The claim that got them the most in trouble with historians was this:
> one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery
Gordon Wood responded,
> "I don't know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves."
Gordon Wood is known as the expert on colonial pamphlets and ideology more generally during the Revolutionary era, so him saying this carries a lot of weight. Gordon Wood and a bunch of other very well known historians wrote to the NY Times to ask for corrections. The editor of the magazine, Jake Silverstein, published their letter next to his rebuttal, in which he argued that defending slavery was indeed a cause of the revolution.[1] What he didn't say was that the NY Time's own fact checker had objected to the claim. That only came out later.[2] The embarrassment of that revelation finally caused the NY Times to slightly weaken - but not entirely drop - its claim about the revolution.
The claim about the revolution caused the most controversy, because it has huge consequences for how one interprets American history, but it was hardly the only false or highly questionable claim. A few others:
* The US has worse labor protections than Brazil because of the US' history of slavery (Brazil was the largest slave nation in modern history, and abolished slavery well after the US did).
* Presenting New Orleans as the financial capital of the antebellum US (NY city alone had nearly as much banking capital as the entire South, and far more than New Orleans).
* Claiming that double-entry bookkeeping was invented on Southern plantations (that would be a surprise to Luca Pacioli, the 15th-Century Florentine mathematician who wrote a treatise on double-entry bookkeeping).
Just fundamentally, I would tell anyone who doesn't already know the history well not to try to learn it from the 1619 Project, because you really can't trust any of the factual claims in the project. People would be much better served by reading more standard historical works (including some of the very accessible works written by critics of the 1619 Project that deal with slavery - James Oakes and James McPherson come to mind).
> one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery
Gordon Wood responded,
> "I don't know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves."
Gordon Wood is known as the expert on colonial pamphlets and ideology more generally during the Revolutionary era, so him saying this carries a lot of weight. Gordon Wood and a bunch of other very well known historians wrote to the NY Times to ask for corrections. The editor of the magazine, Jake Silverstein, published their letter next to his rebuttal, in which he argued that defending slavery was indeed a cause of the revolution.[1] What he didn't say was that the NY Time's own fact checker had objected to the claim. That only came out later.[2] The embarrassment of that revelation finally caused the NY Times to slightly weaken - but not entirely drop - its claim about the revolution.
The claim about the revolution caused the most controversy, because it has huge consequences for how one interprets American history, but it was hardly the only false or highly questionable claim. A few others:
* The US has worse labor protections than Brazil because of the US' history of slavery (Brazil was the largest slave nation in modern history, and abolished slavery well after the US did).
* Presenting New Orleans as the financial capital of the antebellum US (NY city alone had nearly as much banking capital as the entire South, and far more than New Orleans).
* Claiming that double-entry bookkeeping was invented on Southern plantations (that would be a surprise to Luca Pacioli, the 15th-Century Florentine mathematician who wrote a treatise on double-entry bookkeeping).
Just fundamentally, I would tell anyone who doesn't already know the history well not to try to learn it from the 1619 Project, because you really can't trust any of the factual claims in the project. People would be much better served by reading more standard historical works (including some of the very accessible works written by critics of the 1619 Project that deal with slavery - James Oakes and James McPherson come to mind).
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-th...
2. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-proje...