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Dr. Gianluca De Fazio's digital humanities and social sciences project, Racial Terror: Lynching in Virginia, 1877-1927, has developed since 2016 with the support of colleagues in Libraries & Educational Technologies and students in Dr. De Fazio's Advanced Research in Justice Studies classes. Students enrolled in these courses have searched, collected, and helped to organize hundreds of historical newspaper articles on lynching by using the Chronicling America website and other archival resources. They also wrote the first draft of the narratives for each lynching victim and helped to locate where those lynchings took place. This project has been foundational in the work of the History of Lynching in Virginia Work Group, formed in 2018 and led by Senator Jennifer McClellan, to shed light on the long and painful history of lynching in the Commonwealth of Virginia by creating programmatic outreach that will bring awareness of this history to communities across the Commonwealth, and assisting communities in their efforts to memorialize victims of lynching.

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