As the cameras pan across streets filled with historical re-enactors and tourists in front of restored colonial buildings, the pair take another stab at resurrecting the 1619 Project’s narrative about the American Revolution.

The scene opens in Williamsburg on the grounds of its reconstructed colonial Governor’s Palace, where Hannah-Jones joins University of South Carolina professor Woody Holton - one of a handful of heterodox historians who defended the 1619 Project’s original narrative.

“The 1619 Project” creator Nikole Hannah-Jones at the premiere of the Hulu docuseries in Los Angeles on January 26, 2023. But Hannah-Jones was not ready to abandon the claim at the center of her lead essay, and the first episode of the Hulu series makes that abundantly clear. The newspaper found itself in a balancing act between its writer’s uncompromising positions and the need to preserve credibility as it made a Pulitzer Prize bid with the series. Later, a related line about the Project’s goal of replacing 1776 with a “true founding” of 1619 disappeared without notice from the Times’ website. The Times tempered its language to apply to “some of” the colonists, only to see it reasserted by Hannah-Jones in her public commentaries. In the past three years, the Times has grappled with the fallout from Hannah-Jones’ assertion, including the revelation that it ignored its own fact-checker’s warnings against printing the charge. In doing so, creator Nikole Hannah-Jones sought to bolster her project’s most troublesome claim - the assertion that British overtures toward emancipation impelled the American colonists into revolution, ultimately securing an independent United States. The New York Times’ 1619 Project selected Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, as a filming location for its new Hulu docuseries. Mississippi deputies shot off suspect’s tongue, routinely used excessive force: studyīlack educator Marcus Foster has much to teach us today about schools NYC teachers union’s workshop on ‘harmful effects of whiteness’ canceled after influx of ‘hate’

The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones