After the 1776 Commission collapsed, state-level bans on teaching the 1619 Project spread quickly.

Evidence

The commission faced wide condemnation, with forty-seven groups representing academic historians signing a statement drawn up by the American Historical Association that accused the commission of issuing a report “written hastily in one month after two desultory and tendentious ‘hearings,’ without any consultation with professional historians of the United States” and failing “to engage a rich and vibrant body of scholarship that has evolved over the last seven decades.” President Joe Biden rescinded the executive order in one of his first acts in office. But by July 2021, regulations enforcing the ideology of the 1776 Commission and/or seeking to ban the teaching of the 1619 Project and teaching about racism had either been enacted or were being considered in eighteen states. Republican legislators in Texas introduced the 1836 Project, named after the year Texas declared independence from Mexico in order to found a slaveholding republic. That project seeks to establish a “patriotic education” in public schools. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 52

Categorization

• XREF: Directly illustrates the reader’s stated case study: how a historical controversy (the 1776 Commission vs. 1619 Project) actually plays out institutionally. Connects to the Wilentz letter dispute as another episode of historians policing the project.
• SEED: Angle: the 1836 Project’s name choice (Texas independence to found a slaveholding republic) as an origin-story contestation in miniature - what a state dates itself from determines what counts as patriotic.