The New York Times' 1619 Project selected Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, as a filming location for its new Hulu docuseries. In doing so, creator Nikole Hannah-Jones sought to bolster her project's most troublesome claim—the assertion that British overtures toward emancipation impelled the American colonists into revolution, ultimately securing an independent United States.
In the past three years, the Times has grappled with the fallout from Hannah-Jones' assertion, including the revelation that it ignored its own fact-checker's warnings against printing the charge. The Times tempered its language to apply to "some of" the colonists, only to see it reasserted by Hannah-Jones in her public commentaries. Later, a related line about the Project's goal of replacing 1776 with a "true founding" of 1619 disappeared without notice from the Times' website. The newspaper found itself in a balancing act between its writer's uncompromising positions and the need to preserve credibility as it made a Pulitzer Prize bid with the series. But Hannah-Jones was not ready to abandon the claim at the center of her lead essay, and the first episode of the Hulu series makes that abundantly clear.
