The

The Welcome to the first Patreon-only episode of Conversations with Coleman.

If you support me on Patreon, then you know that once a month I'm going to be doing solo episodes that are only available to people who support the podcast. And this is the first one. But because this is the first one, I'm going to leave at least part of this episode open to everyone just so that people who are thinking of supporting

the podcast have a sense of what these episodes are going to be like. So if you support the podcast,

you'll get access to this entire episode. But if you don't, you'll get access to maybe half of it.

But going forward, the episodes will only be available to people

who support the podcast. And of course, you can do that by going to my Patreon page. So today I'm

going to talk about the 1619 project, and I'm going to read an essay that I wrote in response to it.

The 1619 project was created by New York Times Magazine, and it was a

series of essays and poems and photos intended to, quote, reframe American history by placing the

consequences of slavery and the contributions of black

Americans at its center. And the project has inspired lots of pushback and lots of praise.

I believe some Democratic presidential candidate mentioned it during a debate, yet at the same time

it's come under attack by historians, including

some of the leading historians of slavery and the civil war. The reason is because it had some

very controversial arguments. I think the most controversial was the idea that one of the main

reasons Americans revolted against the British is because they wanted to preserve slavery.

And they feared that British rule would mean abolishing slavery in the near term.

In other words, that one of the main reasons the U.S. exists is because of the desire to preserve slavery,

which is not a mainstream claim about the American Revolution.

That claim was made by Nicole Hannah-Jones, who is a journalist with the New York Times magazine

and a MacArthur Genius Grant winner.

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