[7] The project has become a leading subject of the American history wars,[8] receiving criticism from historians, both from the political left and the right, who question its historical accuracy.

[3][9] In a letter published in The New York Times in December 2019, historians Gordon S. Wood, James M. McPherson, Sean Wilentz, Victoria E. Bynum, and James Oakes applauded "all efforts to address the enduring centrality of slavery and racism to our history" and deemed the project a "praiseworthy and urgent public service," but expressed "strong reservations" about some "important aspects" of the project and requested factual corrections.

[13][14] In September 2020, controversy again arose when the Times updated the opening text of the project website to remove the phrase "...understanding 1619 as our true founding..." without any accompanying editorial note to point to what was being redone.

[29] The project quickly grew into a larger endeavor,[26] encompassing multiple issues of the magazine, with related materials in other Times publications, as well as a school curriculum developed in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center.

[30] The project was envisioned with the condition that almost all of the content would be from African-American contributors, deeming the perspective of Black writers an essential element of the story to be told.

[38] The magazine issue was accompanied by a special section in the Sunday newspaper, in partnership with the Smithsonian, examining the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade, written by Mary Elliott and Jazmine Hughes.

The letter disputed the claim, made in Hannah-Jones' introductory essay, that "one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery".

The Times published the letter along with a rebuttal from the magazine's editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein,[10][46] who defended the accuracy of the 1619 Project and declined to issue corrections.

[1] Also in December 2019, twelve scholars and political scientists specializing in the American Civil War sent a letter to the Times saying that "The 1619 Project offers a historically-limited view of slavery."

She wrote in an editorial in The St. Augustine Record that "The settlement known as San Miguel de Gualdape lasted for about six weeks from late September 1526 to the middle of November.

"[49] Writing in USA Today, several historians—among them Parker, archaeologist Kathleen A. Deagan also of Flagler, and civil rights activist and historian David Nolan—all agreed that slavery was present decades before the year 1619.

According to Deagan, people have "spent their careers trying to correct the erroneous belief" in such a narrative, with Nolan claiming that in ignoring the earlier settlement, the authors were "robbing black history".

[46][51] On March 11, 2020, Silverstein authored an "update" in the form of a "clarification" on the Times' website, correcting Hannah-Jones's essay to state that "protecting slavery was a primary motivation for some of the colonists".

[52] This "clarification" was reportedly prompted by a private warning to Silverstein by Harvard classicist and political scientist Danielle Allen that she might go public with criticism if the passage on the revolution were not corrected.

[17] Critics cited by The Washington Post, such as Quillette magazine, argued that this showed that the Times was quietly revising its position without acknowledgement of the original mischaracterization.

"[17] Significant controversy has centered on the project's claim that "one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery".

[58] Wilentz also criticized the project's mentioning the Somerset v Stewart case to support its argument, since that legal decision concerned slavery in England, with no effect in the American colonies.

[58] The historians critical of the project have said that many of America's Founding Fathers, such as John Adams, James Otis, and Thomas Paine, opposed slavery.

[58] Also at issue was the significance of Dunmore's Proclamation as cited by Silverstein,[10] with Wilentz asserting that the event was a response to rebellion rather than a cause; he also questioned the reliance on a quotation by Edward Rutledge as interpreted by Jill Lepore.

[62] In National Review, Phillip W. Magness wrote that the project provides a distorted economic history borrowed from "bad scholarship" of the New History of Capitalism (NHC),[63] and Rich Lowry wrote that Hannah-Jones' lead essay leaves out unwelcome facts about slavery, such that 'it was Africans who captured other Africans, and marched them to the coast to be sold to European slavers', smears the Revolution, distorts the Constitution, and misrepresents the founding era and Lincoln.

Her 1927 interview with Cudjoe Lewis, among the last living survivors of the 1860 voyage of the slave ship Clotilda, contains an invaluable eyewitness account of the middle passage as told by one of its victims.

Cotton added that "The 1619 Project is a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles on which it was founded.

Trump stated that the Department of Education was investigating the matter and, if the aforementioned claim was found true, federal funding would be withheld from California public schools.

[77] McConnell's letter charged that the programs were being modified "away from their intended purposes toward a politicized and divisive agenda" and said that "Actual, trained, credentialed historians with diverse political views have debunked the project's many factual and historical errors."

The World Socialist Web Site criticized the New York Times' "falsification of history", saying that it wrongly centers on racial rather than class conflict.

[11][12] The award cited her "sweeping, provocative and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America's story, prompting public conversation about the nation's founding and evolution.