World Socialist Web Site intervention against racialist falsification of American history
In August, 2019, the New York Times launched its "1619 Project," marking the 400th anniversary of the initial arrival of 20 African slaves at Point Comfort in Virginia, a British colony in North America.
Despite its pretense of establishing the United States' "true" foundation, the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history, interpreting American history entirely through the prism of race and racial conflict.
The World Socialist Web Site published detailed refutations of the numerous falsifications in the Times project and interviewed leading historians of the United States. In 2021, Mehring Books published The New York Times' 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History, including a selection of essays, lectures and interviews, edited by David North and Thomas Mackaman.
The WSWS, reviewing The New York Times' 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History (Mehring Books, 2021), characterized the release of the book as a "significant political and intellectual event."
The book is a powerful collection of essays, lectures, polemics, and articles, as well as eight interviews with world-renowned scholars of American history. The collective force of this material yields an irrefutable debunking of the racialist and ahistorical foundations of the 1619 Project.
US historians review "The New York Times' 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History"
"The controversy over the serious flaws in the 1619 Project's accounts of American history began with the WSWS's interviews of numerous highly distinguished liberal and left scholars. Their calm and precise critiques and others met with no rebuttal, only evasive dismissal by the project's overseers. Even now, despite 'clarification' and silent editing, glaring factual errors remain in the project's materials. This volume vindicates W. E. B. Du Bois's condemnation of propaganda disguised as history.'
-- Sean Wilentz, Princeton University, Bancroft Prize-winning author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
"Fears of association with Trump and his white-supremacist allies can inhibit leftist criticism of the 1619 Project. But from a bold socialist-revolutionary perspective, Mackaman's and North's volume argues cogently that the 1619 Project misinterprets historical causes and effects by positing eternal and immutable cultural or 'racial' identities that deny past-and preclude present and future-collective action against capitalist and imperial power."
-- Kerby Miller, University of Missouri, Pulitzer Prize finalist author of Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America
"The New York Times' 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History is a brave and necessary response to the errors in fact and interpretation that characterize the 1619 Project. It may be that the survival of the historical profession as a legitimate enterprise depends on this critique being heard."
-- William E. Weeks, San Diego State University, author of Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from the Revolution to the Civil War
"[A] frank, refreshing, and unrelenting critique of the 1619 Project. In the age of cancel culture, identity politics, Twitterstars, and the toxic Trump nightmare, much of academia has fallen silent as the 1619 Project wrenched the American Revolution and the institution of slavery from their global historical context, dismissed Abraham Lincoln as a run-of-the-mill racist, and skipped like a river rock over the abolitionist movement, Civil War, and more than fifty years of historiography. The spell that the 1619 Project cast on academia makes the publication of this book all the more timely and important."
-- Gregg Andrews, Department of History, Texas State University, author of Thyra J. Edwards: Black Activist in the Global Freedom Struggle
"This book is essential in two ways: it helps you realize how historically inaccurate the 1619 Project is and how fundamentally reactionary its politics are. Everyone interested in understanding what actually happened then and what's actually happening now needs to read it."
-- Walter Benn Michaels, Department of English, University of Illinois Chicago, author of The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality
Books in the Collection
We are defenders of historical truth and seek to make available the writings of renowned historians who defend the revolutionary traditions fought for in the American Revolution and the Civil War.
