Posted on 01/31/2022 12:39:28 PM PST by Kaslin
Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the infamous 1619 Project, said recently that she didn’t understand why parents believe they should have a say in what their children are learning in school. She simply doesn’t get it. While most Americans agree that our children must learn the whole story of America, they oppose indoctrination and are outraged that the 1619 Project and critical race theory is showing up in our schools.
Hannah-Jones and The New York Times crowd that launched the 1619 Project three years ago have stopped fighting about whether their work is history. After virtually every reputable historian in the country—on both the left and the right—called their work inaccurate and sloppy, they know they have lost that fight. Now they are fighting parents and conservatives.
These days Hannah-Jones and the Times carefully call 1619 a “journalism project” which apparently means it doesn’t have to be true.
Backing away from facts even further, Hannah-Jones has called the work an “an origin story.” She also says “…it is not about history, it’s about memory…”
Journalism, memory, whatever—1619 marches on. It is now a best-selling book and will soon become a movie. A children’s version has been released.
No one who has read 1619 is confused about what it is—another left-wing, America-hating screed designed to divide us on race and to indoctrinate our children.
The 1619 Project has always had a classroom component with teaching guides and lesson plans. It is being taught in thousands of classrooms across America now. The goal is for every school child in the country to be taught that America did not begin in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence, but instead was born in 1619 when the first Africans arrived in Virginia.
It presents all of American history in black and white. “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false,” Hannah-Jones writes, “Black Americans have fought to make them true.”
Of course, Americans of every race and creed have fought—and continue to fight—so our country lives up to the ideals laid out by the founders.
1619 presents only two American stories—the black story and the white story. But American history is made up of millions of stories and we are learning more about those stories all the time.
If Hannah-Jones were a historian writing real history, she would understand that what we know about our past is dynamic. It changes when real historians discover new facts that put the past in clearer focus and sometimes reverses what we thought was historical fact.
When the British dug up Richard the Third in a parking lot in 2012, 500 years of English history had to be re-examined. Closer to home, when DNA finally confirmed in 1998 what Jefferson’s descendants had known and many people had believed for generations—that Thomas Jefferson had fathered Sally Hemmings’ children—it recast the way Americans, who may not have been paying much attention before, viewed our country’s founding and the leaders who forged the nation.
The Jefferson-Hemmings story was not a surprise. Long before The New York Times put out the 1619 project, Americans knew that Jefferson, Washington and other Founding Fathers, despite the great country they had built, were also slaveholders who had exploited the evil of the institution they were perpetrating. By the 1960s, American children were learning in school about slavery and the long road to freedom, from Reconstruction to Jim Crow to the struggles that continue today. Despite their insistence that 1619 advocates teaching history accurately, contemporary history classes discarded “whitewashed” views of the past and phony excuses for the Confederate rebellion decades ago.
Jefferson’s DNA test inadvertently ushered in a new way of looking at history that changed the way we see ourselves. His story was part of what moved millions of Americans to want to know more about who their own ancestors were. Inexpensive DNA tests have allowed millions of Americans to look more closely at their genetic ancestry resulting in a 276 percent jump in the number of people who reported identifying with more than one racial group in the 2020 Census. According to Pew Research, easy access to DNA tests have given Americans a much broader perspective on who they are and where they come from. Almost 20 percent report finding racial links they were not aware of. These findings are expanding what we know about America’s past.
Writing history requires collecting facts and painstakingly stitching them together to build something that gets us closer to the truth of times past. It is not memory or myth and it is certainly not a politically driven agenda pretending to be a “journalism project.”
Real history is the exact opposite of The New York Times 1619 Project and Americans have rejected it. When it comes to history, they want so much more.
“that Thomas Jefferson had fathered Sally Hemmings’ children” -— She had me until then. It takes some supposition to believe that. Could be his brother or another Jefferson was the progenitor.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is just another ditzy, extreme far left freak in a Bozo the clown wig. Very low I.Q. individual with a diploma.
” Closer to home, when DNA finally confirmed in 1998 what Jefferson’s descendants had known and many people had believed for generations—that Thomas Jefferson had fathered Sally Hemmings’ children—”
Technically, it proved that TJ could not be excluded and that it was highly likely that it was a Jefferson.
Before the French and Indian War, the New World contained thirteen commercial colonial corporations of Great Britain determined slavery. After the Treaty of Paris in 1768, the consequences of that struggle caused to emerge the distinct attributes of an American identity associating the colonies with each other; an identity separate from and antagonistic to Crown and Parliament initiatives.
Following the beginning of the rebellion, the country had seen six of thirteen colonies free slaves and two others abolish the international slave trade. Such initiatives had been prohibited by the Crown and Parliament, which mandated this worldwide system of bondage for their charters, so colonial economic activities would support the mercantile policies of the mother country.
At the Constitutional Convention. George Mason of Virginia said, “This infernal traffic originated in the avarice of British merchants…. Slavery discourages arts and manufactures….Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant….They bring the judgement of heaven on a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this”.
Slavery was retained but delegates only agreed to suspend initiatives by Congress until 1808, when the expectation of building moral outrage should vanquish the institution. The philosophical doctrines consulted for founding this country placed master and slave on the same natural plane of existence and only postponed the free exercise of conscience. The Declaration of Independence and Constitution are the first founding documents by a country which doomed slavery.
Partial Bibliography:,p> Miracle at Philadelphia by Catherine Drinker Bowen
James Madison: His notes to the Constitutional Debates of 1787 by Publius Marcus
History of the United States by John Clark Ridpath, LLD
Constitutional Convention (United States)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Convention_(United_States)
Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787: Thursday, May 31 by James Madison
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/convention/debates/0531-2/
The Federalist Papers
https://www.thefederalistpapers.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/The-Complete-Federalist-Papers.pdf
The Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831-1832
https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Virginia_Slavery_Debate_of_1831-1832_The
Declaration of Independence: A Transcription
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip
Constitution
https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/full-text
This is an excellent short video showing that the USA was created by 11 Major groups. Only 1 was based upon Plantation Slavery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0YAR_vsQZ8
And then the cotton gin was invented.....
Thank you for correcting the facts... A MALE—”SOME male Jefferson”, NOT specifically proven to be Thomas Jefferson (who bore a lot of the burden for the other male Jeffersons sowing “wild oats”). The headline in “Nature” was completely irresponsible and sold a lot of copies, but was FALSE>
The genetic forensics proved that “A” male Jefferson (and knowing Thomas’s opinions on miscegenation, frankly could not have been him. Still, he manumitted the results, and his slaves when he could not prior under VA law. These are all points glossed over by imprecise poorly researched writers.
Thomas Jefferson did not have a son survive to
reproduce so it was necessary to locate the male-line descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s paternal uncle, Field Jefferson. That was only part of the real science in analyzing the alleles that could be obtained.
Note that the Wa Po perpetuated this columny, in spite of massive efforts from the official Jefferson Family Historian, and personal assistant to Dr. Foster (the Nature article writer), so it has always served a political agenda predicated in falsehood. And so is the 1619 Project another “journalism” project-— that being a “created” narrative unsupported by ANY real historical facts or even provable timelines. But no matter, they make it up as they go along, same as their consideration of the Constitution being a “living document”.
Grist for their continuous mill.
Thanks again for your post, to defend the much maligned brilliant Founding Father— Thomas Jefferson, the Enigma.
Yeah.
It’s not that good an article.
I grow weary of negroes with chips on their shoulders.
I just heard back from my redskinned kin.
Tonto said he wants March to be declared as Native Indigians (sic) History Month.
Teach um children about Great Spirit and the peace pipe.
Smoke buffalo grass.
Take um many scalps.
Drink firewater.
Everyone needs Mohawk haircut and loincloth.
Pretend we die from smallpox and TB.
Re-enact Battle of Little Big Horn.
Ugh!
Tell um squaw to bring me a beer and pemmican.
Watch some Cleveland Indians baseball.
Red Man like um 21st century !!
How!
Hemmings was Jefferson’s wife’s half-sister which would make a physical relationship incest. Unless he was a pervert, it’s likely that someone else in the family was responsible for the offspring, someone not directly related by blood or marriage.
Randolph Jefferson is the best guess !
The clever Yankees used indentured servitude and European hardships, such as the Irish Potato Famine, to provided cheap sources of labor for factories and farms. The Southern planters could have chosen indentured servitude for their blacks and become textile barons through vertical monopolies producing cotton cloth and clothing. Instead, this pathetic aristocracy chose to be satisfied with luxuries, idleness, and cruelties.
Exactly. She just wants it to be true.
I grew up in South Louisiana in the heart of the most prosperous plantation area in the US. There were plenty of very successful and wealthy plantations. I am sort of the opinion that a mere "couple of estates" may not be a statistically valid sample. At a minimum, I would want to know where and when.
By your time slavery would be only a memory and the work would be accomplished efficiently. The plantations of 1700 to 1860 would have been much different and those are the estates I was referring to. Sources are the diaries and histories I have read. The writings of Fredrick Douglass recently helped refresh my memory that those called children (too young) and grandparents (too stove up) did not engage in the hard labors found in fields, gardens, and barns. After he escaped to the north, he noted how comparable labors were completed with a fraction of the people used on his plantation.
The 1700 to 1860 time frame is exactly what I am talking about. I grew up with the in depth histories of those plantations over their entire existences. Huge wealth was generated in spite of the supposed inefficiencies you mention. Of course that was all destroyed by the civil war and after (history with which I am also very conversant).
My experience covers many more plantations than the few you happen to be familiar with.
Well, no.
It didn't.
Probability yes but not firm conformation.
Never said they did not make money or at least a huge amount of trade goods, but they ignored opportunities to be much more profitable through use of machinery and efficient labor sources.
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