Was the American nation founded in 1776 or 1619? It sounds like a question for an exam paper. But it has become an issue in the 2020 presidential election.

In a speech at the National Archives, earlier this month, Donald Trump, promised to create a “1776 commission” to “restore patriotic education to our schools” and to counteract any effort to brand America as a “wicked and racist nation”. The US president explicitly took aim at the 1619 project — a much-discussed series of articles published by the New York Times and named after the year that the first enslaved Africans arrived in the colony of Virginia.

That project was a reframing of US history that placed slavery and racial oppression at the heart of the American story. By contrast, Mr Trump argues that liberty should be seen as the central theme of American history. So his commission would reassert 1776 — the year of the Declaration of Independence — as America’s foundational moment.