Historians Have Debunked The 1619 Project and There’s Nothing Left
by Claudia Henneberry
May 2026
Part One
In August, 2019, The New York Times Magazine published a revisionist historiographical work that includes essays, a podcast, and a book anthology, with the intention of reframing the narrative of U.S. history by highlighting the centrality of slavery and racism. The “education and race reporter,” a vicious and vile racist, Nikole Hannah-Jones, created and edited what she called, The 1619 Project. The Project is now in book-form, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.
To write the Project, Hannah-Jones “recruited a team of journalists, political editorial writers, and non-experts to craft her narrative,” said Dr. Phillip W. Magness, economic historian and the Chair in Political Economy at the Independent Institute, and author of The 1619 Project Myth. No experts in the Founding era nor the Civil War era were involved. Dr. Sean Wilentz, professor of American history at Princeton University and author of No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding, points out that none of The 1619 Project's feature articles on the crucial period from 1776 to 1865 came from experts in American slavery.
Jake Silverstein, the New York Times editor himself, admits that “the newspaper did not assemble a formal panel [of historians] for this project.”
Hannah-Jones’ lead essay for the 100-page journalistic endeavor asserts the central event in the founding of the United States was the first importation of enslaved Africans to Virginia in 1619 and that U.S. history and modern America are best understood as completely dependent upon the institution of slavery.
In other words, according to The 1619 Project, American history can only be explained through the lens of slavery.
Hannah-Jones’ claim that American history begins in 1619 and not 1620, with the arrival of the Pilgrims, was taken from “Black Power” journalist Lerone Bennett’s 1962 Before the Mayflower, to which she was introduced by her high school black studies teacher. Hannah-Jones presents it in The 1619 Project as historical fact.
Following the Times’ publication of The 1619 Project, many prominent historians came forward to contradict the preposterous claims in Hannah-Jones’ work. Many wrote letters, here and here, to The New York Times Magazine to express their “deep concern” with The 1619 Project’s “historically-limited view of slavery” and their “dismay” at its “treatment of major issues and personalities of the Founding and Civil War eras.”
The list of Prominent Historians who have debunked the 1619 Project are as follows: Peter W. Wood, Gordon S. Wood, James M. McPherson, Sean Wilentz, James Oakes, Victoria E. Bynum, Richard Carwardine, Clayborne Carson, Adolph Reed Jr., Dolores Janiewski, Adolph Reed, Jr., Robert Woodson (The 1776 Project), Phillip W. Magness, Mary Grabar, David North, Thomas Mackaman, William B. Allen, Michael A. Burlingame, Joseph R. Fornieri, Allen C. Guelzo, Peter Kolchin, Glenn W. LaFantasie, Lucas E. Morel, George C. Rable, Diana J. Schaub, Colleen A. Sheehan, Steven B. Smith, and Michael P. Zuckert.
Their criticisms were met with insult and derision, here, here, here, and here, along with editor Jake Silverstein asserting, “No corrections are warranted.”
Yet, edits were made, some under the radar. The Times published a correction on Aug. 15, 2019 reading: “An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It was approved on July 4, 1776, not signed by Congress on that date. The article also misspelled the surname of a Revolutionary War-era writer. He was Samuel Bryan, not Byron.”
In 2020, the online version of the New York Times’ The 1619 Project was quietly edited after considerable pushback from conservatives and historians.
They changed: “It [The 1619 Project] aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative” by removing “understanding 1619 as our true founding” to read: “It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
The editors also begrudgingly changed Hannah-Jones’ lead article that implies the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery, despite there being no shred of evidence for this assertion, to read “some colonists fought the American Revolution to defend slavery.”
Now, the 1619 Project is on Hulu and has been developed into school curricula.
Some historians wrote books refuting The Project:
The National Association of Scholars President, Dr. Peter Wood, explained in a 2021 interview with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the impetus behind The 1619 Project, beginning at 33:30: “The driving idea of The 1619 Project is to infuse more energy and more resentment into the racial divisions of the country.”
“I consider the 1619 Project to be mythmaking of a particularly vicious sort. It is aimed at fostering racial resentment and political division.”
Dr. Wood went on to indicate that Hannah-Jones’ political objective with The 1619 Project, based on an article written by her, is “massive reparations to anyone who can trace their ancestry back to an enslaved black person. The 1619 Project should, I think, be seen as an instrument for gaining and wielding power, forcing others to agree…”
Dr. Peter Wood points out The 1619 Project’s biggest errors:
These lies together paint a picture of America as a system and as a people wholly devoted to white supremacy – which was the primary mission for The 1619 Project.
Below are the facts presented by historians that contradict Hannah-Jones’ erroneous claims in The 1619 Project.
Part 2
Error 1: Slavery was somehow new to America in 1619
Error 2: America’s fundamental origins, from which our entire history and character have derived, lie in the arrival of slaves in Virginia in 1619
Error 3: The American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery out of fear the British were going to outlaw it
Error 4: Blacks “fought back alone” to secure their rights
Error 5: Plantation slavery was the foundation of American capitalism
Error 6: Lincoln was a racist intent on separating blacks and whites
Error 7: The nation’s entire history is best seen as a struggle by blacks against white supremacy
Other points omitted in The 1619 Project:
Conclusion
Dr. Robert Carle, professor of theology at The King’s College and contributor to The Federalist, reviewed Peter Wood’s book, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project:
“What binds our diverse population together is a common commitment to the founding documents. Citizens need to grow up knowing how these documents create and sustain a free, self-governing people under the rule of law. American school children should not be taught that the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were cynical plots to perpetuate slavery. Rather, these were aspirational documents written by people who were in vigorous pursuit of a vision of human equality.”
Slavery contradicted the founders’ love of liberty, but, sadly fell within the rule of law - until the laws were changed. “To tell the story of America requires telling how the laws were changed, and how resistance to changing them was overcome,” Wood writes.
For the sake of our country, we must reject the lies in The 1619 Project meant to poison the minds of future generations against America.
At 41:35 of this interview with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Dr. Peter Wood proclaims “No nation can exist that hates itself.”
by Claudia Henneberry
May 2026
Part One
In August, 2019, The New York Times Magazine published a revisionist historiographical work that includes essays, a podcast, and a book anthology, with the intention of reframing the narrative of U.S. history by highlighting the centrality of slavery and racism. The “education and race reporter,” a vicious and vile racist, Nikole Hannah-Jones, created and edited what she called, The 1619 Project. The Project is now in book-form, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.
To write the Project, Hannah-Jones “recruited a team of journalists, political editorial writers, and non-experts to craft her narrative,” said Dr. Phillip W. Magness, economic historian and the Chair in Political Economy at the Independent Institute, and author of The 1619 Project Myth. No experts in the Founding era nor the Civil War era were involved. Dr. Sean Wilentz, professor of American history at Princeton University and author of No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding, points out that none of The 1619 Project's feature articles on the crucial period from 1776 to 1865 came from experts in American slavery.
Jake Silverstein, the New York Times editor himself, admits that “the newspaper did not assemble a formal panel [of historians] for this project.”
Hannah-Jones’ lead essay for the 100-page journalistic endeavor asserts the central event in the founding of the United States was the first importation of enslaved Africans to Virginia in 1619 and that U.S. history and modern America are best understood as completely dependent upon the institution of slavery.
In other words, according to The 1619 Project, American history can only be explained through the lens of slavery.
Hannah-Jones’ claim that American history begins in 1619 and not 1620, with the arrival of the Pilgrims, was taken from “Black Power” journalist Lerone Bennett’s 1962 Before the Mayflower, to which she was introduced by her high school black studies teacher. Hannah-Jones presents it in The 1619 Project as historical fact.
Following the Times’ publication of The 1619 Project, many prominent historians came forward to contradict the preposterous claims in Hannah-Jones’ work. Many wrote letters, here and here, to The New York Times Magazine to express their “deep concern” with The 1619 Project’s “historically-limited view of slavery” and their “dismay” at its “treatment of major issues and personalities of the Founding and Civil War eras.”
The list of Prominent Historians who have debunked the 1619 Project are as follows: Peter W. Wood, Gordon S. Wood, James M. McPherson, Sean Wilentz, James Oakes, Victoria E. Bynum, Richard Carwardine, Clayborne Carson, Adolph Reed Jr., Dolores Janiewski, Adolph Reed, Jr., Robert Woodson (The 1776 Project), Phillip W. Magness, Mary Grabar, David North, Thomas Mackaman, William B. Allen, Michael A. Burlingame, Joseph R. Fornieri, Allen C. Guelzo, Peter Kolchin, Glenn W. LaFantasie, Lucas E. Morel, George C. Rable, Diana J. Schaub, Colleen A. Sheehan, Steven B. Smith, and Michael P. Zuckert.
Their criticisms were met with insult and derision, here, here, here, and here, along with editor Jake Silverstein asserting, “No corrections are warranted.”
Yet, edits were made, some under the radar. The Times published a correction on Aug. 15, 2019 reading: “An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It was approved on July 4, 1776, not signed by Congress on that date. The article also misspelled the surname of a Revolutionary War-era writer. He was Samuel Bryan, not Byron.”
In 2020, the online version of the New York Times’ The 1619 Project was quietly edited after considerable pushback from conservatives and historians.
They changed: “It [The 1619 Project] aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative” by removing “understanding 1619 as our true founding” to read: “It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
The editors also begrudgingly changed Hannah-Jones’ lead article that implies the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery, despite there being no shred of evidence for this assertion, to read “some colonists fought the American Revolution to defend slavery.”
Now, the 1619 Project is on Hulu and has been developed into school curricula.
Some historians wrote books refuting The Project:
- Peter W. Wood 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project.
- Phillip W. Magness The 1619 Project: A Critique
- Mary Grabar Debunking the 1619 Project
- David North and Thomas Mackaman - edited volume, The New York Times’ 1619 Project and Racialist Falsification of History.
The National Association of Scholars President, Dr. Peter Wood, explained in a 2021 interview with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the impetus behind The 1619 Project, beginning at 33:30: “The driving idea of The 1619 Project is to infuse more energy and more resentment into the racial divisions of the country.”
“I consider the 1619 Project to be mythmaking of a particularly vicious sort. It is aimed at fostering racial resentment and political division.”
Dr. Wood went on to indicate that Hannah-Jones’ political objective with The 1619 Project, based on an article written by her, is “massive reparations to anyone who can trace their ancestry back to an enslaved black person. The 1619 Project should, I think, be seen as an instrument for gaining and wielding power, forcing others to agree…”
Dr. Peter Wood points out The 1619 Project’s biggest errors:
- Slavery was somehow new to America in 1619
- America’s fundamental origins, from which our entire history and character have derived, lie in the arrival of slaves in Virginia in 1619
- The American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery out of fear the British were going to outlaw it
- Blacks “fought back alone” to secure their rights
- Plantation slavery was the foundation of American capitalism
- Lincoln was a racist intent on separating blacks and whites
- The nation’s entire history is best seen as a struggle by blacks against white supremacy
These lies together paint a picture of America as a system and as a people wholly devoted to white supremacy – which was the primary mission for The 1619 Project.
Below are the facts presented by historians that contradict Hannah-Jones’ erroneous claims in The 1619 Project.
Part 2
Error 1: Slavery was somehow new to America in 1619
- Dr. Gordon S. Wood, professor Emeritus of History at Brown University and foremost authority on the American Revolution: “The important point to make about slavery is that it had existed for thousands of years without substantial criticism.”
- Dr. James McPherson, Princeton professor emeritus of history and author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning Battle Cry of Freedom, widely regarded as the authoritative account of the Civil War, emphasizes that slavery was not unique to America and that the project fails to acknowledge the broader historical context of slavery globally.
- Dr. Peter Wood: “Black slavery had been here for nearly a century before 1619; other forms of slavery were indigenous to North America; the active slave trade to the English colonies was half a century in the future; and African slavery in the mainland English colonies was never more than a small fraction of African slavery in the New World, let alone in Africa and the Middle East.”
Error 2: America’s fundamental origins, from which our entire history and character have derived, lie in the arrival of slaves in Virginia in 1619
- Dr. Peter Wood argues that the arrival of the Pilgrims along with dozens of non-Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower is the real beginning of America. He proposes instead that we consider the drafting of the Mayflower Compact in 1620 as America’s founding event.
- African American History Professor, Leslie Harris, the New York Times’ own fact-checker for The 1619 Project, disputed the characterization of the Angolans who arrived in Virginia in 1619 as “chattel slaves.” In the early and middle years of the seventeenth century in Virginia, bondage labor was temporary, and Angolan men and women released from bondage labor often married white settlers and acquired considerable property.
Error 3: The American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery out of fear the British were going to outlaw it
- Dr. Sean Wilentz, professor of American history at Princeton University and author of No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding, points out “…Fear of a rising abolitionism in Britain was not a primary cause of the Revolution – or, for that matter, any cause at all. The very existence of such dedicated and influential rebels as John Adams and Thomas Paine, who reviled slavery, as well as Benjamin Franklin, who went on to head the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, confuted the essay’s claim. So, even more, did the fact that many if not most of the leading Loyalists in the lower South were slaveholders.” “It was the Americans, and not the British, who loudly called for abolishing the trade, in petitions that Crown officials rejected out of hand. Indeed, at the time of the Revolution, there was considerably more in the way of anti-slavery politics in the colonies than in Britain proper.”
- Professor Leslie Harris warned the Times in advance that there was no foundation for Hannah-Jones’ claim that the American Revolution was undertaken to protect the institution of slavery
- Dr. Gordon Wood, said, “The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world.” Abolition began in America, not Britain.
Error 4: Blacks “fought back alone” to secure their rights
- Dr. Victoria E. Bynum, Professor Emeritus of history at Texas State University specializing in the history of the Southern United States, says Hannah-Jones ignores important exceptions, including the Southern white “Scalawags,” many of whom were non-slaveholders, who fought against the Confederacy in the war and participated with blacks and Northern Republicans in passing the Reconstruction Amendments. Blacks did NOT struggle alone. The labor struggles included all races.
- Bynum: “Not only does Hannah-Jones ignore the Scalawags, but also Matthew Desmond, in his 1619 essay on capitalism and slavery, ignores non-slaveholding propertied farmers, the largest class of whites in the antebellum South, and from which many Southern Republicans emerged.”
- Bynum: “Hannah-Jones moves on to the Civil War and Reconstruction, barely touching on American abolitionism and ignoring the Free Soil Movement of the 1840s-1850s that opposed the extension of slavery in the western territories. Both were seeds of the antislavery Republican Party.”
- Bynum: “The 1619 Project makes no attempt…to explore connections between race mixing and the class history of the United States…some of our nation’s greatest historical moments of interracial class solidarity, the labor struggles [were] shared by working class people across the color line.”
- Bynum: “The 1619 Project ignores late 19th and 20th century interracial efforts to combat the power of corporations by an emergent industrial working class.”
Error 5: Plantation slavery was the foundation of American capitalism
- Dr. Mary Grabar, resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, executive director of Dissident Prof, and author of Debunking The 1619 Project, says “Slavery actually held-back the South economically. It was keeping wages down for poor whites. The South did not have the transportation infrastructure so it didn’t attract industry, etc. No slave society has prospered.” “Slavery did not build the wealth of the country.” “In 1830, 6% of whites owned slaves and 94% of free blacks owned slaves.”
- Dr. James Oakes, distinguished Professor of American Studies (expert on Emancipation) and Graduate School Humanities Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, posits: “Slavery made the slaveholders rich. But it made the South poor. And it didn’t make the North rich. The wealth of the North was based on the emerging, capitalist internal market that allowed the North to win the Civil War…. The legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth. The slave societies of the New World were comparatively impoverished. To say things like, the entire wealth of ‘the white world’ is based on slavery seems to me to ignore the enormous levels of poverty among whites as well as blacks.”
- Professor of Humanities at the University of Florida and eminent Civil War expert, author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President and Abraham Lincoln As A Man of Ideas, Dr. Allen Guelzo disputed this claim: “…southern agriculture before the civil war was a sloppy chaotic affair…only a few levels above hunting and gathering.” “…what the South saw in its plantations wasn’t capitalism but the opposite.” Writing in 1854, the pro-slavery propagandist George Fitzhugh described slavery as “a beautiful example of communism, where each one receives not according to his labor, but according to his wants.”
- Dr. Phillip W. Magness, economic historian and the David J. Theroux Chair in Political Economy at the Independent Institute, is the author of The 1619 Project Myth. Hannah-Jones chose Matthew Desmond, a sociologist “who possessed no scholarly background or expertise” in history nor economics, to write the essay on economics of the South. [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.” Moreover, “If you ask the junk historians the 1619 Project relies on, they claim 50% of the American economy’s linked to cotton. The actual numbers? It’s 5% of GDP before the Civil War. So it’s a big industry, but it’s a very small portion of the American economy, and they say this is the thing that drove the American economy to become wealthy.”
Error 6: Lincoln was a racist intent on separating blacks and whites
- Dr. James Oakes says: “It’s ridiculous. Most of what Abraham Lincoln had to say about African Americans was anti-racist.” Oakes says Lincoln always hated slavery. He was the first President to advocate for voting rights and jury service for some free Blacks. “If slavery isn’t wrong, nothing is wrong,” Lincoln said. From the start, Lincoln was anti-slavery and anti-racist. “If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal’; and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.”
- Dr. Phillip Magness: “Lincoln's measure [The Emancipation Proclamation], though military in nature, reflected his own longstanding antislavery beliefs. It freed 50,000 people almost immediately, and extended its reach to millions as the war progressed.”
- Dr. Sean Wilentz: Hannah-Jones claims that Abraham Lincoln was a racist who sought to ship freed Blacks back to Africa. In 1862, “many Black abolitionists supported the idea of colonization, including Martin Delany, Henry Highland Garnet, and Frederick Douglass’s sons, Lewis and Charles Douglass. Lincoln’s support for emancipation was never contingent on colonization.”
Error 7: The nation’s entire history is best seen as a struggle by blacks against white supremacy
- Gordon S. Wood: [The 1619 Project] "claims basically that nothing has ever gotten any better. That it’s as bad now as it was during slavery.…” This ignored how “[t]he Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world."
- James M. McPherson: [The 1619 Project] “left most of the history out," treating racism as the central theme while ignoring the "countervailing tendencies" of opposition to slavery and racism that have been an important theme in American history from the start (e.g., Quakers, abolitionists, radical Republicans, and interracial groups like the NAACP).
- Dr. Allen Guelzo: “It is the bitterest of ironies that the 1619 Project dispenses this malediction from the chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America, because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers.”
Other points omitted in The 1619 Project:
- Dr. Bynum: Multiracial communities are passed over by the 1619 Project
- Dr. Grabar: Society then was based on class, not race. Elite Black and mixed-race slave owners collaborated and socialized with whites. Even free Blacks did not want to attend school with former slaves during Reconstruction
- Dr. Bynum: Southern whites were among the most conservative members of the Republican Party
- Dr. Bynum: White supremacist Democrats derailed Reconstruction
Conclusion
Dr. Robert Carle, professor of theology at The King’s College and contributor to The Federalist, reviewed Peter Wood’s book, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project:
“What binds our diverse population together is a common commitment to the founding documents. Citizens need to grow up knowing how these documents create and sustain a free, self-governing people under the rule of law. American school children should not be taught that the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were cynical plots to perpetuate slavery. Rather, these were aspirational documents written by people who were in vigorous pursuit of a vision of human equality.”
Slavery contradicted the founders’ love of liberty, but, sadly fell within the rule of law - until the laws were changed. “To tell the story of America requires telling how the laws were changed, and how resistance to changing them was overcome,” Wood writes.
For the sake of our country, we must reject the lies in The 1619 Project meant to poison the minds of future generations against America.
At 41:35 of this interview with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Dr. Peter Wood proclaims “No nation can exist that hates itself.”