52 11.14.21
a revolution conceived mainly as sordid, racist
and divisive be the inspiration for a nation?’’
Instilling civic pride, of course, has always
been one of the purposes of national history.
The political goals of Bancroft’s narrative are
self-evident, as are those of George Washington
Williams’s ‘‘History of the Negro Race.’’ But it is
only in the past few decades, since the historio-
graphical paradigm shift of the 1960s fi nally trick-
led into the public consciousness, that we have
had to face down the question of how to square
this purpose with an increasingly problematic
story line. Another way to pose the dilemma is
to invert Wood’s question: What if a revolution
conceived as sordid, racist and divisive cannot be
the inspiration for a nation? What then? Should
we set aside the best scholarship in favor of a uni-
fying myth? Is history a science or a patriotic art?
And what are its responsibilities? Democracy,
we are often told, requires a free press, one that
will hold power to account. Does it also require
a robust historical profession, free to ramify in a
hundred directions at once, not all of them inspir-
ing? Or in this regard do journalism and history
diff er, with journalism providing democracy its
greatest service when most unshackled and crit-
ical, while history operates best with the sense of
decorum and tradition that foments civic pride?
The answer may lie in another of history’s pur-
poses, one that draws it closer to a core mission
of journalism: to explain how we have arrived at
the world we inhabit. ‘‘History is worth writing
and studying primarily because of its power to
shape our thinking about our present and future,’’
Gary Nash wrote. With this purpose in mind, the
upheaval in American history seems less like a
destabilizing force and more like a movement
toward transparency, a clearing away of spin. With
any luck, our descendants will see the past from
a more propitious perspective than our own. But
we can perceive it only from our present reality:
a nation plagued by rampant inequality and racial
injustice, bitterly divided in its politics and inca-
pable of achieving unity on public-health goals or
the existential demands of climate change.
Over the years, many scholars have pointed
out the need for a story that better explains
how we got here. ‘‘Our times seem to call for
new myths and a revised master narrative that
better inspire and refl ect upon our true con-
dition,’’ observed the historian Nathan Irvin
Huggins in 1989. Standing in what he called
‘‘the backwash of the so-called Second Recon-
struction,’’ Huggins, who was the W. E. B. Du
Bois Professor of History and of Afro-American
Studies at Harvard, envisioned a narrative that
might take shape out of the fragmentation of
the new history, one that would be more chas-
tened but also, in a sense, more heroic: ‘‘Such
a new narrative would fi nd inspiration,’’ he
wrote, ‘‘in an oppressed people who defi ed
social death as slaves and freedmen, insisting
on their humanity and creating a culture despite
a social consensus that they were ‘a brutish sort
of people.’ Such a new narrative would bring
slavery and the persistent oppression of race
from the margins to the center, to defi ne the
limits and boundaries of the American Dream.
Such a new narrative would oblige us to face
the deforming mirror of truth.’’
This is, in a sense, what the 1619 Project set
out to do. As an issue of a magazine, produced
from start to fi nish in six months, it could only
partly achieve that goal. Whether the book has
drawn closer is for others to say, but our hope
in publishing it is to realize Nikole’s original
idea as fully as we can. To that end, ‘‘The 1619
Project: A New Origin Story’’ represents a sig-
nifi cant enlargement of the version of the proj-
ect we produced two years ago. That version
was not perfect, as few fi rst eff orts are, and the
enormous amount of feedback we’ve received
— both praise and criticism — has helped us
deepen and improve it. We revised and expand-
ed the 10 original essays and added seven new
essays from the historians and scholars Leslie
Alexander, Michelle Alexander, Carol Ander-
son, Anthea Butler, Martha S. Jones, Ibram X.
Kendi, Tiya Miles and Dorothy Roberts.
The original project also featured 17 works
of fi ction and poetry about specifi c moments
in the past 400 years; for the book, this time-
line has been expanded to include 36 pieces of
original imaginative writing, beginning with
a 1619 poem by Claudia Rankine and ending
with a 2020 poem by Sonia Sanchez. This liter-
ary element nods to the role of creative writing
in the Black historiographical tradition (as in
many others, from the Greeks to the Elizabe-
thans to the Ashanti). ‘‘For those of us whose
history has been erased,’’ the poet, novelist and
scholar Honorée Fanonne Jeff ers, who wrote a
poem for the book, told me, ‘‘it is important
for us to be able to imagine what our ancestors
went through.’’ All told, the book contains the
essays, poetry and fi ction of more than 50 writ-
ers, all of which was submitted to a peer-review
process involving more than 25 other scholars.
Their names are listed in the book, which also
contains footnotes to relevant documents and
works of historical scholarship.
I am aware that no matter how diligent the
work has been, the book will kick up a new
round of debates. After all, years of careful con-
sensus-building around the national history
standards did nothing to forestall that eruption.
But in a sense, these arguments themselves may
represent the apotheosis of our historiography.
‘‘Increasingly, I understand U.S. history as the his-
tory of debate, and our style of democracy as one
that moves only through contest and challenge,’’
Martha Jones told me. ‘‘We lament confl ict and
strife, but I think the lesson is that that’s exactly
how we do and must do democracy.’’
Perhaps, as Jones suggests, we are a nation
of argument that has been fooled all theseyears, through the exclusionary mythmaking
of an elite few, into thinking we were a nation
of consensus. Our present turmoil suggests as
much. The story of a country designed by Prov-
idence and set marching on the righteous path
by leaders of pure and noble purpose fails to
make sense of this moment, which requires a
deeper examination of our founding paradox.
It’s a particularly American irony that the
eff ort to do so has been deemed a ‘‘divisive
concept’’ and banned from the classroom in 12
states. We may need, instead, legislation that
requires us to study divisive concepts, beginning
with the most basic one of all: All men are creat-
ed equal. As Quarles and others have explained,
our founding concept of universal equality, in a
country where one-fi fth of the population was
enslaved, led to an increase in racial prejudice
by creating a cognitive dissonance — one that
could be resolved only by the white citizenry’s
assumption of Black inferiority and inhumanity.
It’s an unsettling idea, that the most revered
ideal of the Declaration of Independence might
be considered our original divisive concept.
Devotion to the traditional origin story of the
United States, and the hostile reaction that has
greeted nearly every attempt to revise it, have
prevented generations of Americans from learn-
ing how to accept this fundamental contradic-
tion at our core — the painful twinning of slavery
and democracy that began as far back as the
summer of 1619. But as we have seen, in a demo-
cratic nation, history does not stand still. As our
country has moved forward from its imperfect
beginnings, haltingly expanding its audacious
promise to enfranchise more and more of us, our
history has transformed behind us, rearranging
itself as the advance of our founding principles
enables us to see more of our American ances-
tors as having had a legitimate, recoverable per-
spective on the events of their own day.
We reached this stage only recently (and
should not consider our progress secure). As
Nikole pointed out in her prizewinning essay,
an essay that has done so much to stimulate
public engagement with American history over
the past two years, we Americans have precious
little experience of true, sustained multiracial
democracy. Our great experiment in self-gov-
ernance, deferred by nearly a century of slavery
after our founding and by another century of
Jim Crow voter suppression after emancipation,
really got underway only in 1965. You could see
the pitched battles over public memory that
have occurred since then as a product of the
new history’s corrosive eff ect on national unity;
or you could conclude that a republic founded
on an irresolvable contradiction — freedom and
slavery — was always going to wind up in an
irresolvable argument over how to tell its story,
that this contentiousness is American democ-
racy, that the loss of consensus means we’ve
fi nally arrived.