The latest hits on the 1619 Project: Designed obsolescence?
Woody Holton
Platypus Review 148 | July/August 2022
THE BOOK VERSION OF the 1619 Project was published on November 16, 2021, and the same period also witnessed the birth of a new genre of critical essay, written while The 1619 Project was in press but responding not to the book but to the August 18, 2019 special issue of the New York Times Magazine that it supersedes.[1] I am grateful for the Platypus Review’s invitation to respond to two of these designed-for-obsolescence articles, along with James M. Vaughn’s thought-provoking essay on my own specialty, the American Revolution.[2]
James Oakes is a founding father of 1619 Project denunciation, having joined four other scholars to lodge numerous grievances against it in a letter that appeared in the Times on December 29, 2019. Since then, these leading critics have continued their crusade, for example in extended interviews at the World Socialist Web Site, the quirkiest of the many anti-1619 organs.
In his latest installment, appearing in the fall 2021 issue of Catalyst, Oakes takes Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein to task for saying that most of what makes the United States exceptional, from its slang to its violence, grew out of race and slavery.[3] I agree; Silverstein ought to have used a less categorial phrase, such as “were heavily influenced by.”
But Oakes believes the entire 1619 Project was “riddled with egregious factual errors,” an assertion that strikes me as strange for three reasons. First, Oakes accuses the 1619 authors of making several claims they did not actually make. Second, his own essay itself abounds in easily-documented mistakes. There is no reason for us to feel indignant at these errors — we all make them — just at Oakes’s righteous indignation. Oakes’s most interesting complaints about the 1619 Project target aspects of the 2019 magazine articles that the authors corrected in the 2021 book, which actually appeared before Oakes’s essay.
In this last sense, Oakes’s “What the 1619 Project Got Wrong” resembles Matthew Karp’s July 2021 Harper’s essay, “History as End: 1619, 1776, and the Politics of the Past.”[4] Together his and Oakes’s articles present us with a rare opportunity. We can compare the changes these two critics demanded to those that had already been made when their criticism appeared. I hope to show that if Oakes and Karp had waited for the book, their articles would have required even more revisions than they demand from the 1619 Project.
Oakes’s first grievance against the 1619 Project has to do with the year in its title. He is astonished that its authors “claim to have discovered the historical significance of the year 1619,” when a Dutch warship entered Chesapeake Bay and sold white Virginians “20. and odd Negroes.” Actually, though, none of the eleven 1619 authors accuses professional historians of missing the significance of that year, only “most Americans.” Contrasting what Oakes’s subjects wrote to what he claimed they wrote reminds us that the 1619 Project is intended as public history, aimed less at scholars than at non-specialists.
Oakes accuses the 1619 authors of falsely saying “the 1619 Project represents a salutary corrective to the way US history has been taught to schoolchildren for decades,” but his accusation is itself false.[5] If you download the entire special issue of the New York Times Magazine for free at pulitzercenter.org, you will find no such criticism of K12 or college textbooks or teachers. Ironically, in the book version, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Project’s creator, comes close to what Oakes falsely accuses her of doing in the magazine two years earlier: she criticizes the history books she was assigned in her Waterloo, Iowa, public school in the 1980s.
Oakes also insists that the 1619 authors exaggerated the impact of the white overthrow of Reconstruction, completed in 1877. He paraphrases their argument as, “white Redeemers reestablished control and restored slavery, if by another name.”[6] But none of them said that, the closest any came being Hannah-Jones’s uncontroversial observation that “The systemic white suppression of black life was so severe that this period between the 1880s and the 1920 and ’30s became known as the Great Nadir, or the second slavery.”
It would be tedious to list every false accusation that Oakes levies against the 1619 Project. Suffice to say that if those eleven magazine essays had actually indulged in the exaggerations he attributes to them, I would be as indignant as him.
But Oakes’s exasperation with the Project’s mistakes and supposed mistakes would have been so much more persuasive if there were not so many errors in his own short essay. The first of these begins, ironically enough, with a goof he failed to detect in the 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones, a New York Times Magazine education reporter, repeated the common misconception that the Africans forcibly landed in Virginia in August 1619 were the first to reach English America. Oakes could have cited any number of his fellow academic historians — for example, Harvard’s Bernard Bailyn in his 2012 The Barbarous Years — documenting earlier arrivals.[7] Instead Oakes insists, with great conviction, “We all knew that 1619 was the year the first enslaved Africans were brought to the British[sic] colonies of North America.”[8]
Incredibly, considering that his specialty is the nineteenth-century United States, Oakes also rejects the 1619 author Jamelle Bouie’s assertion that slavery “fueled” the growth of the northern economy. Surely Oakes knows that textile manufacturing — which used slave-grown cotton to produce cloth that was worn, in large part, by slaves — had become, by 1860, “the leading industry in the United States,” as Ronald Bailey notes.[9] Indeed it is difficult to imagine America’s first industrial boom without enslavers as both suppliers and customers. Oakes states that the value of northern manufacturers’ “clocks, hats, farm implements, cigars, plates, and silverware” exceeded that of textiles—a rather underhanded way of acknowledging that cloth nearly equaled the value of all other northern manufactures put together.[10]
Describing Congress’s Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Oakes affirms that “The slaveholders had secured a new fugitive slave law, but they could not enforce it.”[11] Tell that to Anthony Burns and the other escapees whom U.S. marshals helped return to slavery. It is true that black and white northerners rescued many African Americans from the marshals, but if Oakes is going to call the 1619 authors to account for excessively categorial declarations, he must be held to the same standard.
Oakes informs us that when the African American historian George Washington Williams stressed the importance of slavery in books like The History of the Negro Race in America, 1619–1880, which appeared in 1882, he was “swimming with the tide.”[12] It is true that other brave black scholars published similar work in the late nineteenth century, but the clear implication of Oakes’s metaphor is that most white historians of that era did so, too, a claim that is — to borrow one of the anti-1619 writers’ favorite words — risible.
Where Oakes really trips up is the American Revolution. He falsely says “it was the revolution that inspired the world’s first abolitionist movement.” Actually, small but effective bands of anti-slavery activists had gathered in Britain as well as Quaker Pennsylvania before the revolution. And as A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., Simon Schama, and others have shown, British abolitionists in 1772 achieved a notable success: the Somerset decision, prohibiting the man who asserted ownership of James Somerset from forcibly removing him from England and all but abolishing slavery in the mother country.[13] Certainly Somerset would not ascribe his liberation to the American Revolution.
As the 1619 Project noted, on November 15, 1775, Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, issued an emancipation proclamation, offering freedom to Patriots’ slaves who would enlist against their owners. Dunmore’s proclamation infuriated white colonists, fueling support for the Declaration of Independence that Congress adopted nearly eight months later. Most historians of the American Revolution agree on this point, but Oakes and other anti-1619 writers doubt the proclamation could have had much impact, since independence was already inevitable by November 1775. Actually, whites had been sharing rumors about British officials and blacks reaching out to each other since September 1774, when few whites outside New England had favored independence. In the fall of 1774 and throughout 1775, numerous whites expressed their fury at British officials’ alleged and actual cooperation with African Americans. For evidence, search Twitter for #VAbeforeDunProc and #NCbeforeDunProc.
In denying the African American role in the outbreak of the American Revolution, Oakes ignores reams of documents.[14] But when he discusses the September 3, 1783 peace treaty that ended the Revolutionary War, he comes close to fabrication. In the treaty, he says, “the Americans accepted that slaves who escaped to British lines and were emancipated during the war would not be returned to their owners.”[15] The treaty clause dealing with slaves was copied directly from the preliminary articles of peace of November 30, 1782. Inserted at the insistence of U.S. treaty commissioner Henry Laurens, a slaveholder and former slave trader from South Carolina, this clause committed the British to evacuating the United States “without . . . carrying away any Negroes or other property of the American inhabitants” — the opposite of what Oakes affirms.
To his credit, British commander-in-chief Guy Carleton disregarded this agreement, which conflicted with his government’s earlier promise to the slaves, and about three thousand African Americans evacuated New York with the British in 1783. But they did so over the strenuous objections of white Americans, especially their commander-in-chief, George Washington. (Oakes is on firmer ground in saying the United States acquiesced in these slaves’ liberation in treaties signed in 1795 and 1815.)
I do not think Oakes should feel embarrassed about getting so many American Revolution facts wrong. It is not his specialty. What ought to embarrass him and the other super-critics is the way they dismiss the 1619 Project as mere “ideology,” “riddled with egregious factual errors” — all from atop their mountain of swiss cheese.[16] I am sick to death of the double standard.
We may never know why Professors Oakes and Karp chose to publish their critiques of the 2019 version of the 1619 Project while the 2021 version was in press. But I, for one, relish the opportunity to compare their grievances to how the 1619 authors responded to earlier criticism. Given the natural human tendency to dig in, it is refreshing to discover that they took the brickbats seriously and thoroughly revised their essays.
In her Pulitzer Prize winning introduction to the original 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones stated that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere.” In response to the critics (which included me, on this point), Hannah-Jones has eliminated her assertion that Governor Dunmore and other British officials freed North American slaves out of humanitarian sentiment. In its place she paints a vivid picture of an alliance of convenience: enslaved Americans were desperate for freedom, and the British needed workers, especially fighters. So, starting in the summer of 1775, hundreds of African Americans rallied to Dunmore and other royal officials, infuriating many southern whites. As revised, Hannah-Jones’s analysis strikes me as unassailable.
In other areas, the 1619 authors made major changes, though probably too few to appease their critics. Karp observes that the 2019 magazine articles focused more on what whites have done to African Americans than on how blacks have fought back. He notes that Frederick Douglass received less attention in the 1619 Project than in the self-styled “1776 Report” produced by a commission appointed by Donald Trump. Moreover, the August 2019 special issue of the New York Times Magazine never mentioned such civil rights icons as A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, and Rosa Parks. Except for Parks, none of these makes it into the book version of the 1619 Project, which, like the 2019 magazine package, contains no chapter on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. But several nineteenth-century abolitionists who went unmentioned in the 2019 version, including Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, do receive recognition in the book. Frederick Douglass went from two mentions in 2019 to more than two dozen in the book.
The question is nonetheless raised: is it appropriate for a scholar criticizing a work of African American history to demand that it make the Black History Month compromise of showcasing black heroes instead of white oppressors? Karp triumphantly observes that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “makes only one appearance in the 1619 Project, the same number as Martin Shkreli.” Dr. King appears more than twenty times in the book version of the 1619 Project, but the original King / Shkreli quotient made sense, given that the Project unapologetically focuses more on wrongs than remedies. Like it or not, Shkreli is a major figure in black history. As Matthew Desmond mentions in both versions of his 1619 essay — and Karp pointedly does not in his — African Americans disproportionately suffered when Shkreli raised the price of vital pharmaceuticals to levels that few could afford. As long as the authors get their history right, as for the most part they do, especially in the book, I do not think we critics ought to be telling them what kind of history to write.
Like many other critics of the 1619 Project, Oakes protests its treatment of African Americans’ white allies. With its “black nationalist perspective,” he says, it “erases all evidence that white Americans were ever important allies of the black freedom struggle.”[17] That is another of his exaggerations, one that he repeats throughout his essay, so he may be somewhat comforted to see that white abolitionists fare better in the book version. Martha S. Jones pays tribute to them. Lynn Nottage’s epistolary short story — a work of art, in my opinion — portrays a white Canadian preacher who helps a runaway slave. And so on. In her introductory essay of 2019, Hannah-Jones stated that, faced with slavery and then segregation, “For the most part, black Americans fought back alone.” Many readers saw her as saying zero whites participated in the black freedom struggle, so in the book version, she clarifies that she is only referring to the majority of whites.
But no one is going to mistake the 1619 Project for a celebration of white saviors.
In the book as in her 2019 essay, Hannah-Jones acknowledges that Abraham Lincoln “opposed slavery as a cruel system at odds with American ideals.” But in both venues, her emphasis falls on his less well known racism. That focus infuriates Oakes, but he must have some inkling of how tired most African Americans (and many of their white allies!) are of the dominant culture’s celebration of their supposed white saviors, from the stock image of Lincoln freeing cowering slaves to Robert Gould Shaw dominating the movie Glory and Mississippi Burning's FBI agents — of all people — being depicted as the real heroes of the Civil Rights Movement.
Hannah-Jones’s 2019 depiction of Lincoln was not balanced (the book version is much more so), but given how heavily popular culture has listed toward white saviors, I think she was right to supply the counterweight that might someday right the ship.
In other areas, the 1619 authors made few changes between 2019 and 2021. Karp and Oakes complain that the magazine articles say much more about continuities than change over time. Karp even brands the 1619 Project “neo-originalist,” thus associating it with the jurisprudence of Antonin Scalia. If stressing continuity really is a crime, the book version re-offends. Karp rightly notes that focusing on what did not change makes for a deeply depressing story. Reminding us that “one key function of the old liberal history was to fortify belief in the course of incremental progress,” he compliments Hannah-Jones for recognizing that “black Americans have made astounding progress” — but then chides her and the other authors for not offering more examples of black lives getting better.[18]
Some deny it, but all historians are products of their time. The special issue of the New York Times Magazine appeared in August 2019, after numerous police killings of unarmed black men, along with the continued mass incarceration of African Americans and the reemergence under Trump of hard-core white supremacy. That our era has produced a black history project that perceives more continuity than change and thus offers little in the way of hope should not be blamed on the project’s authors. Rather, to paraphrase James Baldwin, their dark tone may tell us more about our era than many of us wish to know.
The book version of the 1619 Project adds a chapter by Ibram Kendi that is entitled “Progress” but does not chronicle victories. Instead it shows how the illusion of progress can lead to regress, most flagrantly in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), in which the Roberts Supreme Court cited progress since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as justification for gutting it, opening the floodgates to the voter-suppression legislation now reaching its crest. In a November 8, 2021 interview on C-SPAN’s After Words, Hannah-Jones candidly stated, “I don’t think that this is a hopeful book.”[19] Therein may lie the 1619’s cardinal sin in the eyes of some progressive historians: its emphasis is not on progress. And like Marley’s Ghost, it speaks no comfort.
Another carryover from the 2019 to the 2021 version of the 1619 Project will especially irk Oakes. By 1619, he points out, the Spanish and Portuguese had been dragging Africans to their American colonies for more than a century. So why place so much emphasis on that year? In the book version, Hannah-Jones answers that question. Those “20. and odd Negroes” landed in Virginia one year before the Mayflower, to quote (as she does) the title of the 1962 volume by Lerone Bennett Jr. that so powerfully affected generations of African Americans, including a black girl attending a mostly-white high school in Waterloo, Iowa in the 1980s. If black people reached English North America a year before one of the reddest of its red-letter dates — the Mayflower’s arrival at Plymouth in 1620 — that chronological precedence opens up the possibility that at least some lines of causation have likewise run from African Americans to whites. To my mind, that is a more empowering notion than the mini-biographies of black heroes that Karp found too scant in the 1619 Project.
Still, Hannah-Jones and Karp share an interest in African American agency, which means both could probably offer James Vaughn notes on how to address the one aspect of his wide-ranging Platypus essay, “1776 in World History: The American Revolution as a Bourgeois Revolution,” that keeps bugging me. The subjects of nearly all of Vaughn’s verbs are either abstractions or elites. He opens with a tribute to “humble artisans and the laboring poor,” but then no such classes figure in his narrative of the origins of the American Revolution, which focuses on the Radical Enlightenment of Jean-Jacque Rousseau and l’Abbé de Raynal.[20]
In Vaughn’s defense, he gives us ambitious history on a hemispheric scale, and most other practitioners of that dark art share his inattention to the agency of the oppressed. Indeed, one of the enduring criticisms of Immanuel Wallerstein’s otherwise-astounding work on “world-systems” is its inability to see pre-1789 workers influencing events.
One classic story that makes no sense absent an assessment of the impact of ordinary people is the American Revolution, as I show in my new book Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution. Look at the revolution’s origins. The resistance that Native Americans mounted against the white colonists who coveted their land cost the deeply-indebted British government dearly, driving royal officials to two momentous decisions. In 1763, they prohibited colonists and land speculators from claiming land west of the Appalachian Mountains. The Proclamation of 1763 was ineffective against settlers, but it infuriated land speculators like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin, since it prevented them from taking title to native land.
In a further effort to keep colonists and Native Americans apart, all in hopes of preventing another expensive frontier war, Britain decided to keep 10,000 troops in America in 1763, at the end of its most recent clash with France and Spain. To help finance this force, assigned mostly to the Anglo-Indigenous border, Parliament two years later adopted the Stamp Act, which, like the Proclamation of 1763, contributed mightily toward souring relations between white colonists and the mother country. The Proclamation and the Stamp Act might never have been adopted if Native Americans had had as little influence on white politics as most people imagine.
I have already noted that in 1774 and 1775, African Americans initiated an informal alliance with the British, infuriating whites and helping push many over the edge into independence. The capstone grievance in the Declaration of Independence is, “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” Congress would have been more truthful had it reversed that sentence’s subject and object, because it was actually enslaved Americans, not the British, who initiated their alliance.
I am a great admirer of Vaughn’s book The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III: The East India Company and the Crisis and Transformation of Britain's Imperial State (2019), which shuttles effortlessly between Boston, Britain, and Bengal. But I do not think either his book or his December 2013 – January 2014 Platypus Review article is sufficiently sensitive to the influence of workers. Fortunately, scholars like Gerald Horne are showing us how to analyze structures and conjunctures as well as grand events without losing sight of the people.
One small sign of what might be possible arises from a phrase that Vaughn’s essay quotes three times: “empire of liberty.” Thomas Jefferson is generally credited with coining that term for the United States in a December 1780 letter, but he actually appears to have borrowed it from a broadside published earlier that year by Esther de Berdt Reed, founder of a Philadelphia women’s group that went door to door raising money for the troops. To justify this unladylike initiative, Reed recurred to great women of history like Catherine the Great and England’s Elizabeth I, both of whom had “extended the empire of liberty.” I wonder how a consummate scholar of empire like Vaughn might use fragments like the fact that a woman coined “empire of liberty” to help de-masculinize his very masculine field.
Turning to Vaughn’s thesis that the American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, I accept that its eventual result was to pave the way for capitalist development in the United States, but with one major qualification: the route from A to Z was astonishingly convoluted. As Vaughn notes, the process began with a counter-revolution that, had it been successful, would have left British North America less likely than ever to take off economically. Like the Bourbon powers, Britain came out of the Seven Years’ War (actually 1754-1763) determined to gain greater control over its colonists, most of all by arresting their westward expansion (as already noted) and by stopping them from illegally importing the French and Spanish molasses with which they made rum. Vaughn rightly describes a “reactionary tide sweeping across the British political order in the decades following the Seven Years’ War.”[21] Since the American Revolution was a successful effort to stem that tide, it might be more accurately, if also more clunkily, described as a counter-counter-revolution!
Vaughn’s “reactionary tide” originated in Parliament, which ruled the most bourgeois empire on earth, so to my mind, Parliament’s initiatives in the areas of taxation, territory, and trade — the actual starting point of the American Revolution, as Vaughn notes — were at least as much of a bourgeois revolution as the provincial resistance against them.
Had the American Revolution ended in 1783, the year the colonists made peace with the former mother country, it would not have been much of a bourgeois revolution. Although freed from British mercantilist restrictions on their trade, the thirteen states remained incapable of enforcing commercial restraints of their own. Worse, they were governed by highly democratic assemblies that were unusually amenable to voters’ demands for easy escape from their contracts with creditors. Had that situation continued, the new states would have been less fertile fields for capitalist development than the colonies they had replaced.
What made the American Revolution bourgeois was the adoption in 1788 of the U.S. Constitution, which empowered the federal government to regulate trade and thus incubate local manufacturing. Still more important, the Constitution prohibited the states from “impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” It thereby made the United States safe for capitalist investment.
Vaughn’s essay is something of a throwback in attributing the ideals of the American Revolution primarily to the European Enlightenment. Without denying the influence of the French philosophes and other European thinkers he quotes, I will conclude this essay by drawing attention to three other ideological currents that fed into the revolution: evangelicalism, artisan republicanism, and the ideology of black freedom.
America’s revolution was powerfully influenced by a religious movement that felt the effects of the Enlightenment even while constantly clashing with it. This was the Great Awakening, a mid-eighteenth-century evangelical revival most associated with the English itinerant George Whitefield. Patrician Bonomi and others have shown that the Awakening did for the colonies’ Ninety-Nine Percent what the European Enlightenment did for elites: it boosted their self-confidence (the only thing better than having nature and reason on your side was having God) and also accustomed them to options. Once you win the right to choose your local minister, the thinking goes, you start to think you can choose your prime minister as well.
The American Revolution’s reliance upon evangelicals and the Enlightenment was especially evident in the great strides it made toward protecting freedom of religion. Sometimes dissenters explicitly offered to support the revolution if the Patriots would guarantee them religious toleration. Prince William County, Virginia, Baptists told Patriot leaders that if they would disestablish the Anglican Church, Baptists would “gladly unite with our Brethren of other denominations, and to the utmost of our ability promote the common cause of Freedom.”
On January 16, 1786, Virginia became the first of the original thirteen states to adopt a religious freedom statute. It had been written by Jefferson and promoted by James Madison. But as Rhys Isaac, John Ragosta, and others have shown, the Virginia assembly would never have adopted that law in the absence of massive petitions and pressure from evangelicals.
In 1970, the German scholar Willi Paul Adams pointed out that outside New England, most elite North American colonists saw “republic” as a dirty word. The remarkable transformation that had many or most free Americans proudly proclaiming their new governments republican by the end of 1776 owed less to the European Enlightenment than to what Sean Wilentz has called the “artisan republicanism” of urban workers and craftspeople. The penman of the artisan republicans was of course Thomas Paine. Vaughn rightly notes that Paine represented a radical strand of Enlightenment thought — so radical that The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason would turn countless acolytes of the Enlightenment against him. The seeds of that reaction were already evident in the numerous public and private denunciations of Paine’s Common Sense — not for advocating independence but for saying the old colonial governments should be replaced with republics.
Since anti-republican conservatives did not consider Paine and his ilk truly Enlightened, the artisan republicanism that he represented deserves attention as a separate strand of revolutionary thought.
Most Americans misunderstand the purpose of the Declaration of Independence, since Congress primarily pitched it at an audience of one: King Louis XVI of France. Delegates believed that if they could formally sever ties with Britain and get word of that decision to Paris fast enough, French warships transporting Louis’s troops might arrive in American waters as early as the late summer of 1776.
In this, its primary purpose, the Declaration of Independence failed. French soldiers and sailors would not actually reach American shores until the summer of 1778. Had that been the end of it, the Declaration might well have been forgotten. But before the year 1776 was out, Lemuel Haynes, a free black soldier in George Washington’s Continental Army, had written an anti-slavery pamphlet called “Liberty Further Extended,” opening it with the passage from the Declaration of Independence affirming that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Haynes’s epigraph made him the first person ever to quote what would become the Declaration’s most iconic phrase — and as it turned out, he and other abolitionists, black and white, contributed mightily toward elevating its status. Eric Slauter discovered that the vast majority of the Americans who quoted “created equal” between 1776 and 1799 — 70%, my student assistant confirmed — were abolitionists. These anti-slavery writers thus began the process of transforming Congress’s failed diplomatic communiqué into a universal declaration of human rights.
So black freedom ideology must take its place alongside evangelicalism, artisan republicanism, and of course the European Enlightenment ideas showcased by Vaughn as the principal strands of thought that went into the American Revolution. The black role in the foregrounding of “created equal” deserves further scrutiny, and I can already think of a possible venue: perhaps the editors of The 1619 Project will decide that the best response to their many fervent critics is to bring out a second volume. |P
[1] The author wishes to thank UofSC student Riley Sutherland for help on this essay.
[2] See James M. Vaughn, “1776 in world history: The American Revolution as bourgeois revolution,” Platypus Review 62 (December 2013 – January 2014), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2013/12/15/1776-in-world-history/>.
[3] See James Oakes, “What the 1619 Project Got Wrong,” Catalyst 5, no. 2 (Fall 2021), available online at <https://catalyst-journal.com/2021/12/what-the-1619-project-got-wrong>.
[4] Available online at <https://harpers.org/archive/2021/07/history-as-end-politics-of-the-past-matthew-karp/>.
[5] Oakes, “What the 1619 Project Got Wrong.”
[6] Ibid.
[7] Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 174.
[8] Oakes, “What the 1619 Project Got Wrong.”
[9] Ronald Bailey, “The Other Side of Slavery: Black Labor, Cotton, and Textile Industrialization in Great Britain and the United States,” Agricultural History 68, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 44.
[10] Oakes, “What the 1619 Project Got Wrong.”
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Cf. Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007).
[14] 76 of which I collected at <https://bit.ly/CountdownTo1619>.
[15] Oakes, “What the 1619 Project Got Wrong.”
[16] Victoria Bynum et al., letter, New York Times Magazine, December 29, 2019; Oakes, “What the 1619 Project Got Wrong.”
[17] Oakes, “What the 1619 Project Got Wrong.”
[18] Karp, “History as End.”
[19] Available online at <https://www.c-span.org/video/?515705-1/after-words-nikole-hannah-jones>.
[20] Vaughn, “1776 in world history.”
[21] Ibid.
