The magnificent “1619” podcast, part of the 1619 Project, from the New York Times, begins with the sound of surf and seagulls: the coast of Point Comfort, in Hampton, Virginia, where, four hundred years ago, in a ship called the White Lion, enslaved African people arrived for the first time in what became the United States. “I’m just thinking about what they went through,” the project’s creator and the series’ host, Nikole Hannah-Jones, says. Listening along with her, we are, too. Throughout, the podcast sparks empathetic recognition through powerful writing and archival audio—of former enslaved people, of former Presidents, of work songs—as it illuminates the history and legacy of how the United States was built simultaneously on the language of freedom and the economics of slavery. The series is sweeping and intimate, excellently written, consistently surprising. The third episode, “The Birth of American Music,” traces how black Americans have shaped popular…
