The project was built from scholar-driven brainstorming tracing modern institutions to slavery.

Evidence

I reached out to nearly two dozen scholars covering the fields of history, economics, law, sociology, and the arts who specialize in slavery and its legacy and convened a brainstorming session at The New York Times. I asked them to help us produce a list of modern American institutions and phenomena that could be traced back to slavery. We filled a whiteboard with ideas, and then over the next six months, the magazine worked to create a project that would try to unflinchingly tell a four-hundred-year story that connected the past to the present. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 37

Categorization

• XREF: Methodological grounding — how the claimed causal chains were generated to then face the Wilentz critique; useful for the case-study framing of historical controversy.