When Are Nations Born, and What Gives Them the ‘Right to Exist’?

In August 2019, The New York Times Magazine published what some considered a bombshell revision of U.S. history. For Nikole Hannah-Jones, the developer and curator of The 1619 Project, the collection of essays simply moved well-documented historical facts from the footnotes of academia to the front pages of the country’s preeminent newspaper of record, where national narratives are formed and reformed.

The opening paragraph tells the story of the White Lion, a ship that “carries twenty to thirty captive Africans, who are traded to the Virginia colonists for provisions, making them the first enslaved Africans in the English colonies that will become the United States.” Hannah-Jones and the scholars and journalists who wrote The 1619 Project encouraged readers to consider this moment as the seminal event that truly marks the foundation of our country.

In addition to being an incredible work of journalism (it won the Pulitzer Prize), The 1619 Project was an exercise in the prophetic act of “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.”

In the preface to the 2021 book version of the project, Hannah-Jones wrote, “Black students, especially, told me that for the first time in their lives, they’d experienced a feeling usually reserved for white Americans: a sense of ownership of, belonging in, and influence over the American story.”

The backlash was just as intense as the support.

Small groups of historians questioned the framing of the U.S. story as being solely about race. They took special grievance with a paragraph in which Hannah-Jones wrote that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” This prompted her, in a later edition, to make a “not all white people” adjustment to her language.

The 1619 Project wasn’t perfect. No work of history is. But it did what excellent journalism often does: place strategic cracks in the set-in-stone myths designed to protect our sense of innocence.

“Our myths have not served us well,” Hannah-Jones wrote. “We are the most unequal of the Western democracies. … Whether we grapple with these ugly truths or not, they affect us still. The 1619 Project is not the only origin story of this country—there must be many but it is one that helps us fundamentally understand the nation’s persistent inequalities in ways the more familiar origin story cannot.”

The Birth of a Nation

The storm The 1619 Project created was predictable. No one likes their myths challenged. This is especially true for white Americans who, though their numbers are declining rapidly, still make up more than half of the country.

Yet here in 2026, it’s difficult to ignore the suspicion that, in addition to old-fashioned red-white-and-blue racism, the powers that be had another reason to oppose a new reframing of our history: It rained on their parade for marketing the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence as the “birthday” of the United States.

The Declaration of Independence is a sui generis, monumental document of human history. It didn’t just sever ties with a monarchy; it advanced the cause of human equality by leaps and bounds. Yet it is comical to look back on the document and not see its obvious omissions (“all men are created equal”), and to look back on the history it set into motion and see how its original framers didn’t fully believe the words they wrote.

In the context of this year’s patriotic celebrations, The 1619 Project didn’t just document the United States’ history of inequality. It demanded that we reckon with a fundamental question we rarely give much thought to: When is a nation born?

There’s a more ominous question lurking behind that one: What, or who, gives a nation a right to exist?

In our current context, this second question is only ever really considered when speaking about Israel, though it is implied in conversations about the United States. Still, our histories reveal our honest belief about nations and their “right to exist,” which is that those who can take it by force have the right. Those who can’t, don’t.

The Christians who believe God has somehow blessed the United States (and the current nation-state of Israel) with some special place in world history have an answer to these questions, which is that God establishes a nation’s borders and gives it the right to exist. They ignore the reality that nations and borders, as we understand them, are relatively recent phenomena.

A Familiar Pattern

The rejection of The 1619 Project, followed by the over-the-top celebrations of the semiquincentennial, mimics a familiar pattern in our nation’s history. It requires us to believe a lie before reckoning with the truth.

In 2020, then-President Trump created the 1776 Commission to “support patriotic education.” The commission, viewed by many as a response to The 1619 Project, produced a report that was criticized by historians as being partisan and factually inaccurate.

The 1776 Commission was given another task: to advise the United States Semiquincentennial Commission, which was created by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in 2016 to coordinate this year’s celebrations. The 1776 Commission was dissolved by President Biden in 2021 and immediately reinstated by President Trump in 2025.

The result of this recent history—from the publication of The 1619 Project to this year—is that what could have been seven years of historical reckoning over inequality, culminating in a year of reflection and nonpartisan celebration of the equality of all humans, has ended up being a carnival of lies. The primary lie we are being asked to believe is that the United States was born in innocence.

True freedom requires that we tell the truth about history, not hide from it.