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June 2008 Sweet Briar History Professor, Students Provide Original Research for Next Exhibit Dr. Katherine Chavigny, associate professor of history at Sweet Briar College, and five of her upper-level history students have been assisting curator Dianne Swann-Wright with research for Legacy's next exhibit, "For Our Own Good: African American Civic and Social Groups in Central Virginia." In the fall semester, Natalie Cutchin wrote a report on Jimmie Bugg, a founder of Delta Sigma Theta sorority with ties to Lynchburg, and Cory Alderton prepared material on the True Reformers, a nineteenth-century temperance and burial society. Cory and Natalie also wrote an analysis of Diuguid burial records in the Old City Cemetery, 1883-1885. This spring, Emily Green has been researching events that train girls and young women in public self-presentation, such as the Miss Bronze Lynchburg and Little Miss Ebony pageants. Elisa Marani is studying the rituals and regalia of the Prince Hall Masons, and Amanda Strickland is exploring the statewide organization of Negro garden clubs established in the 1930s. In addition to supervising the students' work, Professor Chavigny, with the assistance of Old City Cemetery archivist and curator Ted Delaney, has identified two dozen African American burial societies active in Lynchburg in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The names of these societies, and sometimes of their officers, are included in burial records kept by the Diuguid Mortuary and held at the Cemetery. The work by Professor Chavigny and her students is part of a service learning project supported by a grant from the PACE Foundation to Sweet Briar College. `
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