It's difficult to disintegrate this particular topic from the greater concepts of modern politics, given racial tensions when it was released, and the overall trajectory of the opposition to it through the past few years. But as a historical perspective, how different is The 1619 Project compared to, say, what was taught to college undergraduates a decade ago, and is there legitimately nuanced debate and dissent to it within the historian community, or is this a case of finding the one dentist out of ten who doesn't believe in toothpaste?
Senator Ted Cruz is obviously not a historian, and when he invokes the names of historians, I have no context for those people, either, so my first thought went to this subreddit, because news articles seem disinterested in the facts of history, compared to the conflict of modern political discourse surrounding it.
Apologies in advance if this breaks the 20 year old rule, but my interpretation is that the 1619 project was a re-examination of the context of events which happened hundreds of years ago. So, for my questions:
How is the context presented by the 1619 project different from the US history that I'm more familiar with in a broad-scope concept of US undergraduate historical education?
Was the 1619 Project 'roundly refuted' by collective historical academia, or if it's more of a wedge issue where some adopt it and others don't, or whether it's generally an accurate framing?
Thank you for your time.
my interpretation is that the 1619 project was a re-examination of the context of events which happened hundreds of years ago
You're on the right track. It'd be more precise to call it a re-examination of US history in general, since enslaved Africans were brought to the continent by British settlers up until today, and the 1619 Project frames that history with the context of how slavery and racism have impacted Black people and society at large throughout American history. It's supposed to challenge the historical narrative that we were taught in school, which is typically more whitewashed and ignores or undersells those impacts.
I'm not an expert on the subject matters of the project, nor have I looked at all of it (yet!), so I can't really comment on its veracity. But I want to call attention to something that people tend to overlook when criticising the project, which is that the project isn't a work of academic history but of multimedia and journalistic storytelling. Journalists and historians use different methodologies when uncovering history, which affects how they frame the story, and how that context explains the current situation that we live in. You can't really say 1619 is "wrong", because it's a lot of different contributors looking at different things and making different arguments; you can critique individual pieces, but to broadly criticize the whole thing requires a much more nuanced case than "it's inaccurate and propaganda", which is what we usually hear from [partisan thoughts redacted].
ANYWAY, this is a pretty common topic on here, so you may be interested in these older threads /u/edhistory101, /u/Red_Galiray, /u/mikedash, and more. Most discussion does generally focus on the accuracy of the project, though in one of the threads there is some discourse on the distinction between historiography and journalism and how that tension matters when talking about this project.
And as always, more thoughts and discussion are welcome, if someone has something they wish to share!