The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

Editor and author of the book’s preface as well as its first and last essays, Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and academic at The New York Times Magazine and Howard University, respectively.

Hannah-Jones uses her own personal narrative to frame The 1619 Project, explaining that when she learned about the landing of the White Lion in 1619, she began to understand a history that the official American narrative erased and ignored. This inspired her to pitch the idea of The 1619 Project to The New York Times Magazine; for the 400th anniversary of 1619, Hannah-Jones wanted to commemorate the unacknowledged contributions of enslaved people and their descendants to American society.

Hannah-Jones was not the first to make the argument about the importance of the landing of the White Lion. Her major contribution is perhaps conceptualizing this event as America’s “origin story”; recognizing the importance of narratives to national identity, Hannah-Jones asks Americans to consider what it would mean to center the “sin” of slavery rather than the promise of the American Revolution in their mythos. This project has seen multiple iterations including an article in The New York Times Magazine, a podcast, and the book itself, which stretches through time to show just how lasting the implications of slavery are.