In an early-morning Twitter announcement Sunday, President Donald Trump said that the Department of Education was considering investigating whether schools are teaching The New York Times’ controversial re-framing of the Revolutionary War and America’s founding, the “1619 Project.” He also suggested that schools using the curriculum could face a loss of federal funding.
The “1619 Project,” which won a Pulitzer Prize last year, but which has also been widely criticized by prominent historians, suggests that America’s founding did not occur in 1776, but rather in 1619, when the first slaves arrived in the new world. The project claims that “capitalism” was at the root of the Revolutionary War, and suggests that the Founding Fathers fought to preserve a slave economy from the British Empire, which, at the time, its author, Nikole Hannah-Jones claims, was on its way to abolishing the practice.
The project itself forces teachers and students to view the Revolutionary War through the lens of racial oppression and aims to put “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative,” even if such reframing is, according to some scholars, historically questionable.
“The project, created by Nikole Hannah-Jones, was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary,” Fox News notes. “However, multiple historians have criticized the series of articles for multiple inaccuracies, including the argument that the American Revolution was fought not to achieve independence from Britain, but to preserve the institution of slavery.” – READ MORE
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