Specifications include, but are not limited to: The City of Boston, acting through the Office of Equity and Inclusion, seeks proposals from interested historical research institutions, organizations, teams, and/or individual partners to conduct a comprehensive historical inquiry and produce a report on the City of Boston’s role in and historical ties to the slave trade and the institution and legacies of slavery. Broadly speaking, the City intends to produce a report that will detail the history of the ties between the trans-Atlantic slave trade, racial slavery from the Global South and its intimate connections to Boston’s specific histories of slavery, the history of Boston and its African descended peoples and communities, and the legacy of these historical ties within Boston's economic, political, and social history. Woven throughout the report should be the relevance, legacies, and impacts of these historical phenomena upon American slavery in Boston, Black American freedpeople and their descendants in Boston, and the people of the City of Boston. Additionally, the City of Boston intends for the report to detail its historical relationship with other institutions in affirming or perpetuating the trans-Atlantic slave trade and/or the institution or legacies of slavery, including but not limited to: banks, philanthropic institutions, medical institutions, insurance, real estate, religious institutions, private industries connected to trans-Atlantic slave economies or the slave trade, civic and political institutions, and higher education. The Task Force intends to produce a comprehensive historical text from a set of historians comprising discrete units of study. As previously mentioned, each unit of study comprises a unique scope of work, and a unique contract will be issued for each unit of study. Units of study are as follows: 1. Boston and Bostonians' economic growth and involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and trans-Atlantic slave economies, 1620-1690 2. Boston and Bostonians' economic growth and involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and trans-Atlantic slave economies, 1690-1750 3. Boston and Bostonians' economic growth and involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and trans-Atlantic slave economies, 1750-1800 4. Boston and Bostonians’ economic growth and involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and trans-Atlantic slave economies and their legacies, 1800-1860 5. The economic, social, and political legacies of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and trans-Atlantic slave economies, 1860-1940 (including but not limited to: reconstruction, sharecropping, Jim Crow, lynching and other forms of extralegal violence/racial terror, de jure segregation, eugenics and its legacies, legal/extralegal racial discrimination). 6. The economic, social, and political legacies of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and trans-Atlantic slave economies, 1940-Present (including but not limited to: the Civil Rights movement and Black radicalism, “War on Drugs,” mass incarceration, the Moynihan Report, de jure and de facto segregation, redlining and displacement, police brutality, educational injustice and inequity, racial exploitation and discrimination)
