History doesn’t stay in the classroom. The 1619 Project took a historiographical argument and put it in a newspaper, then a curriculum, then a political fight — and the controversy that followed wasn’t really about the past so much as how it gets used. This post asks you to do two things: judge the argument on its own terms, and place it in the long story of historiography this course has been tracing all semester.
Write a discussion board post of about 800 words that addresses both questions below — roughly half your space for each.
Address both sides honestly, regardless of your own view of the project. What does it get right — as an argument, as a historiographical act, as a public intervention? What are its limitations or vulnerabilities? Draw on Hannah-Jones, Serwer, and Lowenthal.
This is the harder question — and the more interesting one. Where does the 1619 Project sit in the arc of the course? Which historiographical frameworks or thinkers we’ve read does it resemble, challenge, or extend? Ground your argument in specific readings from across the semester, not just this week.
At some point — it can be a few sentences, it doesn’t need its own section — connect this debate to something in your own life. The history you were taught in high school and how it handled slavery. An argument at a family dinner. A statue, a street name, a school named after someone. A social media fight you scrolled past. A textbook you still remember.
This is not decoration. The 1619 Project’s central claim is that the story a country tells about its founding shapes the country — so the test of that claim runs through the version of the story you were handed. Your specific experience of that is evidence nobody else in the class has.
This is the assignment in the course where AI will most easily produce something that looks finished. The 1619 debate is thoroughly documented online, and any chatbot will hand you a balanced, competent, completely generic 800 words in about four seconds.
That is exactly why it’s worth almost nothing here. Every student who does that submits the same post, and none of it shows any thinking.
Write this one yourself. The two things I’m actually grading — how specifically you use our readings, and how you connect the debate to something in your own life — are the two things AI does most poorly. It hasn’t read Trouillot with you, it doesn’t know what Week 5 did to your thinking, and it has no idea what your high school history teacher said about slavery.
If it reads like a competent summary of the controversy with no course readings named and no trace of an actual person behind it, it earns a failing grade whether or not you used AI.
There’s no right answer to either question. But vague generalizations unsupported by the readings won’t earn full credit. The more specifically you draw on the texts — Hannah-Jones alongside Trouillot, or Lowenthal alongside Ranke — the stronger your post will be.
Post your response to the discussion board. You’ll need all three readings — Hannah-Jones, Serwer, and Lowenthal — so this comes after both Week 12 sessions; check the schedule for the exact due date.
Come ready to talk about where you landed — and to hear where your classmates landed somewhere else.