"No blind faith or cynicism for me!"
Why we need National History Day
It is National History Day season, dear readers. For the past several months, more than half a million students from around the world have been conducting research and preparing presentations – exhibits, documentaries, plays, papers – for the annual National History Day competition. If they win at the local and state level, they earn the right to compete in the national event held each June in College Park, Maryland.
I first had the opportunity to witness the wonder of NHD a year ago, when my then-8th grade daughter, Robin, joined her school’s fledgling NHD club. As a historian, I had heard of National History Day but never participated in it. Flashbacks from Science Fair projects gone awry in my own childhood made me hesitant to subject other children to such trauma. But Robin wanted to do it, so how could I say no?
And so began an extraordinary odyssey as Robin became a historian. The theme for the 2024 competition was “Turning Points in History.” Inspired by her rabbi mother and other women rabbis across Maine, Robin researched the story of Sally Priesand, the first publicly ordained female rabbi. Priesand was like the rabbinic Sandra Day O’Connor or Jackie Robinson, a woman who endured extraordinary pressure while breaking a millennia-old gender barrier. The rabbinate – and Judaism itself – would never be the same.
This was no simple look-her-up-on-Wikipedia-and-summarize-it project. No, NHD pushed Robin to conduct real research. She interviewed women rabbis across the country, including the retired Rabbi Priesand herself. She waded through primary sources and pieced together a compelling narrative. Then she learned video editing technology and created a 10-minute documentary telling Rabbi Priesand’s story. All with barely a peep of help from ol’ Dad.
Robin’s documentary earned her a trip to the national competition, where she traded pins with budding young historians from every state in the Union. The presentations were extraordinary, covering a wide range of topics from the launch of Sesame Street to the 16th Amendment (that’s the one that empowers the federal government to levy income taxes). I learned more history in those two days than I do at my professional history conferences!
NHD is a great example of the power of individual action, of one person seeing a problem and doing something about it. In the early 1970s, David Van Tassel, a professor at Case Western Reserve University, saw that his college students were unprepared to do history. Sure, they could spout names and dates, but they had not learned how to ask their own questions or do their own research. To inspire teachers and students to pursue actual research projects, in 1974 Van Tassel organized the first History Day event with 129 Cleveland-area middle and high schoolers. It was such a success that he did it again the next year. And the next.
But NHD was never just a one-man show. From the beginning, the program relied on countless teachers and volunteers, including professional historians who served as judges. Van Tassel wanted to share the model with students around the country, so he created a nonprofit organization and recruited a dynamic leader (and accomplished historian), Lois Scharf. Under Scharf’s leadership, the program expanded to reach hundreds of thousands of students by the early 1990s.
National History Day is something that has “gone right” in our country. It gives young people the opportunity to do real history — to ask important questions and then figure out how to answer them for themselves. “Because I know how to question, I believe I am a better citizen of this country,” one 1997 winner wrote. “No blind faith or cynicism for me!” It’s the kind of learning experience that our kids deserve and our schools need to offer.
Sources
· Gorn, Cathy. “A Tribute to a Founding Father: David Van Tassel and National History Day,” The History Teacher, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Feb., 2001): 229-234.