1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project

by Peter W. Wood Narrated by Stephen Bowlby

Overview

Peter Wood argues against the flawed interpretation of history found in the New York Times' 1619 Project and asserts that the true origins of American self-government were enshrined in the Mayflower compact in 1620.

Was America founded on the auction block in Jamestown in 1619 or aboard the Mayflower in 1620? The controversy erupted in August 2019 when the New York Times announced its 1619 Project. The Times set to transform history by asserting that all the laws, material gains, and cultural achievements of Americans are rooted in the exploitation of African-Americans. Historians have pushed back, saying that the 1619 Project conjures a false narrative out of racial grievance.This book sums up what the critics have said and argues that the traditional starting point for the American story-the signing of the Mayflower Compact aboard ship before the Pilgrims set foot in the Massachusetts wilderness-is right. A nation as complex as ours, of course, has many starting points, including the Declaration of Independence in 1776. But if we want to understand where the quintessential ideas of self-government and ordered liberty came from, the deliberate actions of the Mayflower immigrants in 1620 count much more than the near accidental arrival in Virginia fifteen months earlier of a Portuguese slave ship commandeered by English pirates.Schools across the country have already adopted The Times' radical revision of history as part of their curricula. The stakes are high. Should children be taught that our nation is, to its bone, a 400-year-old system of racist oppression? Or should we teach children that what has always made America exceptional is its pursuit of liberty and justice for all?

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Peter Wood’s pushback against the 1619 Project is at once sharp, illuminating, entertaining, and profound. More than a powerful exposé of the 1619 Project’s mendacity, Wood’s 1620 explains why so many Americans have succumbed to this exercise in manipulation¬—and shows the way to fight back.”
—Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center

“Via Peter Wood, the ‘civil body politic’ of the Mayflower Compact reasserts itself in the national conversation. 1620 is a dispassionate, clear reminder that the best in America’s past is still America’s best future.”
—Amity Shlaes, chair, Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation

“With elegant precision Peter Wood dismantles the edifice ostentatiously called a ‘reframing’ of American history, the 1619 Project. He deftly exposes the jumble of lies, half-lies, logical fallacies, bad history, and bad faith of a project motivated by greed and hatred of America. For anyone who cares about history, education, truth, and the United States of America, 1620 is essential reading.”
—Mary Grabar, resident fellow, Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization

“Peter Wood’s 1620 claims the prize as the most comprehensive response to the ill-fated 1619 Project. In a thorough review of the text, Wood accounts for every argument for and against. He appropriately honors the Project’s intention to pursue a mission of redress, while nevertheless pinpointing its consistent resort to misrepresentation that cannot be dismissed as merely different interpretation. Wood identifies the heart of the matter: Surely there are ways to incorporate a forthright treat¬ment of slavery, racism, and the black experience into the story of America’s rise as a free, self-governing, cre¬ative, and prosperous nation. The key to doing that is to put the pursuit of the ideals of liberty and justice at the center of the story. The 1619 Project failed in that for the sufficient reason that its purpose was cultural shakedown, not cultural affirmation. That is made plain in this necessary work.”
—William Allen, emeritus dean and professor, Michigan State University

“Peter Wood’s survey of the landscape of scholarly criticism has provided a valuable service, both in assessing the heated historical debates around the 1619 Project and by offering readers an accessible roadmap with which to navigate its many controversies. Unfortunately the New York Times has thus far conspicuously avoided the most salient criticisms of its work. This helpful guide masterfully curates the scholarly scrutiny that the newspaper evaded and ignored, equipping the reader to approach the 1619 Project with a discerning eye for evidence-based history.”
—Phillip W. Magness, senior research fellow, American Institute for Economic Research

“Those of us who remain attached to the principles of the Founding need to read 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project with both care and gratitude. For Peter Wood, like a highly trained commando, has advanced to the front lines to clear away the dangerous rubbish put forth by the 1619 Project. With critical skill and in clear prose, he has opened multiple avenues of assault on a misguided enterprise that in trying to rewrite history deserves to end up on its ash-heap.”
—Robert Paquette, president, The Alexander Hamilton Institute, emeritus professor of history, Hamilton College

“The 400th anniversary of the first landing of enslaved Africans at Jamestown could have been a great and unifying moment for America. It could have reinforced the assertion of African American scholar W.E.B. DuBois that “before the Pilgrims landed we were here,” meaning that people of African descent have always been a part of American history, and helped all Americans to see that their climb toward equality and dignity is a vital strand of that history.  But instead the New York Times’ 1619 Project took its bearings from the opposite view: that there has never been a place for African Americans in that larger American history, because racism was embedded in the American DNA at the beginning. Such a view is both historically false and morally corrosive, as Peter Wood demonstrates in this superb, well-researched, fair-minded, and surprisingly elegant book. Anyone who cares about these matters will need to read it. All Americans ought to.”
—Wilfred McClay, Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty, Universityof Oklahoma

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173196828
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	02/09/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Preface: October 1462

When Columbus set foot on Watling’s Island in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, he set in train events that would change the whole world. He was, of course, confused about his location. He imagined him- self on the outskirts of Asia, which is about twelve thousand miles west of Watling’s Island – half the circumference of the Earth. Scholars believe Columbus erred by relying on old books that estimated latitude in Arab miles, which he mistook for shorter Roman miles.

In September 1999, another long-distance voyage failed for similar reasons. Ten months earlier, NASA had fired off the Mars Climate Orbiter. The $125 million device reached Mars but immediately disintegrated. The design team, led by Lockheed Martin Astronautics, had built the machine using English units of measurement – inches and feet – while the navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory did its calculations in the metric system.

NASA’s accident left a lot of red-faced engineers. Columbus’s accident led to Europeans’ discovering corn, tomatoes, tobacco, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers, pumpkins, peanuts, vanilla, blueberries, and chocolate among some ninety New World crops. These were part of what is now called the Columbian Exchange. Material items flowed in both directions. The New World peoples soon had rice, citrus fruits, and bananas brought by Europeans – and exotic animals including horses, don- keys, mules, pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, chickens, cats, and larger breeds of dogs. Europeans also introduced West- ern technology, including wheeled vehicles and more advanced metallurgy.

These days Columbus is more often excoriated than he is celebrated. His accusers emphasize that native peoples had little immunity to the diseases that Europeans brought with them, and the death rates from the result- ing epidemics were appalling. Moreover, in the wake of Columbus’s discoveries came brutal Spanish adventurers intent on coercing labor and extracting every bit of wealth they could from the local inhabitants. Columbus, in fact, and at least some Spanish clerics and officials, tried hard to protect native people but failed to impede the demographic disaster that followed contact. They also could not stop the orgy of rape, murder, and plunder, documented by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas in a series of reports – giving rise to the “Black Legend” of Spanish cruelty in the New World.1 The Spanish, and soon the Portuguese, saw the opportunity to impose forced labor on the natives. Slavery, first in the mines and soon on plantations, became part of the Columbian Exchange.

Slavery itself, however, was nothing new to the New World. It was an institution familiar to many native societies in both North and South America. These popula- tions had been enslaving one another, as far as we can tell, from time immemorial, and forced labor was far from the worst of it. Captured people fed the almost industrial level of human sacrifice at the center of the Aztec Empire. Some New World peoples captured and kept their enemies for rituals and the sport of torture and, in the case of cannibalistic societies, to maintain a mobile food supply. Cortés could not have captured Tenochtitlán without the aid of tens of thousands of indigenous allies who had been suffering under the Aztecs’ brutal imperial rule.

As Europeans learned of these hideous customs, they were relieved of any qualms they had about extracting labor from or forcing Christian conversion on the people they encountered. Better to have your beating heart ripped out of your chest by a masked man with an obsidian knife, or to kneel to a painted image of the Virgin Mary?

Native peoples saw the Europeans as fair game for slavery as well. We have, for example, the account of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish nobleman and would- be conquistador who served as the treasurer of the ill- fated Narváez Expedition in 1528. De Vaca and some three hundred compatriots intended to conquer Florida but were shipwrecked on the Florida coast. Within months, all but sixty died; by spring 1529, fifteen were left, and soon just four. They survived because they were enslaved by the local Indians and were traded from tribe to tribe, based on their skills as faith healers. After eight years of this, they escaped to Mexico. De Vaca’s description of what he saw (Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America) is a key source for anthropologists – of which I am one – and it is among other things testimony to how thoroughly established slavery was in the New World long before any possible influence of European interlopers.

The year 1492 changed the world, but not by introducing slavery to the Americas. Slavery was already here. The Spanish initially embraced the idea of enslaving native people, but then thought better of it. First, the Laws of Burgos, adopted in 1512, attempted to restrain the Spanish abuse of indigenous people. But in 1542, with the issuing of the New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians, the Spanish liberated the Native Americans from this yoke:

We ordain and command that from henceforward for no cause of war nor any other whatsoever, though it be under title of rebellion, nor by ransom nor in other manner can an Indian be made a slave, and we will that they be treated as our vas- sals of the Crown of Castile since such they are.

The exact meaning of this is debated by historians. It seems the Spanish crown wanted to roll back the encomienda, a form of servitude slightly different from the plantation slavery we are more familiar with. The encomienda gave Spanish holders of land-grants the right to demand tribute and forced labor from the local inhabitants. 

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