In 2026, America will throw the most expensive birthday party in the history of empires. We are celebrating the right anniversary instead.
1526 – 2026 • Independence Day to the First Sunday of Advent
Two hundred and fifty years before the Declaration of Independence, the real American revolution had already begun.
In the autumn of 1526, a Spanish nobleman named Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón planted the first European colonial settlement in what is now the United States — San Miguel de Gualdape, on the coast of Georgia — eighty-one years before Jamestown. He brought six hundred settlers, three Dominican friars, and about one hundred enslaved Africans.
The colony lasted three months. Ayllón died on October 18. And then the enslaved Africans rose up, burned what could be burned, and walked into the woods to live with the Guale people — forming, in all likelihood, the first maroon community on the North American mainland. They were the first enslaved Africans to rebel against slavery on this soil.
They wrote no Declaration. They left no signatures. But they began the only revolution that has ever mattered — and it has been going on, in maroon swamps and slave quarters and Indigenous councils and Black churches and on the Standing Rock prairie, for five hundred years without stopping.
The 1526 Project is a twenty-week spiritual formation curriculum and a public counter-witness to the Semiquincentennial. It uses the empire's birthday as a foil to celebrate something far more awesome: people rising up against oppression and evil, century after century, in the name of a God who has always been on the side of the people who run.
The 1526 Project takes its name and method in homage to The 1619 Project, created by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine. Where 1619 reckons with the year slavery took root in the English colonies, 1526 reaches back another ninety-three years — to the first settlement, the first enslaved Africans, and the first rebellion. We build on her work with gratitude.
Twenty Sundays, July 4 through the First Sunday of Advent — each pegged to a moment in the Christian liturgical year and to a rebellion the textbooks tried to bury.
Browse every weekly session, monthly deep-dive, and high feast. Filter by month, then expand any session for its date, scripture, and theme.
The 1526 Project is built to flex. Lay leaders can run it with no special training; scholars can teach it with footnotes. Here are five ways in.
Move through one session a week as a guided rule of life from Independence Day to Advent. Read the history slowly; pray the examen; keep the action.
Designed for a 75–90 minute gathering. A lay facilitator can lead it straight off the page — gather, read, reflect, examine in pairs, lament, and commit to action together.
Every session is anchored to a Sunday in the lectionary year and a scripture text. The liturgies, calls to worship, and benedictions are public-domain and ready for the bulletin.
Primary-source-rich and footnoted. The five monthly deep-dives function as longer essay-length units, each with discussion questions and a closing practice.
The curriculum is built to run alongside a twenty-part public series — one episode or essay per week, plus five long-form interviews tied to the deep-dives. The appendix supplies a suggested guest list weighted toward Indigenous, Black, Caribbean, and Latin American scholars and elders, who should be invited as primary voices and paid for their time.
Priced at $15.26 in honor of the 1526 anniversary.
Note for the site owner: the free buttons download the 3-session preview (The_1526_Project_Preview.docx / .pdf). Wire the “Purchase & Download — $15.26” button to a Gumroad, Stripe Payment Link, or church-giving page that delivers the full The_1526_Project_Curriculum files after payment. Keep the preview files in the same folder as this page, or point the links to your hosting URLs. The $15.26 price honors the 1526 anniversary; the curriculum's own license still invites free adaptation and reprint.
Gather a circle, a class, or a congregation and walk the twenty weeks together. Tell us you're running it — we're weaving a network of communities across the year.
Each session ends in action. Build durable, recurring support for Indigenous-led and Black-led organizations in your own region. Reparation begins with relationship.
If you run the companion podcast or article series, center Indigenous, Black, Caribbean, and Latin American scholars and elders as primary voices — and pay them.