Little Rock, Ark. – U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton addressed ceremony attendees before Republic of Korea Ambassador Cho Yoon-je presented Republic of Korea Ambassador for Peace Medals May 3, 2019, at Little Rock’s MacArthur Museum of Arkansas History to Jim Stoud, Judge Andre McNiel, Charles Casey, Floyd Smith, Joseph Dickerson, Dr. Lumas Kendrick and Wayne Marsh. Photo by Arkansas National Guard.
At The Hill, Anagha Srikanth reports that Senator Tom Cotton has introduced a bill that would defund schools teaching the 1619 Project. Srikanth writes (abridged):
Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) has introduced a bill to prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project in public schools.
“The New York Times’s 1619 Project is a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded. Not a single cent of federal funding should go to indoctrinate young Americans with this left-wing garbage,” said Cotton in a release.
Published last year, the 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that honors the year the first African slaves were brought to an English colony. …
Since its publication, the project has been challenged by members of the Republican party and other right-wing figures.
“Now they want to change 1492, Columbus discovered America,” President Trump told Fox in a recent interview. “You know, we grew up, you grew up, we all did, that’s what we learned. Now they want to make it the 1619 Project. Where did that come from? What does it represent? I don’t even know.”
Some historians have criticized the project as well, including civil war historians James M. McPherson, Richard Carwardine and James Oakes. Historian Leslie. M Harris, who was consulted by the Times’ fact checkers for this project, has publicly disagreed with Hannah-Jones over one of the more controversial assertions of her writing.
“Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,” Hannah-Jones said in an introductory essay for the project.
After its publication, Harris said in an opinion essay for Politico that she had argued against that claim, but was ignored.
