Welcome to today's meeting of the Velshi Band Book Club. I'm MSNBC's Allie

Velshi. Today we're examining just one book, and it is a little different from the

others we've featured so far. This book is nonfiction, as applicable in a history lecture as it

is in an English classroom, and it is perhaps the most controversial book we've read so far.

This book demands its readers have an open mind, a willingness to learn, and an

ability to think critically. It is a harsh look at what exactly it means to be American and the

nature of this country itself, for better and for worse. I'm talking about the 1619 project,

a new origin story by Pulitzer Prize winner and friend of the Velshi Band Book Club, Nicole Hannah Jones.

The initiative, named for the year the first enslaved African people arrived on the shores of Virginia began as an

editorial franchise for the New York Times. It has since grown to include a best-selling book,

a children's picture book, a class curriculum, a documentary series narrated by Hannah Jones

herself on Huluulu and a podcast.

But in the suffocating hole of a ship called the White Lion, bound for where they did not know,

those who refused to die understood that the men and women chained next to them in the dark, were no longer strangers.

They had been forged in trauma.

They had been made black by those who believe themselves to be white.

And where they were headed, black equals slave.

So these were their people now.

The body of work asks us to re-examine and reframe what we know to be true of U.S. history and consider that, quote, the experience of slavery is inextricable from American history,

end quote. The 1619 project turns to history to explain the present, and successfully so.

For example, a grueling exploration into the father of modern gynecology and the black women he

experimented on will stay with you

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