The Center for Mason Legacies contributed ideas, knowledge, and speakers to the Fairfax 250 history day, a county event held in April as part of the statewide Va250 commemoration of the nation's sesquicentennial. The Center's prominent role showcased its dedication to student development and community outreach and its faculty’s talent for interpreting national events at the local level. Affiliated faculty and students anchored every talk of the day-long program but the keynote, which featured a friend of CML from the University of Maryland.
Concurrent with the day’s lectures, hands-on activities and research workshops offered additional gateways for the public to interact with the local past. The conference, “Revolutionary Ideas,” was co-chaired by CML Director George Oberle and community historian Sue Kovach Shuman. Subtitled "Fairfax County’s American Revolution,” it included programming for all ages, presented at the county’s government center and filmed by Fairfax County Channel 16.
CML’s contingent included three members of the university’s history faculty and three doctoral students, each at in a different phase of the department’s degree program from year one to dissertation. The professors, Rosemarie Zagarri, Cynthia Kierner and Oberle, presented an early session on “The Big Picture,” addressing the Revolution's effects on, respectively: political expectations and shaping the right to vote; “Living the Revolution” through local social upheaval; and finding in records and the historically “hushed voices” of the enslaved how the war affected them and their owners'.
Three CML students gave authoritative presentations in an afternoon session titled “Impacts of the Revolution.” Doctoral candidate David Armstrong, whose dissertation explores how generations of Masons kept a grasp on political power as the United States expanded in the nineteenth century, spoke about a Mason family daughter-in-law’s assertion of her property rights. Ph.D student Anne Champlin, who studies colonial Caribbean, Danish and American ties, presented insights on “revolutionary” tenant-landlord relations that can be traced between the lines of the Mason Family Account Book in the University Libraries’ collection. And one of CML's newest members, Allessandra DelDonna, a material culture specialist who entered the doctoral program straight from undergraduate studies, presented on what Mason household objects at Gunston Hall can tell us about the constructed role of the iconic “planter’s wife.”
A fourth CML graduate student, Andrew Snowman, a frequent presence at daises of the county's historical society and other local organizations, helped staff one of the conference's numerous hands-on tabling and workshop activities. Snowman introduced participants to the Fairfax County Circuit Court Historic Records Center, where through CML, he has interned and conducted extensive research toward his undergraduate and, now, master's degrees. Snowman, whose focus area is racial policing history, works closely with Archivist Georgia Brown, a longtime CML collaborator and now herself a CML Ph.D student.
Other conference activities enabled participants to try cursive calligraphy and use it to sign their names to a replica Declaration of Independence. They could also ink disappearing messages using techniques common among General Washington’s famed espionage network. African American cemeteries and burial traditions were the subject of a community history presentation, and a research workshop with University of Mary Washington historian Krystyn Moon, another CML collaborator, showed how maps, land records and racial covenants reveal exclusion and resilience in the African American community. Additional sessions covered Artificial Intelligence tools and, with experts from the Fairfax Genealogy Society, family histories.
The day started with a lively talk by historian Richard Bell, whose book, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, probes the Revolutionary War’s global impact, found in everything from a diaspora of loyalists and fugitives from slavery, to domestic unrest in Britain stirred by the war, to great-power rivalries drawing France and Spain into the conflict, to the war’s ramifications for imperialism and trade worldwide.
The event enjoyed was sponsored by the Fairfax History Commission with help from the Historical Society of Fairfax County. Enthusiastic response has inspired ambitions for CML to reprise some of the conference and its content at other Northern Virginia sites.