All News

After 100 yearas, Black History Month is becoming what it was meant to correct: a charge against an education system that reproduces violence through omission and distortion.

CML's fourth and latest Black Lives Next Door symposium showcased modes of storytelling that convey the variety and innovation enabled by the center's research methods in projects that challenge long-held narratives about Northern Virginia’s past. The event was co-hosted on February 10 with the Department of African and African American Studies as a celebration of Black History Month. It featured four graduate student projects that employ CML's trademark blend of digital, archival and community-based interdisciplinary scholarship.

Concepts of space and place are embedded in cultural narratives and discourses that shape our understanding of who belongs and who is considered an outsider, our ideas of possession and dispossession, our conception of social and cultural heartlands and frontiers.

“The limited sources we had on Mason were an opportunity to use him and his legacy as a teaching tool, to help students learn and engage critically with the complexities of the past,” said George Oberle, director of the Center for Mason Legacies ... [T]his is where the real learning begins for George Mason students."

CML work appears twice in the newest Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation (JSDP). The journal's September 2025 issue (Volume 6 Issue 3) features articles by doctoral student David Armstrong, co-authored by CML Director George Oberle. and faculty affiliate Sheri Ann Huerta, PhD. From slaveholding data almost by definition dehumanizing, the authors hope "to restore some of the personhood to the generations of people enslaved" in Virginia. 

English major Amaiyah-Monet Parker and Integrative Studies major Alessaundra Shallal presented posters in OSCAR's Celebration of Student Research and Impact. Shallal expressed gratitude for Manuel-Scott’s “unwavering” support over nearly two years, crediting her mentorship for enabling her to pursue her research across semesters and “maintain faith in the progression of inclusion in academia.”

Education is under attack, say Cattaneo and Manuel-Scott, precisely because of its liberatory potential. Educators who are committed to the empowerment of those students are an obstacle for those in power who want their populace complicit or quiet. 

In the first of an annual Constitution Day series devoted to on our foundational document's impact and changing meanings, the Center for Mason Legacies drew more than one hundred guests to a for an informative and thought-provoking discussion grappling with questions of formation and change of the presidential role and current moves to expand it.