The Center for Mason Legacies, led by librarians and departmental faculty, is an interdisciplinary research center established by the University Libraries and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Our mission is to preserve and examine the legacy of George Mason IV (1725-1792), his ancestors and heirs, and the plantation economy that shaped our region and nation.
We work with graduates and undergraduates to study the past through research driven by their questions that uses a combination of methods with an emphasis on digital scholarship, storytelling and community history. The notion of critical care—for subjects and practitioners—underlies our novel pedagogical model, which we call Affective Historical Praxis.
CML came into being as the result of a summer group-study project in which five undergraduates worked with three faculty members—Professor Wendi Manuel-Scott and Associate Professor Benedict Carton, both in the School of Integrative Studies, and Associate Professor of History and University Libraries History Librarian George D. Oberle III—to recover the histories of children, women and men enslaved at Mason IV's Gunston Hall plantation. Their project led to the founding of the Center for Mason Legacies and creation of the Enslaved People of George Mason Memorial, dedicated in 2022 to contextualize the campus's existing statue of George Mason, the man.
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We have kept the name and the statue. But we have put them to work, as educational tools to open a wider discussion and understanding of the full duality of George Mason’s nature. He was the author of some of the most radically progressive ideals in modern human history, which he embodied in the Virginia Declaration of Rights. He was also a slaveholder who could not live up to his own ideals ... As the Enslaved People of George Mason Memorial so powerfully illustrates, our namesake is the very embodiment of the duality of America, whose ideals have served as a beacon to humanity for centuries, but whose actual example has at times fallen far short of those ideals.
—George Mason University President Gregory Washington, excerpted from "What does it mean to be a Patriot?" July 1, 2020