The 1619 Project is the August 2019 issue of The New York Times Magazine. The issue was created from the idea of Nikole Hannah-Jones to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Africans landing on the shores of what would become the United States as enslaved people. The goal of the issue is to reframe the origins of the United States away from the traditional narrative of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution and toward slavery as a starting point. The argument the issue makes is that August 1619 is the United States’ actual birthday, not July 4, 1776.
The issue includes two categories of writing. First, there are several journalistic essays on a variety of topics. For...
