaman, 1 November 2019
This is the text of the lecture delivered by Tom Mackaman at the University of Michigan on October 22, 2019 as part of a series on the New York Times' "Project 1619."
An interview with the author of The Free State of Jones
Historian Victoria Bynum on the inaccuracies of the New York Times 1619 Project
By Eric London, 30 October 2019
Bynum is an expert on the attitude of Southern white yeomen farmers and the poor toward slavery.
SEP and IYSSE meeting series in the United States
Race, Class and the Fight for Socialism: Perspectives for the Coming Revolution in America
11 October 2019
This meeting series will refute the historical falsifications advanced in the New York Times “1619 Project,” explain their underlying political motivations and present the strategy for socialist revolution in America today.
“1619” and the myth of white unity under slavery
Book review: Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South by Keri Leigh Merritt
By Eric London, 9 September 2019
Merritt’s research refutes the New York Times’ Project 1619 claim that poor whites benefited from slavery.
The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history
By Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North, 6 September 2019
The 1619 Project, launched by the New York Times, presents racism and racial conflict as the essential feature and driving force of American history.
The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history—Part Two
By Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North, 4 September 2019
The 1619 Project, launched by the New York Times, presents racism and racial conflict as the essential feature and driving force of American history.
The New York Times’ 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history
By Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North, 3 September 2019
PART ONE | PART TWO | COMBINED
The 1619 Project, launched by the New York Times, presents racism and racial conflict as the essential feature and driving force of American history.
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