The 1619 Project Has Failed. Why Do Academics Still Take It Seriously?

In many respects, the 1619 Project exemplifies why Americans have come to distrust elite institutions. Six years ago, when The New York Times launched this self-described “reframing” of America’s founding, distinguished scholars from across the political spectrum identified egregious errors of historical fact and interpretation in this work.

The problems were numerous and noticed immediately. By misrepresenting evidence, the 1619 Project’s lead organizer Nikole Hannah-Jones falsely depicted the American Revolution as a pro-slavery cause. A second 1619 Project essay by Matthew Desmond misinterpreted the economic dimensions of slavery as part of an attempt to indict American capitalism for the author’s own ideological reasons. In the process, he flubbed basic math and inadvertently tried to resuscitate the discredited “King Cotton” thesis of economic development that the Confederacy enlisted to its cause in 1861.

A simple correction to these and other errors by the Times could have salvaged the project’s remaining components, and perhaps even spawned a constructive scholarly dialogue. Instead, Hannah-Jones attacked and smeared her scholarly critics. The newspaper stood behind her and, perhaps more alarming, so did most of the academic profession.

Beyond the subject-matter experts who identified the original errors, the university system began to shower Hannah-Jones with rewards and emoluments for her allegedly “groundbreaking” work. She went on a promotional tour across college campuses at rates that often exceeded $40,000 for speeches lasting an hour or less. In 2021, Hannah-Jones attempted to convert her journalistic fame into a faculty position at the University of North Carolina, despite lacking a terminal degree or any academic research publications. After turning down the offer amid controversy over her demand to start the job with full tenure, she accepted a similar tenured position at Howard University.

Elsewhere in academia, even scholarly criticism of the 1619 Project’s content became taboo. In 2022, activist faculty members launched a cancellation campaign against James Sweet, the president of the American Historical Association, after he penned a mild criticism of Hannah-Jones’s work over its political presentism. Within hours of Sweet’s column appearing online, a Twitter mob of academics had launched a campaign demanding his resignation. A day later, Sweet was forced to issue an apology to save his job—not for any error he had made in his analysis, but because he offended the political sensibilities of other historians simply by criticizing the 1619 Project and thereby allegedly lending credibility to its opponents on the right.

To the outside observer, these and other similar responses from the 1619 Project debate had a clear discrediting effect on university elites. When academia rallied around Hannah-Jones, they showed that a progressive-left political narrative took priority over truthfulness and fidelity to historical evidence.

At the same time, though, it is a grave mistake to conclude that this embarrassing episode discredits scholarly expertise. If anything, the opposite is true. In no small irony, the 1619 Project gained currency precisely because of a breakdown in rigorous peer review and an unwillingness to adhere to scholarly standards about interpreting our past.

The problems began when Hannah-Jones selected her writers and assigned the topics she wished to cover. Rather than consulting with subject-matter specialists in the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the economics of slavery, she recruited a team of journalists, political editorial writers, and non-experts to craft her narrative. The factual errors about the causes of the Revolution came from Hannah-Jones’s own pen, after she ignored the Times’ fact-checker, a distinguished historian of the American founding who warned her to soften her attribution of these events to the defense of slavery. In selecting Desmond to write about the economics of slavery and capitalism, Hannah-Jones opted to rely on a sociologist who possessed no scholarly background or expertise on either of these topics.

In total, only two of the 1619 Project’s original ten feature essays came from historians, and neither of them was a specialist in the crucial period between the American founding in 1776 and the Civil War, which ended in 1865. In place of measured and nuanced historical expertise, Hannah-Jones relied on opinion journalism that privileged peripheral accounts of America’s past. Her claims about the American Revolution largely copied, albeit in a clumsy fashion, the narrative of Lerone Bennett Jr.’s 1962 book Before the Mayflower, a provocative but flawed account of slavery’s role in the Founding that most mainstream historians reject. Desmond’s argument relied almost exclusively on his reading of the “New History of Capitalism” school—a small group of far-left historians who in the early 2010s published widely panned and error-riddled accounts of slavery’s economics, with the aim of promoting a reparations program and attacking free-market capitalism in the wake of the 2008–09 financial crisis.

When basic factual errors became apparent in their respective essays, Hannah-Jones and Desmond panicked. Rather than engage with their scholarly critics, both rushed to assemble a retroactive list of footnotes that gave the appearance of scholarly backing. In reality, these hastily conducted searches ignored any evidence that contradicted their narrative. Instead, they cherrypicked sources based on selective agreement with their claims rather than accounting for the broader scholarly literature on these subjects.

When the pushback against the 1619 Project continued, they resorted to coverup. In early 2020, the Times quietly ghost-edited a controversial line of text that designated the year “1619 as [America’s] true founding,” in place of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Desmond revised his own essay for a new book version of the 1619 Project, quietly deleting factual errors about antebellum cotton-production statistics and a bizarre claim that tried to link Microsoft Excel to plantation accounting books. The 1619 Project’s editors also tried to recast it as “journalism” to justify a lower standard of scholarly rigor, albeit selectively so. When its factual defects came under public scrutiny, they became permissible editorial flourishes under the cover of the newspaper’s opinion page. When Hannah-Jones spoke on college campuses, and when the Times released an accompanying K–12 history curriculum based on the 1619 Project, it purportedly met the scholarly standards of classroom instruction.

In the end, the 1619 Project faltered owing to its lack of rigor and its willful shirking of basic scholarly expertise. And yet its reputation thrived in the university system, precisely because academic elites set aside their own expertise to promote the 1619 Project’s political narrative. The answer to both is a recommitment to higher standards of scholarly rigor.