My rating: 5 of 5 stars
One of my favorite scenes in my favorite Indiana Jones movie, The Last Crusade, is the moment when Henry Jones, Sr., played by the legendary screen actor Sean Connery, is being slapped around by the Nazi colonel demanding to know where Jones’s Holy Grail Diary is. But when the colonel asks, “What does the diary tell you that it doesn’t tell us?”, Jones grabs the colonel’s hand before he can slap him again and says, “It tells me that goose-stepping morons life yourself should try reading books instead of burning them!” I bring that scene up in the context of this book review because, as of this writing, scores of “parent groups” across the United States are trying to force public schools and libraries to remove books about BIPOC and/or LGBTQ+ topics from their shelves. This particular book has been at the center of many of these efforts ever since the first articles of this project were published in The New York Times Magazine in August 2019. Having just finished this book, I have to say that it is one of the best books about American history that I have read in a long time. The authors and editors of this book make the best case for why Black Americans’s 400+ year freedom struggle should be at the center of how we tell the story of America, and, to paraphrase Henry Jones, Sr., people must read this book instead of trying to ban it.
Building upon The New York Times Magazine articles that were first published, this book tells America’s history from the perspective of Black Americans with articles and works of poetry and fiction written by Black authors. Starting with the first enslaved Africans being brought to the Jamestown colony in 1619, the authors document several different aspects of American life that have been affected by our country’s history of slavery and racial oppression. In some ways, the concept and overall framework is very similar to another book that came out just a few months earlier than this, Four Hundred Souls edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain. The key difference is that authors in this book are given an ample amount of space to discuss a particular topic, like medicine, music, or democracy, from the very beginning through the present, whereas in Four Hundred Souls authors a kept to a 5 page limit looking at a specific topic within a 5 year period in American history. Because of that, the authors in The 1619 Project have the space to fully flesh out their topic and demonstrate how America’s past echoes strongly in our present. Thus, the approach that this book provides a clearer picture and more impactful thesis in each chapter.
Each chapter of the book is divided into different topics with works of poetry and fiction separating each topic and providing a rough timeline of American history. In anthology works such as these, I oftentimes find that the quality from work to work can vary wildly. That is not so in this book. Each chapter is top notch with excellent writing and research that both proves each author’s point and is incredibly engaging to read. At no point did I feel bored or unconvinced. The works of poetry and fiction that separate the chapters may appear superfluous at first glance, but in reality serve a vital function of marking out keep moments in American history, providing an artistic break between each chapter’s often thought-provoking topics, and inserting a creative outlet for what the authors and readers are feeling after each chapter.
In short, this book is a monumental achievement in popular history writing that the editors and authors should be proud of. I have nothing but absolute praise for this work and if there is one book on American history that you read this year, you owe it to yourself to read this one.
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