Nikole Hannah-Jones: The Journalist Behind 1619

Some podcasts get made because a topic is trending. 1619 got made because Nikole Hannah-Jones spent years building the case that American history needed to be told differently, then got the platform to tell it.

Who she is

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the creator of the 1619 Project for The New York Times. The project takes its name from August 1619, when a ship carrying more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived in the English colony of Virginia. Hannah-Jones built the project around a direct argument: no part of the country that followed exists untouched by the 250 years of slavery that came after that ship landed.

The show

1619 is the audio series version of that project, produced for The New York Times and hosted by Hannah-Jones herself. It launched on the 400th anniversary of the ship's arrival and has been named an Apple Podcasts Series Essential. The series runs short and dense rather than sprawling. The opener, "Introducing '1619'", sets up the argument in under six minutes, and episodes like "The Economy That Slavery Built" and "The Fight for a True Democracy" each take one thread of that history and follow it all the way through.

How audiences may know her

If you know Hannah-Jones's name, it's likely from the 1619 Project itself, the piece of work she's built her career around at The New York Times. Hosting this series put her voice, not just her byline, behind that project. That combination, an investigative reporter who also narrates her own findings, is part of what made the show land as something more than a standard news podcast.

The read

There isn't much public bio on file for Hannah-Jones beyond her role at the Times and the 1619 Project itself, so this stays close to what's documented rather than guessing at her personality. What comes through in the work itself: someone who treats history as an active argument rather than a settled record, and who's willing to put her own voice on that argument instead of leaving it to someone else to narrate.

Worth being upfront about where the show stands today: 1619 is marked inactive in the directory as of April 2026. It was always meant to be a limited series, just three episodes, and it wrapped all the way back in 2019. There's no new season coming; what you get is a complete, finished listen, not an ongoing show waiting on its next drop.

The directory doesn't have social links on file for her yet. Right now, the clearest way to hear from Hannah-Jones directly is the series itself.