The New York Times' 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History

With essays and interviews drawn from the World Socialist Web Site, this book is the only scholarly and left-wing critique of the NYT 1619 Project, which is promoted as the pillar of a new racialist interpretation of American history.

The book features interviews with renowned scholars Gordon Wood, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum, Richard Carwardine, Clayborne Carson, Adolph Reed Jr., and Dolores Janiewski.

Historical essays bring forward the world-historic impact of the American Revolution and Civil War, and demonstrate the decisive role of class struggle in those events and subsequent history. A series of polemics expose the New York Times’ efforts to cover for factual errors in the 1619 Project.

An introduction by David North argues for the concept of objective truth, not only in the interpretation of history, but in science and art as well, against the relativization promoted under theories of racial identity, “whiteness,” and “critical race theory.”

An Afterward, “Trump’s 1776 Travesty”, exposes the nationalist myth-making at the heart of the right-wing critique of the 1619 Project and the Project itself, grounded in racialist theory.

As Walter Benn Michaels puts it, “Everyone interested in understanding what happened then and what’s actually happening now needs to read it.”

David North has played a leading role in the international socialist movement for forty-five years; he is the chairperson of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party (US). His many published works include The Heritage We Defend; The Crisis of American Democracy; In Defense of Leon Trotsky; The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century; The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left and A Quarter Century of War.

Thomas Mackaman is a historian at Kings College in Pennsylvania, author of New Immigrants and the Radicalization of American Labor, 1914-1924; he is a regular contributor to the World Socialist Web Site.