By now, it seems everyone has an opinion about the 1619 Project, a special edition of The New York Times’ Magazine that tried to focus readers’ attention upon the continuing legacies of race slavery in American life. Legislators in several states have since passed laws to ban it from school curriculums, along with the teaching of Critical Race Theory—or CRT—a set of premises developed by legal scholars in the 1990s to interpret America’s institutions in the context of race and civil rights. 

 

In this two-part course, University of Maryland historian Richard Bell will take us back to basics. We’ll push past the headlines and talk candidly about what the 1619 Project says and doesn’t say, and what CRT means for the teaching of American history.