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What if Americans could revisit the founders' debate over creating the electoral college? In a way, they now can, thanks to a new virtual reality history site recently presented by CML and Digital Scholarship Services.

Dobbins, a doctoral student at George Mason University and CML's community historian. can document her family's presence in Fairfax going back seven generations and is the author of a new book about county history, "The Lost Black Communities of Merrifield, The Pines, and Williamstown."

If an academic center's buttons could burst, CML's would pop with pride over the scholarly achievements and, now, graduation laurels racked up by two of our most active undergraduates, Shemika Curvey and Andrew Snowman, who both call CML central to their scholarly growth.

George Mason University faculty Lauren B. Cattaneo and Wendi Manuel-Scott are co-authors of "Martin Luther King Jr.’s Call for Creative Maladjustment Has Much to Offer Educators in the Modern Battleground." Newly published in the Harvard Educational Review, it examines King's 1967 challenge to social scientists to question disciplinary norms.

Fairfax Circuit Court's historic Slavery Index project now offers digital access to more than 40,000 documents tied to slavery in Northern Virginia. The project makes court-related experiences of the enslaved, enslavers, freed individuals, hirers, patrollers, and others all viewable on the court's website.

CML scholar Sheri Huerta looked at how the upheaval of Revolutionary War affected the lives and choices of enslaved and free Black people in Loudoun County. Huerta also studies the varied ways enslaved Virginians saw, in the war's turmoil, newfound opportunities to define liberty. 

Scholars from the Center for Mason Legacies (CML) closed out Black History Month 2025 with a lively showing of standout research projects conducted in the past year. Symposium presenters included graduate students and an undergraduate student, reflecting the center’s commitment to shaping research and pedagogy at all levels of teaching.

Covering the magnitude and importance of our first president’s last will and testament in a few paragraphs is no small feat. George did an amazing job.

Mason Legacies' Marion Dobbins, a doctoral student in history, drew on decades of research and oral histories covering Northern Virginia's Fairfax County for her forthcoming book, "The Lost Black Communities of Merrifield, The Pines and Williamstown.” It narrates the displacement and erasure of the three Black communities around which she was raised. Dobbins' focus and experience well suit her role as CML's community historian.

The articles describe the philosophy, methodologies and pedagogy informing CML's creation and work in the context of understanding race's role in our universities' origins... George Mason University, the author contend, though founded long after slavery ended and after even the passage of landmark civil rights laws, and known today for its diversity, nevertheless has something in common with far older schools like Yale—"an association with slavery.” They trace previously unnoted strains of white supremacist thought that informed the twentieth-century "rediscovery" of George Mason IV as a pillar of individual rights, notwithstanding his ardent support for race-based slavery as among those rights, and led to his honoring at our university.