George Washington Williams

A work of millennial scope by a self-taught African-American historian.

Initially supportive of Belgian King Leopold II’s claim to have created a “free state” of Congo, Williams changed his mind when he saw the horrors of empire.

The 1619 Project claimed to reveal the unknown history of slavery. It ended up helping to distort the real history of slavery and the struggle against it.

One war, in one city, Philadelphia, and the fate of the men, women, and children left behind as collateral damage in the wake of conflict.

Rejecting the resignation of the 1970s and ’80s, Robinson found in the disinvested ruins of the city a new egalitarian form of politics.

It erases the fact that, for the first 70 years of its existence, the US was roiled by intense, escalating conflict over slavery – a conflict only resolved by civil war.

The project's editor falsifies the history of American history-writing, openly embracing the privileging of “narrative” over “actual fact.”