Saving National History Day

Perhaps there’s no federally supported educational program for kids that has meant quite so much to me as National History Day (NHD). In fact, I’m not sure if I would have grown up to be a professional historian in the academy if it had not been for NHD.

As a homeschooled kid living in Bangor, Maine in the late 1980s, I loved reading every book that I could find about history at our local public library. It started in first grade when I discovered the section of children’s presidential biographies. From there, my interest broadened in elementary school to include other books about history and geography. I read about a lot of other famous people from the past and began writing my own “books” based on my research.

But it was when I was in seventh grade that I started to learn what real research was. And that was because my mother discovered National History Day by reading a book about scholarship opportunities for kids.

NHD, she learned, gave college scholarships to the winners of the national contest – which is why it was listed in the book. But that’s not why the contest piqued her interest. The real reason why she was so interested in NHD was because she had been looking for an intellectually stimulating challenge for me and an opportunity for me to grow academically in ways that went beyond our homeschool curriculum.

NHD was indeed a challenge. If you’re familiar with the program, you probably know that it gives students the opportunity to research a topic of their choice and present the findings of their research in some form. For my first year competing in NHD, I wrote a paper about the impact that war photography had on Americans’ attitudes toward war. I wrote about Matthew Brady’s photos in the Civil War, Joe Rosenthal’s picture of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima, and the photos of suffering that emerged from the Vietnam War. To do that, I read more books on a single research topic than I ever had before and ran through a stack of notecards as I jotted down my findings. But that was only the beginning.

I didn’t win any national prizes that year, but I was hooked. The NHD guidelines gave me my first instructions in the importance of using primary sources; before then, I hadn’t even heard the term. They also gave me my first instructions in compiling a Turabian-style annotated bibliography. I learned for the first time about documenting sources properly and using the right type of sources. And I learned how to make a historical argument. The first version of my paper was more descriptive than analytical, and it tried to cover too much ground, but based on the comments that I received from the judges in the initial round of the competition, I completely rewrote the paper for the national competition and made it much stronger and more tightly focused.

Writing a strong paper was more challenging than I had expected, but it was also rewarding – and I wanted to do more of this research. I came back to National History Day the next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. I entered the contest for five consecutive years, each year with a new research project on a completely different theme.

National History Day, I found out, was the creation of Case Western Reserve University history professor David Van Tassel, who started a history research competition for middle school and high school students in Cleveland in the 1970s. With the help of a national network of teachers and an ongoing grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the program quickly grew to become a national program, enrolling hundreds of thousands of students each year. By the time that I participated in the program, several universities had started offering scholarships through the program, but the largest scholarship – the grand prize of the competition – was a four-year, full-tuition scholarship to Van Tassel’s own university, Case Western Reserve University.

Each year when I was competing in the competition, I dreamed of winning it, but my main reason for competing was because I enjoyed the research and the challenge of using my research findings to tell a story to others.

My parents gave me a tremendous amount of support in what became an annual family project. My dad helped me record the sound track for my documentaries, my mother gave me her feedback and critiques on the script and the production quality, and both of my parents (as well as my brothers) dutifully traveled with me to Washington, DC each year, so that I could present my documentaries at the national competition on the campus of the University of Maryland at College Park. This sacrifice of time and money was not easy for my parents, who were operating on a pretty tight budget at the time, but I’m grateful that they found a way to make it work, since they knew that the program meant a lot to me.

Each year I learned something new as a result of my research. I had never studied any Japanese history at all before competing in NHD, but when I chose during my freshman year of high school to produce an NHD documentary on Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to Japan in the 1850s, I had to delve into the larger history of Japan, and I found it fascinating. Even more interesting were the primary sources that I discovered. In the stacks of the Bangor Public Library, I found a dusty nineteenth-century copy of Perry’s own published narrative – and I found it exhilarating to comb through the pages of his own narrative and compare it with what I knew from secondary sources about his bullying and bluster.

Creating my own narrative that synthesized these sources with my own analysis was exciting, since I felt like I had made some original discoveries that I wanted to tell the world about. I got that opportunity when, after placing third in the national contest, I was invited to publicly present my documentary at the Bangor Public Library, and I got to answer questions about my project from a reporter from the Bangor Daily News.

I also developed a lifelong conviction that a study of the past can help us better understand the present, because while I was in the midst of researching the history of Commodore Perry’s attempt to open up trade relations with Japan at gunpoint, I saw a Time magazine cover about America’s trade wars with Japan (which was in the news a lot in the early 1990s) - and I realized that I now had the historical knowledge to understand the historical background behind the latest news headlines about that issue. From then on, I wanted to use my historical research to better understand political issues in the present.

In my fifth and final year of competing in NHD, I produced a documentary on the influence of geography on Russian war that was awarded the grand prize: the scholarship to Case Western Reserve University. I entered CWRU convinced that I wanted to study history and confident about my own ability to research and write.

Perhaps I still would have found my way to the academic study of history if it had not been for NHD, but I definitely would not have ever been able to go to a university like CWRU without the scholarship I received from the competition, and even if I had studied history at another college, I would not have entered with the same level of research skills. It was the NHD competition that trained me to think like a historian by using a wide variety of primary source materials to make a historical argument and craft an engaging narrative.

Because of the special role that National History Day played in my intellectual development, I have tried to invest in it as an adult by volunteering my time as an NHD judge. When I was a student at CWRU, I served as a judge at a regional NHD in Cleveland. After I started my first full-time teaching job as a history professor at the University of West Georgia, I began volunteering as a judge for the national competition in the state, and I continued to return each year to the state competition for about five or six years.

And now it’s time for the next generation in my family to find out for themselves what I discovered as a result of participating in National History Day. For the last couple years, my nine-year-old son Jonah, who is just as interested in history as I was when I was his age, has been eagerly anticipating the moment when he will be eligible to create his own NHD research project. The competition is for 6th-12th graders, but Jonah began talking about what he would do for NHD when he was only in third grade. Next year, he’ll finally be eligible for the competition that he’s been longing to participate in for so long – and he can’t wait. He’s been talking about it regularly for a long time.

But last week, we learned that the Trump administration’s cuts to the NEH grants means that National History Day has just lost $336,000 in NEH funding, putting its future in jeopardy.

I certainly hope that NHD can make up this funding shortfall in private donations. I made a donation to NHD yesterday evening and hope that enough others will do the same to maintain NHD.

NHD is founded on a goal that many conservatives, as well as liberals, should share: the goal of giving kids the tools to read primary sources for themselves and fall in love with the study of the past. It enrolls a lot of homeschool and Christian school students in addition to students from public schools across the nation.

But regardless of NHD’s merits, it’s a program that the federal government will not support anymore. And because of that, it’s more important than ever, I think, for us as private citizens to fill the gap by supporting both NHD or any of the numerous other worthwhile programs that are helping students in vitally important ways.

As we see cuts in federal grants for humanities programs, science, the arts, colleges and universities, and public media, we can do more than merely lament the loss; we can donate to save the programs we consider valuable. We may not have the resources to save every worthwhile program, but we can at least do our part to help the ones that mean the most to us personally.

For decades, we have relied on a government that believes in funding learning for the public good to support the intellectual endeavors that are critical for a healthy democracy. But now that that government support is rapidly being terminated, it’s up to us as private citizens to use our resources for the public good.

For me, that will start with National History Day. I really want to give my son the experience that he’s been longing for to participate in NHD next year – and to do that, the program has to survive.