Jake Silverstein is the editor-in-chief of the NY Times Magazine and the man who has been at the forefront of defending the 1619 Project. Silverstein is the author who wrote the Times’ refusals to correct the contents of the 1619 Project after a group of actual historians pointed out some of its claims, including a key part of its thesis about the causes of the Revolutionary War, were false.

Today, Silverstein has written a history of the last two years which casts the 1619 Project as the hero and victor over an older school of historical thought which he wishes to dismiss. To call this lengthy piece self-serving would be underselling it quite a bit. This is a an author trying his best to lay claim to the future, but in describing his own history he manages to leave out most of the dead ends, false starts and controversy. Ironically, this piece on the relatively brief history of the 1619 Project is a whitewash. Let’s start with Silverstein’s account of the one correction he eventually agreed to make.

Substantive criticisms of the project began a few months later. Five historians, led by the Princeton scholar Sean Wilentz, sent a letter that asked The Times to issue “prominent corrections” for what they claimed were the project’s “errors and distortions.” We took this letter very seriously. The criticism focused mostly on Nikole’s introductory essay and within that essay zeroed in on her argument about the role of slavery in the American Revolution: “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology,” Nikole wrote, “is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

Though we recognized that the role of slavery is a matter of ongoing debate among historians of the revolution, we did not agree that this line or the other passages in question required “prominent corrections,” as I explained in a letter of response. Ultimately, however, we issued a clarification, accompanied by a lengthy editors’ note: By saying that protecting slavery was “one of the primary reasons,” Nikole did not mean to imply that it was a primary reason for every one of the colonists, who were, after all, a geographically and culturally diverse lot with varying interests; rather, she meant that one of the primary reasons driving some of them, particularly those from the Southern colonies, was the protection of slavery from British meddling. We clarified this by adding “some of” to Nikole’s original sentence so that it read: “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

We published the letter from the five historians, along with my response, a few days before Christmas. Dozens of media outlets covered the exchange, and the coverage set certain corners of social media ablaze — which fueled more stories, which led others to weigh in.

Just to be clear, here’s a bit of what the historians wrote:

These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or “framing.” They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology. Dismissal of objections on racial grounds — that they are the objections of only “white historians” — has affirmed that displacement.

On the American Revolution, pivotal to any account of our history, the project asserts that the founders declared the colonies’ independence of Britain “in order to ensure slavery would continue.” This is not true. If supportable, the allegation would be astounding — yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false. Some of the other material in the project is distorted, including the claim that “for the most part,” black Americans have fought their freedom struggles “alone.”

The five historians who signed the letter asked the Times to correct the record and be more open about the process that led to the creation of the Project. In essence they were asking the Times to show its work including the names of historians they collaborated with.

In Silverstein’s response, he refused to acknowledge any errors; however, he did spend an entire paragraph cleaning up after an embarrassing tweet Hannah-Jones had issued about “white historians.”

Valuable critiques may come from many sources. The letter misperceives our attitudes when it charges that we dismiss objections on racial grounds. This appears to be a reference not to anything published in The 1619 Project itself, but rather to a November Twitter post from Hannah-Jones in which she questioned whether “white historians” have always produced objective accounts of American history. As is so often the case on Twitter, context is important. In this instance, Hannah-Jones was responding to a post, since deleted, from another user claiming that many “white historians” objected to the project but were hesitant to speak up. In her reply, she was trying to make the point that for the most part, the history of this country has been told by white historians (some of whom, as in the case of the Dunning School, which grossly miseducated Americans about the history of Reconstruction for much of the 20th century, produced accounts that were deeply flawed), and that to truly understand the fullness and complexity of our nation’s story, we need a greater variety of voices doing the telling.

Here’s the tweet in question which seems pretty clearly to be dismissing the idea that white historians can produce accurate work.

Having refused to make any changes in December of 2019, that would have seemed to be the end of it. It probably would have been if not for an article that appeared in Politico in March of 2020. That was when a historian at Northwestern named Leslie Harris wrote a piece saying she’d been asked to help fact check some claims in the 1619 Project and she’d warned the paper prior to publication that her claim about the causes of the Revolutionary War were not supportable:

On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America…

Weeks before, I had received an email from a New York Times research editor. Because I’m an historian of African American life and slavery, in New York, specifically, and the pre-Civil War era more generally, she wanted me to verify some statements for the project. At one point, she sent me this assertion: “One critical reason that the colonists declared their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery in the colonies, which had produced tremendous wealth. At the time there were growing calls to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, which would have badly damaged the economies of colonies in both North and South.”

I vigorously disputed the claim. Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war…

Despite my advice, the Times published the incorrect statement about the American Revolution anyway, in Hannah-Jones’ introductory essay. In addition, the paper’s characterizations of slavery in early America reflected laws and practices more common in the antebellum era than in Colonial times, and did not accurately illustrate the varied experiences of the first generation of enslaved people that arrived in Virginia in 1619.

The fact that Nikole Hannah-Jones had ignored one of the historians the Times itself had consulted seemed to shake things up a bit. Just a few days later Jake Silverstein announced a “clarification” of the lead essay to make the change he described above about the causes of the Revolutionary War. In his explanation for the change, Silverstein thanked historian Leslie Harris and several others for their “insightful advice” but pointedly did not thank any of the five historians who’d originally asked for a correction on precisely this point. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they felt forced into making the correction by the Politico piece but couldn’t bring themselves to admit their primary critics were right. If they had, then their refusal to make a similar correction just a few months earlier would be pretty hard to explain.

All of this gets left out of today’s recounting of the history of the Project by Silverstein. He also completely skips over another controversy in which the Times attempted to revise the history of the Project. One of the major arguments stemming from Hannah-Jones claims about the motivations for the Revolutionary War was the idea that 1619 represented our “true founding.” This is how Quillette framed it in Sep. 2020.

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.

Here’s a screenshot of one of those claims:

How do you call other people liars who repeat an easily falsifiable claim when you have characterized the matter this way? pic.twitter.com/tXdbsGqeA2

— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) September 18, 2020

The Times simply deleted the claim about our “true founding” and Hannah-Jones suddenly claimed she’d never said 1619 was America’s “true founding.”

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.”…

…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.

I wrote an entire post about all the times Nikole Hannah-Jones had made this claim prior to its deletion and her sudden reversal on this point. Most of the examples were collected by Conor Friedersdorf:

July 6, 2020: https://t.co/6bkdULGJkr

— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) September 24, 2020

February 13, 2020https://t.co/lpeZMNzs2b pic.twitter.com/K58ygV3SrU

— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) September 24, 2020

And Friedersdorf also found examples where Jake Silverstein himself agreed with this framing of the 1619 Project as changing the nation’s true founding.

"a powerful simplification of the project"! pic.twitter.com/7qCOdK0DN8

— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) September 24, 2020

There’s more here. None of that gets mentioned in Silverstein’s piece today which, as I suggested, is a whitewash of the Project’s true history. But I guess that’s what happens when you win a Pulitzer and are lauded for your work. You get a chance to write a victor’s narrative in the paper of record in which all of the messy parts of the story are simply left out. But many of the Times’ own readers aren’t buying it. For example, here’s the 2nd most upvoted comment:

One of the main problems here, Jake, is that this Project made an earthquake of a claim that is not supported by the vast preponderance of historical evidence: that the Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery.

We have seen enough critique from our most seasoned and respected historians — something you and Nikole clearly are not — to understand that the 1619 overreached. In trying to recalibrate the historical narrative of this country around slavery– an institution as old as organized religion, marriage or government and practiced by virtually every civilization and society on record by 1619– you tried to root YOUR central beliefs about the US in a wicked practice that continued for far too long. You, NHJ and many Americans today appear to believe this country is at its core morally bankrupt and has been since day one. That is your right to believe. But you do not have the historical chops or evidence on your side to ground your belief in some of the defining moments of our shared nation: when the colonists declared independence from GB and went to war.

Had your project stuck to what has gone wrong for black people in the US – a topic in superabundance in this country, and a topic which was fed to me ad nauseum throughout my entire public school education – you might have had less pushback. But no, you needed to try to link THAT reality with the author’s personal way of thinking about the US, as defined only by slavery.

Another response. I’m not cherry-picking because all of the top 10 responses (at least) are critical:

Wonderful article about how the view of history has changed over the years, with how the diligent work of many historians told different stories at different times.

The problem with the “The 1619 Project” is that written, edited, and prepared by a journalist, it’s not history. The sense one gets is that the conclusion was reached first, and that selected facts and interpretation were gathered later to support the conclusion.

And so on. This person hit the nail on the head.

The editorial board does not consider adding the phrase “some of” to Nikole’s thesis “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons [some of] the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery” a “prominent correction”? Really?

In my world of the written word that change converts the thesis to a footnote.

Here’s a simple but accurate account of what happened here. The thesis of the 1619 Project, originally, was that 1619 was our “true founding” as a nation and that was so because everything since then, including the Revolutionary War, was motivated by a desire to protect slavery. But that narrative fell apart when the claims about the Revolution had to be corrected, so the Times memory-holed the claims about the “true founding.” But that is what they were saying, at least initially. The fact that they can’t say it now really does make the entire thesis a bit of a shambles.