The New York Times’ “1619 Project” is a series of articles published in 2019 to mark the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans to arrive in America. In an introduction to the series, New York Times Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jake Silverstein claims that slavery “is the country’s very origin.” He writes: Out of slavery—and...
In a speech commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth, the great orator Daniel Webster lauded these refugees as the authors of American “civil and religious liberty.” A few decades later, French diplomat and writer Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “Puritanism was not only a religious doctrine, but also at several points it...