Student Work
Students are at the heart of CML scholarship, and their questions lead our work. What follows is a sampling of student contributions to our methods and mission in projects that deepen their critical thinking and offer a sense of purpose as they meaningfully help broaden the archive, elevate suppressed voices, and provide a more complete narrative of plantation and slavery legacies in Northern Virginia and beyond.
Black Placemaking in Loudoun County, Virginia
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
Enslaved People of George Mason Memorial
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.
Enslaved Children of George Mason
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.
Mason Family Account Book
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.
>> Mason Family Account Book
Fairfax County African American History Inventory
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
Black Lives Next Door: Geographies of Inequity
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.