“The 1619 Project” (2021) is a book edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones and others that re-imagines US history as starting in 1619 when Blacks first arrived, not in 1776 when Whites declared their independence from the UK. It is the special issue of the New York Times Magazine of August 18th 2019 fleshed out into a 590-page book, nuance and all.
Nikole Hannah-Jones:
“Black Americans understand that we have been taught the history of a country that does not exist. What I have heard again and again since the original project was published is that the 1619 Project, for many people, finally made America make sense.”
It has been banned from being taught in schools in Texas, so you know it must be good!
I am reading the book now. As I read each chapter, I will write a post with my own summary, linked to below:
- The 1619 Project: Democracy
- The 1619 Project: Race
- The 1619 Project: Sugar
- The 1619 Project: Fear
- The 1619 Project: Dispossession
- The 1619 Project: Capitalism
- The 1619 Project: Politics
- The 1619 Project: Citizenship
- The 1619 Project: Self-Defense
- The 1619 Project: Punishment
- The 1619 Project: Inheritance
- The 1619 Project: Medicine
- The 1619 Project: Church
- The 1619 Project: Music
- The 1619 Project: Healthcare
- The 1619 Project: Traffic
- The 1619 Project: Progress
- The 1619 Project: Justice
When I finish the book I will come back and flesh out this post.
– Abagond, 2021.
See also:
- books by some of the chapter authors:
- Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow – she does the chapter on fear
- Ibram X. Kendi: Stamped from the Beginning – progress
- Carol Anderson: White Rage – self-defence
- Nikole Hannah-Jones
- 1619
- other books I summarized chapter by chapter:
- Banned/distorted US history:
591
Abagond 
I stopped on page twenty-six because I couldn’t see the words through tears. Wishing I’d bought the large print version. This book has a place in every school. I live in Texas. Parents don’t have to rely on schools to do the right thing. Reading it at home, researching and fact-finding together is great. We are our children’s first teachers anyway. So why not carry on?
I will resume reading today. Looking forward to your thoughts about the project.
Be well.
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Looking forward to reading it. I have a few others books to get through before I can dig into this one and so I’m anxious to read your posts.
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LaLa, I just read the first bit to set me back on my heels. I finished Will Smith’s book, “Will.” He describes the birth of hip-hop and scratching. This quote from The 1619 Project does not bear up under scrutiny: “And it was in the deeply impoverished and segregated neighborhoods where white Americans forced the descendants of the enslaved to live that teenagers too poor to buy instruments used old records to create a new music known as hip-hop.”
Excerpt From
The 1619 Project
Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times Magazine, Caitlin Roper, Ilena SIlverman & Jake Silverstein
https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-1619-project/id1556566008
This material may be protected by copyright.
The famous DJ had TWO turn tables. No way could he have been too poor to buy instruments. Or, does that statement require further explanation? Were the first “scratchers” too poor to buy TWO turntables? How did they get them then? Did they steal them? 🙂 And where would such teenagers find “old records?”
Wait . . .
God bless the Internet. I Googled the question and was rewarded with this: “It was a protégé of Grandmaster Flash, the Grand Wizard Theodore, who created ‘scratching’ – the sound made when the record is rubbed back and forth. He discovered the technique by accident as he stopped the record with his hand to hear what his mother was shouting out to him.”
Proof that the Grandmaster was not too poor to buy records or turntables. LOL.
BTW, I bought an e-version of the book, making it easier to read and will have it available even when I’m too weary to carry the heavy book and a pair of reading glasses.
I hope you will invest in a copy. It might make you weep but you sit up a little straighter, and you discover even more pride in those early ancestors. They were strong people and are still changing America, shaping it into the country it is meant to be.
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It depends on the quality of the instruments. You can buy a crappy guitar or drumset for relatively cheap, and they may be good enough for starting to teach yourself how to play, but they’re going to sound crappy to an audience, even at a street party or a garage band. If you want to perform, you need something better, and even back in the ’70s you might have been looking at an outlay of several hundred dollars to a couple thousand for a halfway decent instrument.
That said, I don’t know how expensive of turntables the earliest hip-hop DJs were using at first. Top-line stereo equipment can also be very pricey.
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I bet much of the material will be familiar to you. I predict Chapter 3 will draw from Sidney Mintz, for example.
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We need a 1652 Project. (1652 is when the Dutch landed at the Cape)
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