In the fall semester of 2019, geography students Kelsey Chavers, Kylie James, Chinnae Faustor, Elizabeth Devine and Thomas Blackburn worked with their faculty mentor Dr. Steve Hanna on a project designed to understand how relationships between presidential plantation museums and communities comprised of descendants of people once enslaved impact visitors’ experiences and attitudes at three of these sites: James Monroe’s Highland, James Madison’s Montpelier, and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. To accomplish this, researchers and student research assistants from the University of Mary Washington, University of Tennessee, and Georgia Southern University surveyed visitors before and after their museum experiences and mapped where different historical narrations occurred within each site. Students processed and analyzed both visitor survey data and narrative mapping data to determine how and where stories about the enslaved were represented at each museum and to measure visitor reactions to this material. The preliminary results were compiled into site-specific presentations that Dr. Hanna presented to the administrators of the three presidential sites. This project and research team continues spring semester 2020 to expand data collection to George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Dr. Hanna and some of his students plan to present their results at the Association of American Geographers April 2020 convention in Denver, Colorado.
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