About This Unit

In August 2019, The New York Times Magazine marked the four hundredth anniversary of the first enslaved Africans' arrival in Virginia by proposing a reframing: that 1619 belongs at the center of the national story, that slavery and Black Americans' struggle to realize democracy's promises are the country's origin and engine. The 1619 Project — essays, poems, a podcast, a Pulitzer for Nikole Hannah-Jones's opening essay, a curriculum adopted in thousands of classrooms — became the most consequential public-history intervention in a generation, and then the most contested: criticized by some historians on points of interpretation, answered by a presidential "1776 Commission," and targeted by a wave of state laws restricting how race and history may be taught. This unit examines the project, the substance of the scholarly debate, and the backlash as a study in how a nation fights over its origin story — and over who is licensed to tell it.

The unit's second movement turns from contested pasts to contested futures. The same years that produced the history wars produced the broadest American audience abolitionist ideas have ever had: not abolition as elimination alone, but as Ruth Wilson Gilmore's formulation — abolition is "about presence, not absence," the building of life-affirming institutions until punishment systems become obsolete. Mariame Kaba's organizing credo ("hope is a discipline") and the One Million Experiments project's catalog of community safety practices give the horizon a working inventory. The unit closes the module by joining its two halves into one question: if the past is being re-authored and the future re-imagined in the same decade, what does each struggle teach the other?

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

• Summarize the 1619 Project's central claims and the principal scholarly criticisms, distinguishing disputes over fact, emphasis, and interpretation.
• Analyze the backlash — commissions, statutes, curriculum bans — as a political movement with identifiable actors, strategies, and stakes, using primary documents.
• Explain abolition as a constructive program ("presence, not absence"), distinguishing it from reform and from simple elimination, with concrete examples.
• Analyze a community's self-authored historical record as an act of political storytelling, using primary sources.

Keywords

• Abolition
• Origin stories
• Public history
• Educational gag orders
• Non-reformist reforms
• Transformative justice

Open Educational Resources

• The 1619 Project Education Materials Collection. Pulitzer Center. Explore the collection. Original issue at the Times.

Curricular collection (with full original issue) · Open access.

The open route into the project itself: the complete August 2019 magazine issue as a downloadable PDF, essay reading guides, and curricular materials used in thousands of classrooms within months of publication. Using the education collection rather than the metered Times site keeps the primary text genuinely accessible — and the collection is itself part of the story the unit studies, since the curriculum's classroom reach is precisely what the backlash legislation targeted.

• 1619 (podcast). Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times, 2019–2020. Listen to the series.

Podcast (5 episodes + update) · Open access.

The project in its most intimate register: Hannah-Jones narrating the personal stakes — her father's flag, her own schooling — alongside episodes on the economy, health care, land, and music. The audio form carries what the essays argue: that this history is inheritance, not abstraction. Episode 1 is the unit's recommended entry point for learners who will not read the full issue.

• PEN America. "Educational Gag Orders" and the America's Censored Classrooms report series, 2021–present. Explore the tracking reports.

Research and tracking reports · Open access.

The systematic documentation of the legislative backlash: bills and laws restricting teaching on race, gender, and American history, tracked state by state with analysis of language, penalties, and chilling effects. PEN's "educational gag orders" coinage names the mechanism precisely — restriction by statute of what may be said in a classroom — and the running data lets learners treat the backlash as a measurable campaign rather than an atmosphere. Primary instrument for the unit's first case study.

• One Million Experiments. Explore the catalog.

Project site, podcast, and film · Open access.

A curated, growing catalog of community-based safety projects — crisis response without police, violence interruption, community bail funds, transformative-justice practice — presented through a podcast and an experimental documentary, built on the premise that a million small experiments, not one grand design, is how a world beyond punishment gets built. The unit's abolitionist horizon in inventory form: learners stop debating abolition in the abstract and start examining its working prototypes — the move the unit's reflection questions put to work.

Key Scholarship

• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. London: Verso, 2022. Publisher page.

Book (collected essays).

Three decades of essays from the scholar whose work defined the field: racism as "the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death," prisons as a geographical solution to political-economic crises, and abolition as place-making — "about presence, not absence," building the institutions that make cages obsolete. The collection gives the unit its theoretical center of gravity and the formulation everything else in the abolitionist half elaborates.

• Davis, Angela Y., Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie. Abolition. Feminism. Now. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022. Publisher page.

Book.

Four movement scholars argue the two traditions are one: abolition that ignores gender violence and feminism that relies on police and prisons each betray themselves, and the genuinely effective anti-violence work of the past decades has been abolitionist feminist in practice — survivor-led, community-based, unwilling to hand harm over to the carceral state. The book supplies the unit's answer to abolition's hardest standing question — "but what about violence?" — from the practitioners who have worked it longest.

• Hannah-Jones, Nikole, ed., with Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. New York: One World, 2021. Book site.

Book (expanded edition).

The book-length expansion: eighteen essays and dozens of literary works, with Hannah-Jones's revised opening essay and a new preface that directly engages the controversies — including the contested claim about the Revolution and slavery, here reframed with the scholarship the dispute produced. Assigning the book rather than the magazine alone lets learners watch a public argument metabolized: the revisions are visible, citable, and themselves evidence in the unit's study of how contested history gets corrected in public.

• Kaba, Mariame. We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021. Publisher page.

Book (collected essays and interviews).

The organizer's handbook of the abolitionist present: Kaba on why "hope is a discipline," why reforms must be tested for whether they expand or shrink the system's reach ("non-reformist reforms"), and how participatory defense campaigns, mutual aid, and transformative justice actually run. Written from decades of Chicago organizing, the book converts the unit's horizon into method — and its short, self-contained chapters are built for excerpting.

• Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002 (20th anniversary ed. 2022). Publisher page.

Book.

Kelley's classic argument that Black radical movements should be judged not only by what they won but by what they dared to imagine — reparations, surrealism, socialism, abolition — because the imagination is where political possibility is manufactured. The 2022 edition's new introduction reads the book into the Black Lives Matter era it anticipated. The unit's bridge text: it treats re-narrated pasts and dreamed futures as the same faculty, which is precisely the unit's closing claim.

Case Studies

• The Backlash in Documents: From the Historians' Letter to the Gag Orders

Historians' exchange (2019), 1776 Commission report (2021), and educational gag-order statutes via PEN America · Document-analysis activity.

A document-analysis activity that follows the backlash through its own paper trail: the historians' letter and the magazine's published response (December 2019) — scholarly dispute conducted in public; the 1776 Commission's report (January 2021) — the state's counter-narrative, issued in an administration's final days and rescinded by the next; and the wave of statutes that PEN America's report documents law by law. Learners classify each document's mode — critique, counter-story, prohibition — and trace how a dispute over interpretation escalated into legislation governing classrooms.

• Writing Themselves In: The Colored Conventions and the Power of Storytelling

Colored Conventions Project digital archive (1830s–1890s proceedings) · Archive-exploration activity.

Built on the Colored Conventions Project, the digital archive recovering the nineteenth-century Black political meetings — state and national conventions from 1830 into the 1890s — where free and formerly enslaved Black Americans wrote themselves into the national record: minutes, petitions, debates, and demands, alongside the project's curated exhibits. Learners choose one convention, read its proceedings against a project exhibit, and analyze the conventions as self-authored history — what the delegates demanded, how they narrated themselves, and what freedom dreams the documents preserve — connecting the unit's origin-story question to the power of storytelling from minority voices.

Questions for Reflection

1. On origin stories: The 1619 Project's deepest claim is formal: that where a nation starts its story determines what the story can explain. Test the claim — pick one feature of American life (an institution, an inequality, a cultural pattern) and sketch how its explanation changes when the story opens in 1776 versus 1619. What does each opening make visible and invisible?
2. On the scholarly debate: Several historians disputed specific claims while endorsing the project's aims; the project revised some language and defended its interpretation. Using the actual exchange, identify one dispute and classify it — fact, emphasis, or interpretation — and explain what each side risks conceding. What does the episode teach about how public history should handle expert disagreement?
3. On the backlash: Read one educational gag order's operative language. What exactly does it prohibit, who decides violations, and what would teaching this unit look like under it? What does the statute's vagueness or precision reveal about its purpose?
4. On Gilmore: "Abolition is about presence, not absence." Take one institution in your own community — a school, clinic, library, garden, crisis line — and analyze it as abolitionist presence: what need does it meet that might otherwise become a police call, an arrest, a sentence? What would doubling it change?
5. On Kaba's test: "Non-reformist reforms" shrink the system's reach; reformist reforms feed it. Apply the test to two real proposals — body cameras and non-police crisis response, or any pair you choose — and show your reasoning. Where does the test itself get hard to apply?
6. Synthesis across the unit: The unit's two halves share a faculty Kelley names: the imagination that re-authors the past is the imagination that builds futures. Take one document from the backlash fight — an essay, a statute, a commission report — and one working experiment from the abolitionist inventory, and set them side by side: what does each assume about what a story, or an institution, can do? Then answer the unit's closing question directly: if the past is being re-authored and the future re-imagined in the same decade, what does each struggle teach the other — about method, about opposition, and about what winning would look like?

Further Readings and Resources

• Kruse, Kevin M., and Julian E. Zelizer, eds. Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. New York: Basic Books, 2023. Publisher page.

Book (edited essays).

Essays by twenty historians, each dismantling one durable legend about the American past, written expressly for general readers in the middle of the history wars. Kruse and Zelizer frame the volume as the discipline's public-facing answer: if national history is being weaponized, the profession's counter-move is accessible correction at scale. For the unit it models a genre — historians doing public history under fire — that the 1619 fight made newly urgent, and it supplies comparison cases beyond 1619 itself.

• The 1619 Project (docuseries). Hulu, 2023. Viewing guide (Pulitzer Center).

Docuseries (streaming; subscription required) · Viewing guide open access.

The six-part screen adaptation, with Hannah-Jones as narrator, translating the project's essays into documentary television. Placed here rather than among the open resources because streaming access requires a subscription; the Pulitzer Center's open viewing guide, linked above, structures the episodes for teaching and self-study. For the many learners who first encountered the project through the series, the adaptation is itself evidence of the unit's theme: the reach of a re-told origin story across media.

• Purnell, Derecka. Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom. New York: Astra House, 2021. Publisher page.

Book.

A human-rights lawyer's first-person account of moving from police reform to abolition: Purnell begins as a teenager calling 911 in St. Louis, works through law school, Ferguson, and years of organizing, and arrives at abolition not as dogma but as conclusion. The book is the unit's persuasion narrative — written for readers who find abolition implausible, tracing each objection the author herself once held and showing what dissolved it.

• Silverstein, Jake. "On Recent Criticism of The 1619 Project." The New York Times Magazine, October 2020. Read the essay.

Editorial essay · Metered access.

The magazine editor's extended essay revisiting the project's critics a year on: how the December 2019 exchange with five historians unfolded, which claims were revised and why, and where the magazine held its ground on interpretation. As the editor's own account, it pairs with the exchange itself — the opening document of the unit's backlash case study — and gives learners the retrospective narrative of how a public correction was actually negotiated inside a newsroom.

• Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. Publisher page.

Book.

The short book that put the question in circulation: Davis's case that prisons are a historical invention rather than an inevitability — tracing their rise, their racial and economic function, and the workings of the prison industrial complex — and that prison reform has repeatedly expanded what it promised to shrink. Two decades on, the unit's newer texts read as answers to the question this one made askable: obsolete — and replaced by what?

• Interrupting Criminalization (organizational resource library). Visit the resource library.

Organizational resource library · Open access.

The research-and-practice hub co-founded by Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie: toolkits, reports, curricula, and campaign materials on non-police crisis response, defunding fights, and community accountability — the working documents behind the experiments the unit inventories. For learners the library shows abolitionist method at the level of the memo and the toolkit: how a horizon gets translated into fundable, replicable practice.

• CRT Forward Tracking Project. UCLA School of Law. Explore the tracker.

Legal tracking database · Open access.

UCLA School of Law's database of anti-"critical race theory" measures — bills, laws, resolutions, and local actions — with the statutory text and status detail that complements PEN America's narrative reports. Together the two trackers let learners triangulate the backlash: one names the mechanism, the other archives the law itself. The tracker recurs elsewhere in this project's case studies and rewards a bookmark.