![\"Nikole](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Hannah-Jones_220330a647-200x300.jpg\")
On Wednesday, she joined UConn history professor Manisha Sinha for a conversation on producing \u201cThe 1619 Project\u201d<\/a> with The New York Times Magazine<\/a>, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary<\/a> during the pandemic, and what being patriotic means to her.<\/p>\n The talk \u2013 a capstone event commemorating the 20th anniversary of the UConn Humanities Institute<\/a> \u2013 drew a sizeable crowd to the Student Union Theater, as the line of audience members stretched the length of the building long before the event commenced.<\/p>\n \u201cI think everyone should be cared for in this world, everyone deserves a fair chance,\u201d Daniel Flanagan \u201924 (ENG) said as he waited for the program to begin. \u201cI\u2019m interested in learning more about Nikole Hannah-Jones and her work. It looks like she does important work.\u201d<\/p>\n In what Hannah-Jones describes as a \u201ccultural phenomenon,\u201d “The 1619 Project\u201d is a series of articles, essays, and other works that highlight the contributions of Black people and makes the case that slavery influenced the formation of the United States from the outset and continues to play a role in society today.<\/p>\n It was timed to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the first landing of slaves in what was to become America and since has been used to develop school curricula to change the way history is taught.<\/p>\n Hannah-Jones said she couldn\u2019t sleep the night before publication for fear of how it would be received. The New York Times had trouble selling ads in the issue, and there were some companies to which it refused to provide ad space. She wasn\u2019t uneasy about its portrayal of how slavery has shaped society today; she knew a negative reception would stymy continued efforts to make change.<\/p>\n When she saw the mockup of the magazine before it went to print, she \u201cwalked into that room and I started sobbing,\u201d she said. \u201cWe knew we had created something powerful.\u201d<\/p>\n She heard stories of empty newsstands and non-Times readers seeking out copies. The audience engagement was amazing, she said, but it did come with backlash when a handful of academic historians contended the project contained factual inaccuracies and tried to tarnish the project\u2019s aim.<\/p>\n \u201cThis wasn\u2019t just about critique,\u201d Hannah-Jones said. The attacks became personal, weaponized, and wrapped into a national debate and continued struggle on race, she said.<\/p>\n \u201cOften the history we are taught is a history to legitimize power. This is a project that seeks to expose that power for what it is,\u201d she said. \u201cNarrative drives policy and if you start to think about and understand your country differently, then you start to support policy that addresses the country that actually exists not the country we pretend to be.\u201d<\/p>\n Hannah-Jones said she\u2019s had some low points in the three years since the project\u2019s publication. Oftentimes, it\u2019s a random act of kindness that reminds her of the good that\u2019s come from it \u2013 like when an 85-year-old white woman from Mississippi contacted her to say she never knew what Black people had done for the country.<\/p>\n Those small moments bring joy, certainly, but winning the Pulitzer Prize brought great joy.<\/p>\n She said she always imagined what winning journalism\u2019s highest honor would be like, how she would feel being applauded by her peers as she strutted through The New York Times newsroom and ascended its grand staircase to receive accolades.<\/p>\n Then, the pandemic hit, and her award was presented much less climactically over Zoom.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t what she envisioned, yet it did bring joy.<\/p>\n Her father also found happiness when Hannah-Jones was growing up in flying a large American flag outside the family\u2019s home. She said she was embarrassed by the enormity of the flag that seemed to her to reach 200 feet high but was probably more like 15.<\/p>\n \u201cPatriotism for Black Americans is deeply conflicting,\u201d she said, explaining that she struggles to understand how someone like her father could love a place that\u2019s rejected them at every turn. \u201cThere\u2019s no reason we should love this country, but we do.\u201d<\/p>\n Like many in the Jim Crow South, Hannah-Jones said her father enlisted in the Army to escape poverty and told her he didn\u2019t feel like a true American until he left home soil and went overseas. It\u2019s a story she relays in her opening piece of \u201cThe 1619 Project.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t find patriotism useful in general,\u201d she said. \u201cI think it\u2019s an excuse for a whole bunch of other things.\u201d<\/p>\n But it\u2019s important to note the difference in definitions of patriotism. For many, she said, it\u2019s the feeling that one\u2019s home country can do no wrong. For others, it means to challenge, question, and expose hypocrisy.<\/p>\n \u201cThe essay is patriotic,\u201d she acknowledged, \u201cI\u2019m not.\u201d<\/p>\n Wednesday\u2019s event was co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost<\/a>, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences<\/a>, the UConn Foundation<\/a>, the Neag School of Education<\/a>, the Africana Studies Institute<\/a>, the Human Rights Institute<\/a>, the History Department<\/a>, and the Journalism Department<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Pulitzer Prize winner addressed racism, The 1619 Project, and what it means to be patriotic in the United States<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":160,"featured_media":183668,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2317,2235,2306],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2368],"class_list":["post-183649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-journalism","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-voices"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-17 01:52:18","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/160"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183649"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183770,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183649\/revisions\/183770"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/183668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183649"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=183649"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=183649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}