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Reading Guide for ​The 1619 Project ​Essays

The index below offers a preview and guiding questions for the 18 essays included in ​The 1619 Project​ from ​The New York Times Magazine.

1. “The Idea of America” by Nikole Hannah-Jones (pages 14–26)

Excerpt “Our Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776, proclaims that ‘all

men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable

rights.’ But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be

true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst. ‘Life, Liberty

and the pursuit of Happiness’ did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet

despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black

Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black

resistance and protest, we have helped the country to live up to its founding

ideals…Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black

Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it

might not be a democracy at all.”

Key Names,

Dates, and

Terms

abolitionist, American Revolution, Civil Rights Act, Crispus Attucks,

Declaration of Independence, Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Jim

Crow, Mason-Dixon Line, National Association for the Advancement of Colored

People (N.A.A.C.P.), Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois

Guiding

Questions

1. How have laws, policies, and systems developed to enforce the

enslavement of black Americans before the Civil War influenced laws,

policies, and systems in years since?

2. How has activism by black Americans throughout U.S. history led to

policies that benefit all people living in the U.S.?

2. “Chained Migration” by Tiya Miles (page 22)

These materials were created to support ​The 1619 Project​, published in ​The New York Times Magazine​ August 2019. You can find this and more educational resources at ​www.pulitzercenter.org/1619

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Excerpt “Slavery leapt out of the East and into the interior lands of the Old Southwest in

the 1820s and 1830s.”

“As new lands in the Old Southwest were pried open, white enslavers back east

realized their most profitable export was no longer tobacco or rice. A complex

interstate slave trade became an industry of its own. This extractive system,

together with enslavers moving west with human property, resulted in the

relocation of approximately one million enslaved black people to a new region.

The entrenched practice of buying, selling, owning, renting and mortgaging

humans stretched into the American West along with the white settler-colonial

population that now occupied former indigenous lands.”

Key Names,

Dates, and

Terms

Indian Removal Act of 1830, Mexican-American War, Westward Expansion

Guiding

Questions

1. How was the expansion of the U.S. shaped and made possible by slave

labor?

2. When did free black Americans begin to travel west, and why?

3. “Capitalism”​ ​by Matthew Desmond (pages 30–40)

Excerpt “In the United States, the richest 1 percent of Americans own 40 percent of the

country’s wealth, while a larger share of working-age people (18-65) lives in

poverty than in any other nation belonging to the Organization for Economic

Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.).”

“Those searching for reasons the American economy is uniquely severe and

unbridled have found answers in many places (religion, politics, culture). But

recently, historians have pointed persuasively to the gnatty fields of Georgia

and Alabama, to the cotton houses and slave auction blocks, as the birthplace

of America’s low-road approach to capitalism.”

Key Names,

Dates, and

Terms

2008 economic crisis, assets, capitalism, Collateralized Debt Obligations

(C.D.O.s), cotton gin, credit, creditor, debts, depreciation, Industrial

Revolution, investor, labor union, Louisiana Purchase, mortgage, Organization

for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.), Panic of 1837, stock

These materials were created to support ​The 1619 Project​, published in ​The New York Times Magazine​ August 2019. You can find this and more educational resources at ​www.pulitzercenter.org/1619

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market crash of 1929, Wall Street, W.E.B. Du Bois

Guiding

Questions

1. How does the author describe capitalism in the U.S.?

2. How did slavery in the U.S. contribute to the development of the global

financial industry?

3. What current financial systems reflect practices developed to support

industries built on the work of enslaved people?

4. “Mortgaging the Future” by Mehrsa Baradaran (page 32)

Excerpt “The Union passed the bills so it could establish a national currency in order to

finance the war. The legislation also created the Office of the Comptroller of the

Currency (O.C.C.), the first federal bank regulator. After the war, states were

allowed to keep issuing bank charters of their own. This byzantine

infrastructure remains to this day, and is known as the dual banking system.

Among all nations in the world, only the United States has such a fragmentary,

overlapping and inefficient system — a direct relic of the conflict between

federal and state power over maintenance of the slave-based economy of the

South.”

Key Names,

Dates, and

Terms

bank charters, dual banking system, federal oversight, National Bank Act,

Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (O.C.C.)

Guiding

Questions

1. How are current banking practices in the U.S. influenced by bank

administration and regulation practices developed to fund the Civil

War?

2. How are bank regulation practices established after the Civil War

connected to the 2008 economic crisis in the U.S.?

5. “Good as Gold” by Mehrsa Baradaran (page 35)

Excerpt “At the height of the war, Lincoln understood that he could not feed the troops

without more money, so he issued a national currency, backed by the full faith

and credit of the United States — but not by gold.”

“Lincoln assured critics that the move would be temporary, but leaders who

followed him eventually made it permanent — first Franklin Roosevelt during

These materials were created to support ​The 1619 Project​, published in ​The New York Times Magazine​ August 2019. You can find this and more educational resources at ​www.pulitzercenter.org/1619

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the Great Depression and then, formally, Richard Nixon in 1971.”

Key Names,

Dates, and

Terms

fiat currency

Guiding

Questions

1. Why did the U.S. develop its first national currency, and what role did

the Civil War play in its creation?

2. How was the value of a national currency in the U.S. determined?

6. ”Fabric of Modernity” by Mehrsa Baradaran (page 36)

Excerpt “From the first decades of the 1800s, during the height of the trans-Atlantic

cotton trade, the sheer size of the market and the escalating number of disputes

between counterparties was such that courts and lawyers began to articulate

and codify the common-law standards regarding contracts...Today law students

still study some of these pivotal cases as they learn doctrines like foreseeability,

mutual mistake and damages.”

Key Names,

Dates, and

Terms

damages, futures contracts, foreseeability, mutual mistake contracts

Guiding

Questions

1. How did increased production of cotton in the South through slave

labor influence trade and business in the U.S., and around the world?

2. How have the laws and contracts developed before the Civil War to

support the cotton industry influenced the financial documents we use

today?

7. “Municipal Bonds” by Tiya Miles (page 40)

Excerpt “As the historian David Quigley has demonstrated, New York City’s

phenomenal economic consolidation came as a result of its dominance in the

Southern cotton trade, facilitated by the construction of the Erie Canal. It was

in this moment — the early decades of the 1800s — that New York City gained

its status as a financial behemoth through shipping raw cotton to Europe and

bankrolling the boom industry that slavery made.”

These materials were created to support ​The 1619 Project​, published in ​The New York Times Magazine​ August 2019. You can find this and more educational resources at ​www.pulitzercenter.org/1619

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Key Names,

Dates, and

Terms

capitalism, Dutch West India Company, insurance, profits, Wall Street

Guiding

Questions

1. How did enslaved people contribute to the construction of northeastern

cities like New York City?

2. How did banks and other financial institutions profit from slavery, even

after it was abolished in the North?

8. “A Broken Health Care System” by Jeneen Interlandi (pages 44–45)

Excerpt “Federal health care policy was designed, both implicitly and explicitly, to

exclude black Americans. As a result, they faced an array of

inequities—including statistically shorter, sicker lives than their white

counterparts.”

“One hundred and fifty years after the freed people of the South first petitioned

the government for basic medical care, the United States remains the only

high-income country in the world where such care is not guaranteed to every

citizen. In the United States, racial health disparities have proved as

foundational as democracy itself.”

Key Names,

Dates, and

Terms

Affordable Care Act (A.C.A.), Aid to Dependent Children Act, Fair Labor

Standards Act of 1938, Freedmen’s Bureau, GI Bill, Jim Crow, New Deal,

Pullman porters,​ ​Reconstruction, Social Security, Wagner Acts of 1935

Guiding

Questions

1. How have healthcare policies, city planning, and other government

systems in the U.S. limited who has access to healthcare services?

2. According to the author, what factors help diseases to spread in a

community?

9. “Traffic”​ ​by Kevin M. Kruse (pages 48–49)

Excerpt “The postwar programs for urban renewal, for instance, destroyed black

neighborhoods and displaced their residents with such regularity that

African-Americans came to believe, in James Baldwin’s memorable phrase,

that ‘urban renewal means Negro removal.’”

These materials were created to support ​The 1619 Project​, published in ​The New York Times Magazine​ August 2019. You can find this and more educational resources at ​www.pulitzercenter.org/1619

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“In the end, Atlanta’s traffic is at a standstill because its attitude about transit is

at a standstill, too. Fifty years after its Interstates were set down with an eye to

segregation and its rapid-transit system was stunted by white flight, the city is

still stalled in the past.”

Key Names,

Dates, and

Terms

James Baldwin, New Deal, public transit, redlining practices, segregation laws

of the 1890s, urban renewal, white flight

Guiding

Questions

1. What policies contributed to neighborhood segregation in the U.S.?

2. How have transportation systems reinforced segregation?

10. “Undemocratic Democracy” by Jamelle Bouie (pages 50–55)

Excerpt “There is a homegrown ideology of reaction in the United States, inextricably

tied to our system of slavery. And while the racial content of that ideology has

attenuated over time, the basic framework remains: fear of rival political

majorities; of demographic ‘replacement’; of a government that threatens

privilege and hierarchy.”

Key Names,

Dates, and

Terms

Affordable Care Act (A.C.A.), the black belt, concurrent majority, debt limit,

fiscal responsibility, nullification, Populist Party

Guiding

Questions

1. According to the author, how do 19th century U.S. political movements

aimed at maintaining the right to enslave people manifest in

contemporary political parties?

11. “Medical Inequality” by Linda Villarosa (pages 56–57)

Excerpt “The centuries-old belief in racial differences in physiology has continued to

mask the brutal effects of discrimination and structural inequities, instead

placing blame on individuals and their communities for statistically poor health

outcomes. Rather than conceptualizing race as a risk factor that predicts

disease or disability because of a fixed susceptibility conceived on shaky

grounds centuries ago, we would do better to understand race as a proxy for

bias, disadvantage and ill treatment. The poor health outcomes of black people,

the targets of discrimination over hundreds of years and numerous generations,

may be a harbinger for the future health of an increasingly diverse and unequal

These materials were created to support ​The 1619 Project​, published in ​The New York Times Magazine​ August 2019. You can find this and more educational resources at ​www.pulitzercenter.org/1619

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America.”

Key Names,

Dates, and

Terms

anesthesia, gynecology, lung capacity, pulmonary function

Guiding

Questions

1. What inaccurate and unfounded assumptions have doctors made

throughout history about the bodies of enslaved black people, and how

did they attempt to prove those assumptions?

2. How have racist medical practices and attitudes influenced the medical

treatment that black Americans have received throughout history, and

continue to receive today?

12. “American Popular Music” by Wesley Morris (pages 60–67)

Excerpt “When we’re talking about black music, we’re talking about horns, drums,

keyboards and guitars doing the unthinkable together. We’re also talking about

what the borrowers and collaborators don’t want to or can’t lift — centuries of

weight, of atrocity we’ve never sufficiently worked through, the blackness you

know is beyond theft because it’s too real, too rich, too heavy to steal.”

Key Names,

Dates, and

Terms

appropriation, minstrelsy

Guiding

Questions

1. How have popular musical and performance trends throughout history

used traditions and styles developed by black Americans?

2. How does the author describe black music and blackness in music?

13. “Sugar” by Khalil Gibran Muhammad (pages 70–77)

Excerpt “None of this — the extraordinary mass commodification of sugar, its economic

might and outsize impact on the American diet and health — was in any way

foreordained, or even predictable, when Christopher Columbus made his

second voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1493, bringing sugar-cane stalks

with him from the Spanish Canary Islands. In Europe at that time, refined

sugar was a luxury product, the back-breaking toil and dangerous labor

required in its manufacture an insuperable barrier to production in anything

approaching bulk. It seems reasonable to imagine that it might have remained

These materials were created to support ​The 1619 Project​, published in ​The New York Times Magazine​ August 2019. You can find this and more educational resources at ​www.pulitzercenter.org/1619

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so if it weren’t for the establishment of an enormous market in enslaved

laborers who had no way to opt out of the treacherous work.”

Key Names,

Dates, and

Terms

1730 slave code in New York, Haitian Revolution, Hurricane Katrina,

racketeering, taxpayer subsidies, triangle of trade, wire fraud

Guiding

Questions

1. How is sugar produced, and why was it cultivated in what became the

U.S.?

2. How has sugar production changed, and how have policies continued to

limit who has access to the wealth earned from producing sugar?

14. “Pecan Pioneer” by Tiya Miles (page 76)

Excerpt “The presence of pecan pralines in every Southern gift shop from South

Carolina to Texas, and our view of the nut as regional fare, masks a crucial

chapter in the story of the pecan: It was an enslaved man who made the wide

cultivation of this nut possible.”

Key Names,

Dates, and

Terms

commercial production, commercial market, grafting

Guiding

Questions

1. How were pecans initially cultivated in the U.S., and how did Antoine’s

innovation make their commercial production viable?

2. Who are the figures that we learn about when studying innovation in

the U.S., and whose stories are missing?

15. “The Wealth Gap” by Trymaine Lee (pages 82–83)

Excerpt “Today’s racial wealth gap is perhaps the most glaring legacy of American

slavery and the violent economic dispossession that followed.”

“The post-Reconstruction plundering of black wealth was not just a product of

spontaneous violence, but etched in law and public policy.”

Key Names,

Dates, and

Terms

Freedmen’s Bureau, GI Bill, Home Owners Loan Corporation, New Deal

programs (social security, unemployment, minimum wage, etc.),

Reconstruction, redlining, zero and negative wealth

These materials were created to support ​The 1619 Project​, published in ​The New York Times Magazine​ August 2019. You can find this and more educational resources at ​www.pulitzercenter.org/1619

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Guiding

Questions

1. How does a person accumulate and keep wealth in the U.S.?

2. How have policy and exclusion from government wealth-building

programs limited black Americans’ opportunities to accumulate wealth?

16. “Mass Incarceration” by Bryan Stevenson (pages 80–81)

Excerpt “The United States has the highest rate of incarceration of any nation on Earth:

We represent 4 percent of the planet’s population but 22 percent of its

imprisoned. In the early 1970s, our prisons held fewer than 300,000 people;

since then, that number has grown to more than 2.2 million, with 4.5 million

more on probation or parole. Because of mandatory sentencing and ‘three

strikes’ laws, I’ve found myself representing clients sentenced to life without

parole for stealing a bicycle or for simple possession of marijuana. And central

to understanding this practice of mass incarceration and excessive punishment

is the legacy of slavery.”

“It’s not just that this history fostered a view of black people as presumptively

criminal. It also cultivated a tolerance for employing any level of brutality in

response.”

Key Names,

Dates, and

Terms

13th Amendment, Black Codes, capital punishment, Reconstruction,

sharecropping

Guiding

Questions

1. How have laws been written and enforced in the U.S. over the past 400

years to disproportionality punish black Americans?

2. How does Stevenson argue that the modern day prison system acts as a

continuation of slavery?

17. “Hope” by Djeneba Aduayom (photography), Nikole Hannah-Jones (introduction), and

Wadzanai Mhute (captions) (pages 86–93)

These materials were created to support ​The 1619 Project​, published in ​The New York Times Magazine​ August 2019. You can find this and more educational resources at ​www.pulitzercenter.org/1619

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Excerpt “Leading up to the civil rights movement, Howard was virtually the only law

school in the South that served black students. It became an incubator for those

who would use the law to challenge racial apartheid in the North and the South

and help make the country more fair and democratic.”

“The school continues that legacy today, producing more black lawyers than

perhaps any other institution. In May, it graduated its 148th class, and the four

newly minted lawyers featured here were among the graduates. All of them

descended from people enslaved in this country.” —Nikole Hannah-Jones

As a sixth-generation descendant of slavery, I am essentially a part of the first

generation of descendants to carry the torch that was lit by my ancestors into

true freedom.’’ ​—​Septembra Lesane, a recent graduate of Howard University School of Law

Key Names,

Dates, and

Terms

census, estate, Freedmen’s Bureau, genealogy, Historically Black Colleges and

Universities (HBCUs), property ledgers, will

Guiding

Questions

1. What challenges do black Americans face in tracing lineage, and what

strategies have been used to address those challenges?

2. What similarities and differences do you notice between the stories of

the ancestors of the four Howard University School of Law students?

3. How do the portraits help tell the stories of the people who are profiled?

18. “Shadow of the Past” by Anne C. Bailey (text) and Dannielle Bowman (photograph) (page 98)

Excerpt “This spot [pictured] is the site of the largest auction of enslaved people in

American history… A photo can’t capture the contribution those 436 people

made to the economy of their country, or the gifts and talents they lent it. (As

part of the Gullah Geechee community, they were among those who gave the

world a song of peace, ‘Kumbaya.’) What you do see are two tracks, intersecting

but going in different directions, toward different outcomes — a fitting

metaphor, perhaps, for black and white life in America.”

These materials were created to support ​The 1619 Project​, published in ​The New York Times Magazine​ August 2019. You can find this and more educational resources at ​www.pulitzercenter.org/1619

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Key Names,

Dates, and

Terms

auction, economy, Gullah Geechee community

Guiding

Questions

1. How does the author describe the largest auction of enslaved people in

American history?

2. How do the text and image connect? Why do you think ​The 1619 Project concludes with this image and text?

These materials were created to support ​The 1619 Project​, published in ​The New York Times Magazine​ August 2019. You can find this and more educational resources at ​www.pulitzercenter.org/1619