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danichar 's review for:
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
by Nikole Hannah-Jones
A tremendous archive detailing captivity, duress, hope, and the unfathomable patriotism of Black Americans in complex relationship with the state. This book is a compilation of Black Americans’ belief in this land’s possibility. This manifest belief, energized and thwarted decade after decade over 400 years to the great benefit of all Americans, is captured beautifully in this illustrative collection of essays and prose.
The intellectual organization and gravity of the 1619 project pulls into proper orbit events and happenings I had been taught (willfully) as disparate, superfluous or incommensurate with the prevailing narrative of “American history.” These events and stories, Americana, are brought into loving (for this can only be a work of love) and remarkable clarity by Hannah Jones and the scholars Jones marshals in the project. Jones’ scholarship is exceptional and is simultaneously, a call to our own excellence in inquiry. It is a book I will return to as an exemplar.
As a life long learner and former history teacher, I should note the project is principally read best alongside the copious citations and rich notes that substantiate each subject anew (though, arguably, many of the analyses of 1619 might be un-new to some). Each essay is an argument toward what would constitute Justice. What is unique, however, is its heft, it’s comprehensibility, the fact of this text’s ongoing relevance, it’s arrangement and accessibility as a public history. Interestingly, the chagrin of its detractors demonstrate again the very premise of the book: the fear of the cost of our own ideals, the enticement of racialized and nationalist mythologies that work against our own country’s progress.
Most poignant are two conversant senses: Hannah Jones’ belief in our country’s strength to reckon with the coordinated efforts and sophistication of racialized plunder, it’s origins and epicenter in 1619 with it’s shaping of the American fabric, and, with heady measure, our country’s capacity to unmake its past and persistent ills. It is this Janus-faced belief 1619 leaves us with. The belief we can become, in looking back, who we have professed to have always been.
Side note: the audiobook is a wonderful addition. Each author reads their own essays; poets, their poems, with fragments of primary and secondary sources that interlock the work (a gift for those of us more inclined to listen to close to 500 pages than sit down with them). Be ready for the insatiable desire to learn even more after you’ve finished.
The intellectual organization and gravity of the 1619 project pulls into proper orbit events and happenings I had been taught (willfully) as disparate, superfluous or incommensurate with the prevailing narrative of “American history.” These events and stories, Americana, are brought into loving (for this can only be a work of love) and remarkable clarity by Hannah Jones and the scholars Jones marshals in the project. Jones’ scholarship is exceptional and is simultaneously, a call to our own excellence in inquiry. It is a book I will return to as an exemplar.
As a life long learner and former history teacher, I should note the project is principally read best alongside the copious citations and rich notes that substantiate each subject anew (though, arguably, many of the analyses of 1619 might be un-new to some). Each essay is an argument toward what would constitute Justice. What is unique, however, is its heft, it’s comprehensibility, the fact of this text’s ongoing relevance, it’s arrangement and accessibility as a public history. Interestingly, the chagrin of its detractors demonstrate again the very premise of the book: the fear of the cost of our own ideals, the enticement of racialized and nationalist mythologies that work against our own country’s progress.
Most poignant are two conversant senses: Hannah Jones’ belief in our country’s strength to reckon with the coordinated efforts and sophistication of racialized plunder, it’s origins and epicenter in 1619 with it’s shaping of the American fabric, and, with heady measure, our country’s capacity to unmake its past and persistent ills. It is this Janus-faced belief 1619 leaves us with. The belief we can become, in looking back, who we have professed to have always been.
Side note: the audiobook is a wonderful addition. Each author reads their own essays; poets, their poems, with fragments of primary and secondary sources that interlock the work (a gift for those of us more inclined to listen to close to 500 pages than sit down with them). Be ready for the insatiable desire to learn even more after you’ve finished.