“[I]t is impossible to shake off this chain” of a stained history, said Friedrich Nietzsche in his 1874 meditation The Use and Abuse History for Life. But we don’t need to shake off history, he added. It is necessary to learn from it.
1619 was the year that the first slave ships arrived to Virginia. Hulu was launched in January. The 1619 Project A six-part documentary series based on the book of that name, currently being used in approximately 4,500 classrooms in the US. The original written version The 1619 Project The Revised History of America is published by the New York TimesFirst as a magazine supplement, August 2019, and then as an entire book, 2021. The 1619 Project: An Origin Story. Many of the first edition’s dubious claims and factual errors were criticized by historians. Although the first edition was partially correct, many of the unqualified controversial claims still remain. But what is sometimes lost in the debate—necessary as it is—over the veracity of its specific facts is the project’s fundamentally misguided use (or abuse, as Nietzsche put it) of history.
In the Hulu docuseries, the 1619 Project’s founder Nikole Hannah-Jones states that the project’s goal is…
