In late August 1619, a ship carrying more than twenty to thirty enslaved African people arrived on the shores of Hampton, Virginia. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: I t is the source of so much that still defines the United States.

On the 400th anniversary of that fateful moment, The New York Times Magazine launched The 1619 Project, a reframing of the American founding and its contemporary echoes, placing slavery and resistance at the center of the American story.
This book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself.

The 1619 Project speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today. It reveals long-glossed-over truths around the US nation’s founding and construction—and the way that the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation, but continues to shape contemporary American life.