There was a buzz around George Mason University’s Fairfax Campus on Monday, April 15, 1996. The Mason community was about to meet the university’s new president-elect in a press conference later that afternoon. Dr. Alan Merten, Mason’s fifth president, was set to officially assume the presidency on July 1, and he was about to be […]
Last week we sadly found out that Dr. Darius Swann, a civil rights advocate and lifelong Presbyterian minister died at his home in nearby Burke, Virginia on March 25. Dr. Swann had been a popular and respected member of the George Mason University Faculty from 1971 to 1984. He is probably best known as the […]
It is fascinating how oral history has a way of describing a social, political, or environmental situation by putting the listener right there in the middle of the action. An interviewee has nothing to lose or gain by recalling events as they saw them, but a listener can get tremendous insight, detail, and understanding by […]
In 1974 George Mason University faculty members Lorraine Brown and John O’Connor discovered the archives of the Federal Theater Project (FTP) in an aircraft hangar near Baltimore, Maryland after a lengthy search. Included were scripts for over 800 plays and radio programs, official FTP photographs, 1930s-era silk-screened posters, hand drawn set and costume designs, and […]
“It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.” This quote, attributed to a U.S. Army officer in February 1968, illustrates the contradictions inherent in the Vietnam Conflict. Seen by some as a noble fight to stop Communism and help a developing country establish democracy, and others as interference in a war […]
