The malicious, historically illiterate 1619 Project keeps rolling on

The New York Times is like God, who, if Genesis reported Creation correctly, beheld His handiwork and decided “it was very good.” The Times is comparably pleased with itself concerning its creation, “The 1619 Project.”

This began in August 2019 as a special edition of the paper’s Sunday magazine. Now it has become a book by which the Times continues attempting to “reframe” U.S. history. In the Times, an advertisement for the Times’s book describes it as “a dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism.” That description damages journalism’s reputation for respecting facts, which the 2019 writing that begot this book did not do. The 1619 Project’s tendentiousness reeks of political purpose.

The Times’s original splashy assertion – slightly fudged after the splash garnered a Pulitzer Prize – was that the American Revolution, the most important event in our history, was shameful because a primary reason it was fought was to preserve slavery. The war was supposedly ignited by a November 1775 British offer of freedom to Blacks who fled slavery and joined British forces. Well.

That offer came after increasingly volcanic American reactions to various British provocations: After the 1765 Stamp Act. After the 1770 Boston Massacre. After the 1773 Boston Tea Party. After the 1774 Coercive Acts (including closure of Boston’s port) and other events of “The Long Year of Revolution” (the subtitle of Mary Beth Norton’s “1774”). And after, in 1775, the April 17 battles of Lexington and Concord, the June 17 battle of Bunker Hill and George Washington on July 3 assuming command of the Continental Army.

Writing history is not like doing physics. But event A cannot have caused event B if B began before A.