No serious historian questions the central role of slavery before the civil war or the survival of its legacy, as evidenced by the persistence of racism, systematic discrimination, and wide disparities in income, wealth, health, education, and criminal law, as well as all facets of American culture, including food, music, religious customs, language models, vocabulary, literature, etc. In an effort to avoid controversy and better align secondary and high school curricula with university expectations, more and more history and social science teachers say they teach students to think, not what to think. The Pulitzer Prize Project of 1619 is a thinking experiment that raises the question of how American history will be understood differently, given the founding date of 1619 and the arrival of the first Africans in English-speaking North America. In my opinion, the 1619 project is a great missed opportunity for major historical associations to stimulate public debate on important factual and conceptual issues raised by the project. Since history is built on fragments of the past, historical knowledge is necessarily conditional and subject to review, and evidence must be assessed in terms of authenticity, authorship, bias, context, perspective, reliability and a number of other variables. Trump’s call for a commission in 1776 to promote a more patriotic version of American history in public schools revived the controversy over the 1619 project. Therefore, students should not view history in terms of the sequence of individual and unrelated characters or events, but in terms of common themes, critical debate, and journalism. The revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality are rejected as a farce, and there is no recognition that United States history represents an ongoing and unfinished struggle to ensure that the United States lives up to its founding ideals. What ultimately distinguishes history from other forms of attachment to the past – legend, myth, nostalgia, yes, as well as fiction and cinema – is respect for the evidence and a willingness to accept uncertainty, ambiguity, complexity, different perspectives and multiple reasons for correcting the past. Consider The Times’ efforts to rewrite American history and national discourse about race, and to change the way we teach in class, how it is exaggerated. They must face the profound contradictions of this country: that the land of opportunity and an oasis of religious freedom, with its noble ideals of freedom and equality and its unparalleled technological and scientific achievements, may be a place of exile and expropriation, slavery, discrimination, and violence and death unparalleled in the Western world of the 19th century. Without a solid foundation in historical facts and without an organizational or narrative framework to accommodate important episodes, the past will undoubtedly seem to most students as a fragmented and incoherent mass of unrelated events. Worse, some fundamental historical issues, such as the contribution of slavery to the economic growth of the United States, require highly technical calculations that are difficult to obtain in colleges, let alone in high school. Following a speech by Carl Becker, president of the American Historical Association in 1931, we must all strive to “understand the past and anticipate the future in light of our own limited experience. “In short, we must all be historians. American history and civilization, perhaps more than any other K-12 subject, contradict what should be taught and who should decide.