Marcello Rollando Discovers Hidden History with Lynn Rainville, PhD

Lynn Rainville is a research professor in the humanities and the founding director of the Tusculum Institute for local history and historic preservation, located at Sweet Briar College. Although her PhD is in Near Eastern archaeology, she has spent the last decade studying historic African American cemeteries, documenting forgotten burial sites, conducting oral interviews with descendants of enslaved communities, and developing on-line mortuary databases.

Lynn began researching the enslaved community on the Sweet Briar Plantation in 2001 with the re-discovery of the on-campus slave cemetery; she is working on a book about this project titled Invisible Founders: African American Heritage at Sweet Briar. Her grant-funded research has produced numerous articles and a recent book titled “Hidden History: African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia" (University of Virginia Press, 2014). Her latest grant-funded research is on World War I memorials and gravestones. She hosts an annual Teaching with Historic Places workshop for central Virginian teachers and holds memberships in and presents papers at a wide variety of historical organizations including the American Historical Association, the National Council on Public History, the Archaeological Institute of America, the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, and the Society for American Archaeology.