Please join Jason Stanley, author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, in conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of The 1619 Project. This ticketed event is presented in collaboration with Liz’s Book Bar and One Signal Publishers, to mark the arrival of Erasing History in paperback.
In Erasing History, philosopher and New York Times bestselling author Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the authoritarian right’s attacks on education, identifies their key tactics and funders, and traces their intellectual roots. He illustrates how fears of a fascist future have metastasized, from hypothetical threat to present reality. And with his “urgent, piercing, and altogether brilliant” (Johnathan M. Metzl, author of What We’ve Become) insight, he illustrates that hearts and minds are won in our schools and universities—places that democratic societies across the world are now ill-prepared to defend against the fascist assault currently underway.
This urgent discussion comes at a moment where the very acts of erasure Stanley documents are occurring in the United States. From executive orders calling for an education system devoted to a mythic vision of America’s past to January 6th insurrectionists rebranded as “peaceful patriotic protesters.” Black history is under existential threat. Governmental websites are being scrubbed of historical facts and scientific data. This urgent conversation could only be had with Nikole Hannah-Jones whose 1619 Project saw politicians in 2020 threatening to defund schools that used curricula from it.
Jason Stanley is the Bissell-Heyd-Associates Chair in American Studies in the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of seven books, including How Fascism Works and How Propaganda Works. His writing on authoritarianism and democracy has appeared in The Guardian, the New York Times, Project Syndicate, and many other publications around the globe.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of The 1619 Project and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. Her deeply researched reporting on racial inequality and injustice has also earned her a MacArthur Fellowship, a Peabody Award, the Knight Award for Public Service, two George Polk Awards and the National Magazine Award three times.
Her six-episode Hulu documentary series, The 1619 Project, won the Emmy for best documentary series. Hannah-Jones was also named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.
An institution builder, Hannah-Jones is a founder of the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting; founder of the 1619 Freedom School, a free-afterschool literacy program in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa; and founder of the Center for Journalism & Democracy at Howard University, where she serves as the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism.