Authored by Phillip Magness via Quillette.com,
The history of the American Revolution isn’t the only thing the New York Times is revising through its 1619 Project.
The “paper of record” has also taken to quietly altering the published text of the project itself after one of its claims came under intense criticism.
When the 1619 Project went to print in August 2019 as a special edition of the New York Times Magazine, the newspaper put up an interactive version on its website. The original opening text stated:
The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It 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. [emphasis added]
The passage, and in particular its description of the year 1619 as “our true founding,” quickly became a flashpoint for controversy around the project. Critics on both the Left and Right took issue with the paper’s declared intention of displacing 1776 with the alternative date—a point that was also emphasized in the magazine feature’s graphics, showing the date of American independence crossed out and replaced by the date of the first slave ship’s arrival in Jamestown, Virginia.
For several months after the 1619 Project first launched, its creator and organizer Nikole Hannah-Jones doubled down on the claim. “I argue that 1619 is our true founding,” she tweeted the week after the project launched. “Also, look at the banner pic in my profile”—a reference to the graphic of the date 1776 crossed out with a line.
It’s a claim she repeated many times over.
But something changed as the historical controversies around the 1619 Project intensified in late 2019 and early 2020. A group of five distinguished historians took issue with Hannah-Jones’s lead essay, focusing on its historically unsupported claim that protecting slavery was a primary motive of the American revolutionaries when they broke away from Britain in 1776. Other details of the project soon came under scrutiny, revealing both errors of fact and dubious interpretations of evidence in other essays, such as Matthew Desmond’s 1619 Project piece attempting to connect American capitalism with slavery. Finally back in March, a historian who the Times recruited to fact-check Hannah-Jones’s essay revealed that she had warned the paper against publishing its claims about the motives of the American Revolution on account of their weak evidence. The 1619 Project’s editors ignored the advice.
Throughout the controversy, the line about the year 1619 being “our true founding” continued to haunt the Times. This criticism did not aim to denigrate the project’s titular date or the associated events in the history of slavery. Rather, the passage came to symbolize the Times’s blurring of historical analysis with editorial hyperbole. The announced intention of reframing the country’s origin date struck many readers across the political spectrum as an implicit repudiation of the American revolution and its underlying principles.
Rather than address this controversy directly, the Times—it now appears—decided to send it down the memory hole—the euphemized term for selectively editing inconvenient passages out of old newspaper reports in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Without announcement or correction, the newspaper quietly edited out the offending passage such that it now reads:
The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. 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.
Discovery of this edit came about earlier this week when Nikole Hannah-Jones went on CNN to deny that she had ever sought to displace 1776 with a new founding date of 1619. She repeated the point in a now-deleted tweet:
“The #1619Project does not argue that 1619 was our true founding. We know this nation marks its founding at 1776.”
It was not the first time that Hannah-Jones had tried to alter her self-depiction of the project’s aims on account of the controversial line. She attempted a similar revision a few months ago during an online spat with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.
But this time the brazen rewriting of her own arguments proved too much. Hannah-Jones’s readers scoured her own Twitter feed and public statements over the previous year, unearthing multiple instances where she had in fact announced an intention to displace 1776 with 1619.
The foremost piece of evidence against Hannah-Jones’s spin, of course, came from the opening passage of from the Times’s own website where it originally announced its aim “to reframe the country’s history” around the year “1619 as our true founding.” When readers returned to that website to cite the line however, they discovered to their surprise that it was no longer there.
The Times quietly dropped the offending passage at some point during the intervening year, although multiple screencaps of the original exist. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine suggests the alteration came around late December 2019, when the 1619 Project was facing an onslaught of criticism over this exact point from several distinguished historians of the American founding.
It wasn’t the only edit that the newspaper made to further conceal its previous denigration of 1776. Prompted by the discovery of the first deletion, Twitter users noticed another suspicious change to the project’s text. The print edition of the 1619 Project from August 2019 contained an introductory passage reading:
In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed.
The website version of the 1619 Project now reads:
In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed.
This additional reference to the 1619 origin point, underlined in the original print version, is no more.
Whatever the exact occasion for the changes, the Times did not disclose its edits or how they obscured one of the most controversial claims in the entire 1619 Project. They simply made the problematic passages disappear, hoping that nobody would notice.
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Would you trust that face?
Seriously, just look at it.
When I initially saw her face I thought alright, I finally found a clown for my kids birthday party…Damit, not that sort of clown. The search goes on.
Who knew Bozo had a sister? Another example of Hemingway’s comment on wokesters from 90 odd years ago. Displaying “a uniformity of eccentricity.”
When you promote anything this stupid on its very face should you take seriously the author or its supporters?
Too many people are looking for something for nothing,
or to create mayhem for past problems. The NYT is an
enemy of the people/all people actually.
When this stupid shit is being forced into young, impressionable minds that have been made dull and dumb by miseducation, then I take her and its supporters very seriously, because they’re very dangerous.
This ^^^^
More shades of SA. Traitors to the people this NYT stirring social
unrest and the blab about slavery. Better the paper should concentrate
on present day slavery because that is alive and thriving. Instead,
NYT is fomenting violence and mayhem. Very shameful, these virtue
signaling pukes…
Due to 1.4 percent of American owning slaves,of which 3,000 of those were black themselves, in the peak slavery year of 1860, all of modern America now has a black problem and it is a plague on civilized society.
America as a nation owes nothing to blacks. 1.4 percent of 31 million does not a nation make. If anything blacks owe the nation a least a trillion in reparations for decades of murder, rape, robberies, incarceration, increased law enforcement, free education, housing, medical care food and cash, not counting the anguish and grief caused to families of the victims of brutal black assaults and murders.
This is our nation stuck on black. Ever single day. No one in America is safe.
https://abc7chicago.com/several-charged-in-dupage-county-home-invasions-shooting/6395784/
Malik Pitts, 22, of Broadview; Isaiah Johnson, 21, of Blue Island; and Keytori Jackson, 22, of Broadview appeared in bond court Sunday, where Judge Timothy McJoynt denied bond for Pitts and Johnson and set bond at $500,000 for Jackson.
“The conduct alleged in these charges is shockingly violent and demonstrates a complete disregard for our laws and for human life,” Berlin said.
All three face felony attempted murder, home invasion and aggravated battery charges. Their next court appearance is scheduled for Sept. 28.
Margaret Sanger had a solution, and that solution would have worked better if the same people that complain about blacks wouldn’t also keep doing everything in their power to thwart that solution. There is a reason we have Planned Parenthood – it is probably the best tax dollars we spend, and if it had never existed we’d have 65 million blacks running amok in our country right now. We can barely survive 40 million, and we’d have collapsed by now if we’d gotten to 65 million.
Sad to say but you speak the truth.
Ice- Why establish an outlet to limit population while at the same time paying them per child to produce a proxy annual income?
To have them voting Democrat for 200 years, turn the Republic into a “democracy”, and let loose the American financialization project without dissent.
Ice and Yo correct. I would venture to add that more white babies are aborted by PP. TPTB don’t care about the color of the sacrifice, do they?
In the current year, this is what passes for higher learning.
Laura Walther
@laura__walther
Temple University professor pressuring students to tell him whether “dick size matters” during a class discussion. This is the type of educational experience Temple charges $35K for?
Like Wakanda these turd stirring BLM will fabricate and extrapolate all manor of historical nonsense to further their free ride on society and the leftist assholes throughout our free society will promote it perpetuating a plantation mentality among the poor and poorly educated dependent class to keep them chained to the system with the illusion Of freedom and equality .
When IQ’s of about 80% of blacks hover barely above mental retardation you can forget all about equality and only hope for some tolerable existence . Feed and house and support at some level and cage the ones that get off the farm !
Looters are shot dead in times of civil unrest !
I have a solution.
Any African genes that survive the coming revolution should be put on the auction block offshore to pay for their ticket home. Let them enjoy “African” equality in a diamond sluicing operation in west Africa.
There is still slavery today in Mauritania, Morocco, Mali, Niger, Southern Algeria, Libya, Sudan, and Chad but we don’t hear one peep from these mulattoes. I still think we should have a government all expenses paid summer program where we send these blacks and mulattoes to live someplace like the slums of Monrovia, Liberia for 3 months. When they return home they will be instilled with the wonderment of Wakanda and we’ll see if their message changes. Would be an interesting experiment.
Iceman
I’m 1/4 Scotch so I’m always looking to save a few pennies(squeeze, depending on who you ask). Why pay for the return trip? By the time they swim home they will be fit enough to work for a living.
Blacks can’t swim. Have you ever seen them in a New Orleans hotel swimming pool during the Essence Festival week? Pool is unusable for weeks afterwards.
How unfortunate!
Why let them back?
If “Sideshow Bob” had a sister….she would be it.
They simply made the problematic passages disappear, hoping that nobody would notice.
Kind of like what they did at Glacier National Park with their signage that claimed a certain glacier would be gone by now.
When I studied engineering in the 1980s the university told us that superconductors would lead to levitating cars. How’d that work out?
VW perfected that. There is a Engrish version somewhere, sorry.
You can see its airflow pushing the soda can out of the way, so obviously not superconductor-based. And where do you park that? In a large egg carton?
That’s no memory hole. That’s a mudshark hole.
Ha, OT LHG, moving to montvale va in November, can you recommend a gun club/range in the area?
Got 11 acres on a dead end road, but the wife wants to join gun club/ How cool is that?
I personally espouse the view that the manufacture of bicycles in America should be made the official “start point” of the US. And the wellspring and center of our understanding of and the importance of America. Out of bicycle manufacturing came motorcycles which gave us cool boots and coats, which was a sidelight to Arnold Schwarznegger’s role as the terminator in T2, easily his greatest role. Motorcycles also were fundamental in creating motorcycle gangs, one of America’s most interesting and notorious subcultures. Also bicycles in America eventually led to Greg Lemond, which in turn led to Lance Armstrong who is perhaps the greatest example of what exactly performance enhancing drugs can do for top level athletes-outside the Williams sisters, of course. Plus there is Bicycle Playing Cards, so, yeah. And, if blacks in America were given the choice to straighten up and fly right or be given free passage back to Africa, I wonder how many of them would sign up for what.