Most Americans did not know the date 1619 even by 2019

Evidence

At the start of 2019, two and a half decades after I first learned of the year 1619 in the pages of a book my teacher gave me, most Americans still did not know that date. As the four-hundred-year anniversary approached that August, I understood that, like so much of the uncomfortable history of our country, this momentous date would likely come and go with little acknowledgment of its significance. But by 2019, I was no longer a curious teenager attending a public high school in a small Midwestern town. I now worked at one of the most powerful media institutions in the world. I wanted to try to use that global platform to help force a confrontation with our past and the foundations upon which this country was built. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 35

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what did the post-issue polling show about whether Americans knew 1619 afterward? Did the project actually move public awareness?
• XREF: The personal-origin motif (a book a teacher gave her, Lerone Bennett) parallels how the reader frames origin stories as infrastructure for the nation and for the author’s own path.