Global Sailors: Birthplaces of Mariners departing Salem, Massachusetts, 1803-1830
This in-progress project demonstrates the global diversity of sailors who sailed on ships departing Salem, Massachusetts, from 1803-1830. The port was home to a sizeable population of Black sailors but also included sailors born in the Caribbean, South America, Europe, Africa, and India. Additionally, American sailors migrated to Salem from around the United States to work aboard the town’s ships. Future modifications to these maps will include an interactive interface. These maps were created using R in RStudio. The data can be found here. I would like to acknowledge and thank the Mystic Seaport Museum Library for providing me with access to the data in Excel form and the faculty at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media for their helpful suggestions and guidance.
Black Lives Next Door: George Mason & Northern Virginia in an Era of Disparity & Opportunity
I served as a research assistant, project mentor, and digital editor for the George Mason University Center for Mason Legacies’ 2021 project “Black Lives Next Door.” This research team, comprised of faculty and graduate mentors and six undergraduate researchers, studied segregation, race, education, and housing in Fairfax, Virginia, amidst the founding of George Mason University in the 1950s. I completed original archival research, including digitizing over 3,000 pages of archival material, and guided students to collections relevant to their projects. I also researched and created two digital exhibitions. “For the Mission or ‘For all the People'” argues that George Mason College administrators slowed reform at the school by their hostile and combative responses to civil rights investigations at the institution in the 1960s. “The .7%” is a co-authored exhibit which includes a map and short biography of each of the sixteen Black students enrolled at George Mason College in 1971. These students comprised only .7% of the 2,456 mostly white student body.