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The 1619 project could end up being one of the New York Times' most noteworthy journalistic efforts to advance politically partisan narratives and reinterpretations of history, in spite of the fact that many historians have compellingly criticized its errors and inaccuracies, including Professor Leslie Harris (NYT’s own fact-checker for "The 1619 Project") who came forward in Politico to say, for example, that she had warned the NYT in advance that there was no foundation for Hannah-Jones’s claim that the American Revolution was undertaken to protect the institution of slavery. The Times has ignored or tried to minimize criticism, to date, even going so far as to ignore the factual errors pointed to them. Such attitudes from NYT's editors and even from Pulitzer winning journalists should not be surprising in today's context of growing political polarization and partisanship (that have been increasingly spilling into both the US media & academia, for decades) or to anyone who is familiar with the way the New York Times (and not just them) does and has been doing journalism ... especially when a big story is being chased. Some of the NYT's most noteworthy controversies include: 1) The 2002 stories about the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. The stories were later cited by top US officials like  Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and others as part of the campaign to commission the unjust Iraq War. By the time they were debunked, it was a too late. 2) Walter Duranty's early 1930s reporting on the Soviet Union, which have later been exposed for their denial of the Holodomor, the Soviet induced famine and genocide which has claimed millions of lives. Ironically, Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his work, too. 3) Donwplaying Nazi Germany's targeting of Jewish people for genocide. etc The book is structured around a collection of 18 essays written by various authors (historians, activist academics, lawyers, journalists / opinion columnists, etc) some of whom seem to embrace similarly rigid ideological orthodoxies. Certain parts of the book are really good and informative, while some of the conclusions and interpretations are highly controversial. Project 1619's central claim is that  while history teaches 1776 as the year of USA's founding, we should consider whether "the country’s true birth date, the moment that our defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619” (per Hannah-Jones) -as that was the moment the first African slave was brought to American shores. It can’t be that America was founded on values like equality, freedom and democracy, values that it imperfectly embodied, and has continuously strived to correct, over generations. It must be that the true founding was slavery, with the country's "true nature" revealed by this failure. Nevermind that slavery has been documented for more than 10 thousand years (e.g.: since the beginning of the agrarian revolution, at least), that it was a global phenomenon affecting every major state, kingdom, empire or civilization in history, that tens of millions are trapped in it all over the world today, and that the founders of America have decided to take on a very different path, one much more enlightened than most of the alternatives the world was offering in those times. Such myopic and reductionist views is why many of the so-called social-justice movement (especially those who have inherited freedoms and civil liberties won or built by the generations before them) cannot recognize the huge gains that have been made in the US on the question of race. The 1619's project leader, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has acknowledged in an interview that she intended to verify her "lifelong theory" that everything in the modern-day United States can be traced back to slavery (“If you name anything in America, I can relate it back to slavery”). In social psychology this is called "motivated reasoning", e.g.: emotionally biased reasoning that distorts analyses, prompts people to cherry-pick the facts they want and to ignore evidence to the contrary, in order to produce justifications that are most desired rather than explanations that accurately reflect the available evidence. In the book, Hannah-Jones seems also to be embracing Mary Ellen Hicks' claim that:" ... we [scholars/historians] produce constantly evolving interpretations, not facts.” (which she quotes) This is a correct statement in a lot of cases (if not most). What was the motivation behind certain comments by President Lincoln, for example, cannot be known for sure and is definitely more in the realm of opinion and interpretation than fact; his very well documented actions, by contrast, are probably closer to fact. Not everything scholars produce is a matter of interpretation ... in fact, the most valuable things in Sciences, are much , much more than generic "constantly evolving interpretations". Reinterpretations, especially those that ignore or discard proven facts that do not support them, are not history either. The project is not without merit, however, and a lot of the informations presented in the book are definitely useful in deepening our understanding of US history, which is a plus.  Others have omissions, exaggerations or distorsions (which is a common phenomenon when authors serve a political or ideological agenda). One example: Hannah-Jones states that  "[the majority of US high school students] can't define the Middle Passage, which led to the forced migration of nearly 13 million people across the Atlantic and transformed—or, arguably, enabled—the existence of the United States." - if a majority of high school students are not aware of the Middle Passage, this is a serious omission of the US education system, one that should be rectified - yet, of the 10 to 12.6 million African people forced to cross the Atlantic during the Middle Passage  (by most contemporary historian estimates) only a relatively small part were brought to Mainland North America directly (around 500,000 or less by most historical sources; and another 100,000 or less were brought from the Caribbean) with much larger numbers sent to Brazil (estimated 4.5-5 million) or the Caribbean (4-5 million). This latter information, and others throughout the book, are the kind of facts that are too often omitted by activists (not just by the 1619 project) who would rather leave it to the imagination of the reader to fill in the informational gaps, around the data they chose to provide. Had the project focused on bringing to public knowledge data, while summarizing and accurately (as much as possible) presenting research it would have been a notable resource for the general public. On the other hand, it's many flaws however, don't justify the excessive backlash it has attracted. Verify the data if you care about historical accuracy, be skeptical of the narratives and the interpretations that go against much better documented alternatives and you should be fine :) And remember, this is a work of journalism (more opinionated and polemic in nature) and not exactly on par with rigorous research of historical events. Overall it is not fit to be studied in schools, instead of US history (and most of what the media produces today is not school material), but some of the sources they've built upon are probably good additions to expanding the body of existing knowledge. While the US was not founded in order to protect slavery (one of the many central but weak claims pushed by the 1619 project), slavery was a significant phenomenon in US history and the general public should probably know more about it.