Reshaping public memory in the 1619 project: rhetorical interventions against selective forgetting

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the New York Times’ The 1619 Project and its engagement with public memory, focusing primarily on two articles, by Nikole Hannah-Jones and Jamelle Bouie, that reframe America’s political history. While every piece in The 1619 project, and the archive as a whole, engages meaningfully with public memory, these pieces are most representative of the archive’s rhetorical interventions against harmful narratives about the nation’s past predicated on selective forgetting. Indeed, The 1619 Project has significant implications for rhetorical studies, providing a template of how archival rhetorical texts can resist the erasure of historical injustices from public memory. After examining these two articles as case studies of how The 1619 Project engages with public memory, the paper will also discuss responses to the project, which have important implications for memory studies and museum studies, in particular for discussions of how forgetting operates within particular historical discourses.