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I'm Christopher Leiden. This is Open Source.

It's a funny thing about origin stories,

who we are, how we got here, each one of us,

hold nations of us.

We know going in that the stories are made up one way or another,

and we come to find out that a lot of them are just plain wrong.

Then what?

The Sunday magazine of the New York Times took a bold run this past summer

at the year 1620 as the start of the American story.

The year, of course, when the Mayflower landed about a hundred

dissenting English purtons, our pilgrims at Pymethrock.

But no, the Times argued our first chapter was dated 1619,

a year earlier, when a ship bearing some 20 African slaves

landed in Point Comfort, Virginia,

which was to say the drive to implant a slaveocracy in the New World

had a step on building a temple of freedom.

Nicole Hannah Jones is the writer and editor who led what the Times

called a major initiative at the paper to reframe American history.

...