'1619 Project' Book Already Amazon Bestseller

Thais Perkins is the owner of Reverie Books in Austin, Texas, and the parent of a middle school student and high school student. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas has proposed a bill that would ban federal funding for teaching the project, and the Trump administration issued a “1776 Commission” report it called a rebuttal against “reckless ‘re-education’ attempts that seek to reframe American history around the idea that the United States is not an exceptional country but an evil one.” In 2021, Republican objections to the 1619 project and to critical race theory have led to widespread legislative action. The Texas laws, Friedman says, are “opaque” about how or whether a given school such as the ones attended by Perkins’ kids could receive a copy of the 1619 book. A spokesperson for the Austin Independent School District says in a statement that the “academics team is currently working on this internally, and we are not yet able to speak to the issue.” The 1619 book appears destined for political controversy, but it’s also a literary event. Those once “brokenhearted, beaten and bruised” became “healers, pastors and activists,” Hannah-Jones and Watson write, “because the people fought/America began to live to its promise of democracy.” Jess Lifshitz, who teaches fifth grade literacy in the Chicago suburbs, says that although she was familiar with “The 1619 Project,” she didn’t plan to directly incorporate the work into her classroom because of her students’ age.