Remarkably, the project errors include even its name, which is the subject of the Pulitzer-winning lead essay written by 1619 Project director Nikole Hannah-Jones:
In August 1619, just 12 years after the English settled Jamestown, Va., one year before the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock and some 157 years before the English colonists even decided they wanted to form their own country, the Jamestown colonists bought 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from English pirates.
Thus, was the “1619 Project” name selected, and this is why the essay series was published in August 2019, the presumed 400th anniversary of the “beginning of American slavery.”
Correcting the Record
This assertion was invalidated as soon as it was released by Nell Irvin Painter, a professor emerita of American history at Princeton University. In an August essay for The Guardian, a left-leaning British newspaper, Painter wrote:
People were not enslaved in Virginia in 1619, they were indentured. The 20 or so Africans were sold and bought as “servants” for a term of years, and they joined a population consisting largely of European indentured servants, mainly poor people from the British Isles whom the Virginia Company of London had transported and sold into servitude.
From the bowels of New York Times-ism, you can here if you listen closely, “So what?”
Blithe Spirit 