Stand and Deliver at National History Day

My wife and I spent Saturday morning in history heaven judging the regional National History Day competition at UWGB. More than 350 students (and tagalong parents and teachers) from 16 Northeast Wisconsin middle and high schools crowded the hallways, commons, and coffee shop of the Student Union. Their energy seemed to stun sleepy undergrads wandering in for a jolt of coffee and carried over into competition as they presented, discussed and defended their original history research to teams of volunteer judges, like us.

If you missed the handout from your school's social studies teacher, National History Day (coordinated for many years by the UWGB Archives and Area Research Center -- kudos to Deb and her team) is like a science fair with world, US and local history as the subject matter rather than biology, chemistry and physics. So, instead of creating a paper mache Mount St Helen diorama, think a scale model of the Capitol Mall in Washington, DC, or a replica of the first Catholic parish along the Fox River. These would have been entries in the Junior and Senior Exhibit competition, our assignment for the day.

We judged documentaries last year (Ken Burns-like videos with slow pans of old newspaper photos), but liked the additional time we had this year to review work that didn’t move quickly by us on a classroom screen. History research should be savored not timed. I guess I'm an old-fashioned three-panel, doubled-stacked six-foot display kind of guy. Joined by a friendly credentialed historian, we three reviewed and discussed the exhibits and then had a 15-minutes to interview each high school historian.

It was stand and deliver time for them as they explained how their exhibit fit the year’s theme “Taking A Stand in History”. I'm sure students were nervous -- I would be -- but I hope each one left the interview proud of the work. The three of us were not shy about asking questions, but knew our role was to discuss and help, not frighten. Each student put in a fair amount of time creating and producing the exhibits, and was justifiably proud of his or her work. They all did good.

And, in other rooms buzzing around us, other students were being evaluated in four other categories: video documentary, short dramatic presentations, research papers and history websites. All five categories required an extensive bibliography, a process paper that explained why the student picked the subject, and strict guidelines in size (exhibits), time length and word count. Word count was especially tough to hit. How does one summarize three months of research into 500-words? I go over that limit each week in this posting.

Every year, the National History Day attracts more than half a million students to this competition -- that's a lot of rubber cement. The students that we saw were competing for Northeast Wisconsin Regional spots against winners from seven other state regions in Madison in April. In order to help them compete at the next level, our goal as judges was not only to engage the students about their topics but also to give them constructive comments that would help them improve their work if they moved on.

Most of the corrections we suggested were no different than corrections an instructor might make in any other high school or even four-year college research work: citation errors, the difference between direct quotes and paraphrasing, and using photos to drive your argument rather than just sit there idle as decorations.

I think all three of us we were especially impressed when each of our students extended their research beyond the first ten hits on the Internet. That gives credit back to their history/social studies teachers. In addition to web sources, they sought out inter-library loan documents, Wisconsin and other state historical society archives, old newspaper front pages, books and family memoirs, and even cold-called witnesses of historic events. I wish my Freshman Composition students had half this gumption when conducting their research. I was more likely to get a Wikipedia "The Top-Ten Conspiracies of All-Time" as a major reference than the work I saw on Saturday. After one student was even able to easily answer my question about the difference between primary, secondary and tertiary sources, I would have given her a Masters Degree hood then and there

Regional winners from all five categories were announced in the University Theater at the end of the day. We didn't stay for that. Our job was to select two semifinalists who would advance to finalist judging by another panel in the afternoon. I think our two top students had a good shot of making it to Madison. I’ll look the award winners up later on. Next step for them will be Madison and then on to the Nationals at the end of the school year. Who says history can’t be fun?