Putting the “story” back into history is what draws 665 high school and middle school students from throughout the state to compete in Colorado History Day on Saturday.
“It’s hard work, with all the effort you put into getting the facts for the performance, but it’s surprisingly fun research,” said Tucker Lewis, a Denver School of the Arts student whose words belied the message on his black T-shirt (“I Got Out of Bed For This?”).
“History Day” is a misnomer for the program that began in 1974. A History Day project is a year-long study program focused on investigating and interpreting primary and secondary sources. Participants are judged on the breadth of their bibliographies, and they go well beyond Google and public libraries for their projects.
They visit the Colorado State Archives to retrieve archival letters and documents. They pay for video clips from the U.S. Library of Congress. They search through archives kept in university basement libraries, browsing through clippings alongside doctoral thesis students. When they can, they visit sites in person, such as Camp Amache, the Ludlow Massacre memorial and historic cemeteries.
The theme, set by the National History Day organization, changes annually. This year, it’s “Conflict and Compromise.” Students can explicate that however they wish, and some interpretations beggar the imagination.
At the Denver regional competition, for example, one project adopted the rising and falling hemlines that characterized women’s fashions. (That one didn’t make the cut for the state competition.)
Most projects are fiercely sober, falling under the general categories of civil rights, genocide, slavery and injustice. Students can present their projects as a paper, a performance, a display board, a documentary or as a website. They can compete individually, as student Clarke Shupe-Diggs has chosen to do with an elaborate display board on the Memphis, Tenn., lunch counter sit-in, or in groups, as Emma Whitehead and her group have done with the Irish potato famine’s immigrants to the U.S.
“We started out wanting to do a performance on civil rights,” Whitehead said.
“We were going to do (Civil War confederate spy) Nancy Hart, but she was crazy, and then in our research, we came upon an Irish woman named Mary Rush (whose desperate plea for help wound up in the British parliamentary papers). So we decided to do something about an Irish immigrant facing prejudice in the United States. Everyone thinks that the Irish left the potato famine and it was all hunky-dory in America. But it wasn’t. On the social ladder, they were lower than slaves.”
Former Colorado History Day state coordinator William Convery, now state historian at the Colorado Historical Society, said he often warned competition judges that the contestants probably would know the minutiae of their chosen categories even better than the judges.
“It becomes all-consuming,” Convery said.
“They become experts on their topics in ways that stun adults. History Day has a profound effect on the way students understand a subject. They don’t just listen. They interpret. They live with a topic that engages them, and they thoroughly understand why their topic matters to the human condition. I’ve judged History Day on and off for eight years, before I became the state coordinator, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve turned to another judge and said, ‘How did those kids learn about that?’ ”
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com
See Colorado History Day
The competition will begin at 9 a.m., following check-in at the Tivoli Student Union Tavern on the Auraria campus of the University of Colorado at Denver. Pickup schedules and maps will be available. Venues include the Auraria PE/Events Center, North Classroom, King Center and Plaza Building. Performances and documentary showings begin at 9 a.m. and continue until 3 p.m. More information can be found at the Colorado History Day website, .
