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Book Series Planned Based On New York Times 1619 Project: ‘New Way Of Thinking About American History’

Book Series Planned Based On New York Times 1619 Project: ‘New Way Of Thinking About American History’

1619 Project
Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones will oversee a series of books based on the 1619 Project — a New York Times magazine that has been credited with helping to reframe history. “Raise Up” is a bronze statue at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice honoring thousands of people killed in lynchings in Montgomery, Ala. The memorial and museum are a project of the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative, a legal advocacy group in Montgomery, April 23, 2018. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones will oversee a series of books based on the 1619 Project — a special magazine published on the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans brought to the U.S. — that has been credited with helping to reframe history.

Random House has acquired rights to a multi-book series based on the project, the publisher announced Wednesday.

Hannah-Jones initiated the 1619 Project to commemorate the arrival of the first 20-to-30 enslaved Africans brought on a ship called the White Lion to the Virginia colony. The project showed how the legacy of slavery endures to this day.

The project was years in the making and will be ongoing for the next two years. Hannah-Jones wrote the opening essay, entitled “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.”

The magazine is changing how U.S. history is taught in schools today through a partnership with the Pulitzer Center, New York Times reported.

The book releases will include an expanded version of the magazine issue with essays, fiction and poetry published by One World. A graphic novel is also planned. Random House Children’s Books plans four “1619 Project” publications for young people.

The 1619 Project documented how the brutal system of slavery on which the U.S. was built left a legacy that persists. Numerous Black authors contributed to the project including essayists, poets, playwrights, scholars, and novelists who explored aspects of contemporary American life rooted in this history. They wrote about how Black resistance to slavery and racism helped to force progress and equality for all Americans.

The 1619 Project drew both praise and anger as it sought to reframe the story we’ve been sold about slavery in the U.S.

Historian, conservative and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called the whole 1619 Project “a lie” and a “propaganda paper.” Sitting senators and some of the most influential commentators on the right screamed about the project.

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One World Publisher Christopher Jackson has acquired world rights, according to the New York Times.

“The 1619 Project is one of the most important and imaginative works of magazine journalism I’ve ever seen,” Jackson said in a prepared statement. “It didn’t just commemorate a major moment in global history, but made a powerful argument for a transformative new way of thinking about American history and identity.

“The 1619 book projects will … invite readers of all kinds and all ages to think more deeply about who we have been, who we are, and who we might yet be as a nation.”

Hannah-Jones has been recognized with the International Women’s Media Foundation Gwen Ifill Award and The Front Page Award for Journalist of the Year. In 2017, she received a “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

The same creative team at The New York Times that worked on the original Project 1919 magazine will edit the book series.