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Has the New York Times ‘1619 Project’ been widely adopted in schools?

Tuesday, December 15, 2020
By Austin Tannenbaum
NO

“The 1619 Project” was a New York Times Magazine issue reexamining the history of slavery in America. It was published in August 2019 to mark the 400th anniversary of the first slaves being brought to the English colony of Virginia. The project's distribution in U.S. schools has been limited.

The Pulitzer Center, which seeks to broaden journalism's impact on education, said in May that it had “connected” project-related materials to 4,500 classrooms comprising “tens of thousands of students" — less than 0.1% of the 56.4 million K-12 students in the U.S. According to the Center, five U.S. school systems have adopted the project “at broad scale.”

The 1619 Project has been criticized by historians and a Times fact-checker for inaccurately depicting 1619 as the first time slaves were brought to America and for asserting that colonists fought the Revolutionary War to preserve slavery.

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