All CML Projects
In this summer 2024 project, two CML students collaborated the Friends of the historic Thomas Balch Library’s Black History Committee to explore documentation and stories of Black placemaking and, all too often, displacement in the region. Doctoral student Annabelle Spencer and recent graduate Shemika Curvey then shared their wide-ranging research in a visually rich story map, Spatializing Black Stories: Geographies of Community in Loudoun County, Virginia.
Their work explores the historical Loudoun communities of Willard and St. Louis as exemplars of African American placemaking, which they defined as "the endowing of meaning at a location," turning spaces into "geographies" and "geography into an heirloom." For an audience of more than 60 at the Balch Library that included descendants of some of those they had studied they described how the areas' Black residents built and passed on wealth despite the obstacles of segregation through tactical approaches to landownership, building businesses, and forming social and worship communities. For St. Louis, the research helps resurrect a well deserved reputation for Black equestrian and agricultural expertise that contributed to the Middleburg area's "horse country" renown. In the case of Willard, granted a U.S. post office in 1900 but razed by the government in 1958 for Dulles Airport, their research showed how nearby White residents reaped the airport's windfalls while the generational wealth of neighboring Black families was erased.
>> Spatializing Black Stories storymap
>> Balch Library presentation article
Since 1907, the Thomas Balch Library in Leesburg, Va., has been collecting and preserving print, manuscript, photographic, cartographic and genealogical documentation of Loudoun County and Northern Virginia, also serving as a designated Underground Railroad Research Site. Through its ongoing partnership with the Center for Mason Legacies, the Balch Library seeks to widen the audience for these invaluable primary sources by making more of them individually available online, seeing them serve new scholarship, and promoting insights into their meaning through CML-created digital exhibits on our region's people, history and development.
>> Balch Library collections digitized by CML
Rutland's three-volume Papers of George Mason (1970) notably omits records of Mason's slaveholdings or the enslaved people who made his comfort possible. Our ongoing digital project revisits these records and adds documents from the region's courthouses and other repositories to render the Mason family—its branches, holdings, businesses, and descendants—a lens on slavery's lasting legacy.
>> Mason Family Papers: The Digital Edition
- Papers of George Mason, 1725-1792
- Fairfax Circuit Court Slavery Index
- Interpretive Exhibits: The Doeg and the Early Mason Family... ⋅ “Not Satisfied with the Provisions Made for Her”: Elizabeth... ⋅ Enslaver, Investor, and Failed Progenitor: Richard...
The Dictionary of Fairfax Biography (originally called "Black Lives Next Door in Fairfax") began as an undergraduate Honors research project. Students were asked to locate, interrogate, and analyze primary sources from the Fairfax Circuit Court Historic Records Center as a way to describe and profile Black individuals who lived, worked, and created community locally. This work of identifying and publicizing the often underestimated presence and contributions of Fairfax's Black population is a continuing project.
>> Dictionary of Fairfax Biography
As our university's 50th anniversary approached, in 2022, praise abounded for its extraordinary diversity. Yet little was known about its place in the development of Northern Virginia. Starting in 2021, a team of student and faculty researchers, dug deep into the formative years of George Mason College and its relationships with the community. Black Lives Next Door appeared online in 2021, with a focus on "Campus, Community, and Education," launching a journey we continue today through our region's “pasts next door."
>> Black Lives Next Door
CML created this site, still open to contributions, in response to the Spring-Summer 2020 mass protests against police-involved killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans. The site invites stories and artifacts from the broader George Mason community to seeks collect, preserve, and present them, highlighting personal memories and online materials tied to resistance against racism and white supremacy. The COVID-19 lockdown that dispersed the university population only heightened the importance of digital collecting, as capturing the moment for a far-flung campus community often meant gathering experiences and events that occurred far away. On or off campus, all those experiences are part of this story.
>> Racial Reckoning digital archive
Papers held by the Mason family at the time of patriarch George Mason IV's death met an unknown fate. Nevertheless, the seminal published collection, The Papers of George Mason, 1725-1792 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970) fills three volumes that document Mason's kin, landholdings and businesses, including his ownership of and commerce in enslaved people. The enslaved themselves, however, remained almost entirely absent from the page and modern memory, until students working with CML put them at the center of their research.
>> Enslaved Children of George Mason digital exhibit
Watch: About the project.
Those who know George Mason IV are more likely to think of him as the author of Virginia's influential Declaration of Rights, but as a slaveholder. But Mason's ownership of enslaved people and the fruits of their labor constituted the primary sources of his wealth. In this foundational CML project, students cast fresh eyes on our school's namesake, using documentary evidence and artifacts to glean stories of the roughly 100 people who lived in bondage at his Gunston Hall estate. Their exhibits include: Mason's letter on inoculating his human property for smallpox; photos of the narrow back stairs they used; a slave-trading ad by Mason's brother; and a drawing of the estate's slave burial ground.
>> Enslaved People of George Mason Memorial exhibit
Watch: Meet the student creators.
Centering the encounters of three Black communities with slow violence, suburbanization, and the expansion of Northern Virginia, this archive was completed by Jacob Connelly in 2024 as his capstone research project for the master of arts in interdisciplinary studies. It highlights how three Black settlements in Northern Virginian—Tinner Hill, Gum Springs, and St. Louis—fought to preserve their homes, land and communities from the slow violence of twentieth century suburbanization.
>> Northern Virginia Archive of Black Community Resistance
100 Years of Black Falls Church documents the more than 150-year history of Falls Church, Va.'s, vibrant African American community, many of whose descendants still live, work and worship in the vicinity. The project exemplifies how university-community collaboration and digital methods can pair with old-fashioned archival digging to recover "lost" pasts. In this case, that past involves multi-generational families' acquiring land, building businesses, and forming churches and political organizations, despite challenges from segregation, disenfranchisement and, more recently, urban growth.
The exhibit relies on archival records, genealogy, archaeology, and oral and community histories. Its documentation of brick-and-mortar churches, homes and other architectural structures enables online visitors to digitally "tour" an American community in Northern Virginia and explore the nature of community resilience.
A collaboration between the Department of African and African American Studies at George Mason University and the Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation, funded in part by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, this exhibit relied on the foundation's voluminous archive of primary sources, including photographs, letters, documents, tapes and oral histories, and materials generously shared by local residents and church archives.
>> 100 Years of Black Falls Church
Begun in 2021-2022 by George Mason University seniors working with CML, this collaboration with the Fairfax County History Commission seeks to document, communicate, and preserve the African American experience across the county's history. Its contents document Black residents’ contributions and culture expressed through churches, homes, schools, businesses, communities and events. Itemized resource types include physical sites, collections (print and digital), oral histories, church and school histories, roadside markers, family and private records, artifacts, places to visit, and other research sources. The inventory's aim is to increase interest in and knowledge of Fairfax County’s diverse population.
>> Fairfax County African American History Inventory
These public digital projects formed the culminating assignment in an innovative, cross-disciplinary seminar offered, in Spring 2023, to graduate and undergraduate students jointly, co-taught by two of CML's founding faculty members, Wendi Manuel-Scott and George D. Oberle, the center's director. The students' exhibits engage critically with a wide range of Black life, history, and spatial narratives in Northern Virginia. Together, they demonstrate the course's success in fostering a deeper understanding of Black geographies, a reconsideration of space in storytelling, and an appreciation of antiracist methodologies' capacity to improve academic learning.
This course was made possible by funding support from Lyrasis.
>> Black Lives Next Door: Geographies of Inequity (graduate student projects)
>> Black Lives Next Door: Geographies of Inequity (undergraduate projects)
>> Black Lives Next Door: Geographies of Inequity (award-winning projects)
This ongoing project aims to explore the back story of our campus and its spaces through an interactive learning experience. Its contents focus on: the history of the university's named buildings and the complex backgrounds of the individuals they commemorate; institutional campus traditions, their histories and origins; and the diversity and actions of other people and influences, many previously unrecognized, that shaped these spaces.
>> George Mason University History Trail
The ongoing Mason Account Book project reveals as much about archival research as it does about its owners, a nephew and grand-nephew of university namesake George Mason IV. From this seemingly pedestrian log of transactions, from pork purchases to land sales, patterns and profiles are emerging that amplify our nation's story. University Libraries acquired the manuscript in 2013. In 2020, students learning documentary history with Professors Cynthia Kierner and George Oberle undertook the first digital transcriptions and annotations of its pages, with special attention to what its contents reveal about the Masons' profitable roles—rarely studied or remarked on—in the trade and enslavement of people from West Africa and their descendants.