One evening last weekend, a group of middle school and high school students were packed into a theater at the University of Maryland, clapping and swaying along to “History” — or rather, history.
The tune was the familiar One Direction hit. But the lyrics, sung by a woman onstage strumming an acoustic guitar, were different.
“Learning about history, is worth your while,” she sang. “And National History Day teaches it with style. History’s going strong, history’s holding on, thanks to N.H.D.”
Word kids have the National Spelling Bee. Aspiring Steve Jobses and Marie Curies have math and science Olympiads. And then there’s National History Day, which every year brings together some 3,000 students to compete for medals and generally celebrate the nerdy, exciting — and these days, controversial — practice of studying and talking about the past.
The five-day event, which ended on Thursday, blended footnotes with sometimes intense theater-kid energy. For many, it was a chance to meet people from across the country and around the world, and let their enthusiasms run wild.
Kaleb Ice, 13, a seventh-grader from Nashville, Ind., said he had started participating in National History Day two years ago, after moving from a part of the state where anything that wasn’t sports was “shunned”
“You get to talk about history without it being a foreign concept,” he said “A lot of people, I’ve discovered, don’t like history. Which is kind of weird to me.”
Increasingly, a lot of people are also fighting about history. Over the past four years, more than 20 states have passed laws restricting teaching on race, gender and other subjects. And since returning to office, President Trump has called for a return to “patriotic education” rather than “radical indoctrination,” while slashing federal support for the humanities — including National History Day.
This spring, the national organization, which is headquartered in College Park, Md., lost more than $300,000 — nearly 10 percent of its annual budget — after the Trump administration canceled virtually all existing grants by the National Endowment of the Humanities.
State-level affiliates have also been hit hard. Five states whose History Day programs were funded and run by federally supported state humanities councils saw their budgets wiped out entirely.
A scramble for stopgap funding from donors and bake sales allowed all qualifying teams to attend the national finals this year. But what happens next is unclear.
“People are nervous and scared and worried, which is a really lousy feeling,” Cathy Gorn, the group’s executive director said. “How do you make plans?”
Gorn, who has worked for the group since 1982, questioned the idea that studying the harder parts of our history makes students feel guilty or ashamed to be American. In her experience, the opposite is true.
“It probably makes them feel more patriotic,” she said. “It makes them understand that people can work hard, and work together, to change things for the better.”
National History Day was founded in 1974, during the run-up to the Bicentennial. Today, the organization reaches an estimated 500,000 students nationwide, through a number of educational programs. But the main event is still the history contest.
There are competitions for websites, papers, documentaries, museum exhibits and two age categories. Participants rise through a series of local and state contests, working for months to refine their theses, visuals and annotated bibliographies, which must include a variety of primary and secondary sources.
The strength of National History Day, supporters say, is that it’s driven by what students themselves are interested in. And it aims to be a resolutely nonpartisan, genuinely inclusive affair.
“For politicians, supporting National History Day should be like kissing babies,” said Angela Adams, the state coordinator for Arkansas, who has worked to expand the program to more rural areas. “It really is for everyone.”
This year’s theme, “Rights and Responsibilities in History,” was broad enough to take in just about anything. That variety was on vivid display in a ballroom, where many of the roughly 400 entries in the tabletop-exhibit category were spread out like a museum of mini-museums.
There were multiple entries on the French Revolution, Title IX, the Berlin Wall, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the 1950s comic book scare and Native American boarding schools, often through a state-specific lens.
“We always get a lot of women’s suffrage, Jackie Robinson, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire,” said Jeff Ball, a teaching specialist at Harford Community College in Maryland, one of the contest’s more than 500 judges.
But there were also surprising, tightly focused projects, like exhibits on the Paralympics, the fight for racial integration at Cleveland’s Euclid Beach amusement park and the role of flight attendants in advocating for laws banning smoking on airplanes.
And then there are newly popular subjects, driven by recent books and movies. There were at least four exhibits about the so-called Radium Girls — early 20th-century factory workers whose legal battle to be compensated for severe health problems from painting glow-in-the-dark watch faces helped pave the way for worker safety laws.
Many displays included clever, low-tech versions of the interactive features common in professionally designed exhibits — like one about the Panama Canal, where a cutout photograph of Jimmy Carter urged visitors to open the doors of piled-up miniature shipping containers.
Thomas Fowler, 16, from Orem, Utah, said he had become enthralled by the former president after watching the documentary “Carterland.” On his first day of research, he read through two long treaties. “I loved finding little typos,” he said.
Each entry was evaluated by a panel of three judges, who peppered students with questions about design, sources and how they weighed different kinds of evidence. (Among the requirements: All projects must take into account “varied perspectives” on the topic.)
“At this moment in time, anything that helps young people ask questions about information and where it comes from is something we need more of,” one of the judges, Lee Ann Potter, the director of education outreach at the Library of Congress, said.
Imani Haven and Carmen Thompson, two 16-year-olds from the White Mountain Apache tribe who live in the reservation community of Cibecue, Ariz., had brought an exhibit about missing and murdered Indigenous women.
“We really wanted to raise awareness,” Imani said. “Lots of people are coming up to us and asking questions.”
It was their first time participating in National History Day, and their first trip on an airplane. (That evening, they planned on going to the beach.) But many students were back for a second, third, fourth time, sometimes as parts of multigenerational National History Day dynasties.
Olivia Stetler, 14, from Wilmington, N.C., had an 8th-place finish last year, with a group entry about the violent 1898 overthrow of that city’s interracial government, which left as many as 60 people dead. This year, she was back on her own, with an exhibition about Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center and her efforts in the 1980s to limit children’s access to explicit lyrics.
She hit on the subject after discovering a 1984 episode of “The Phil Donahue Show” about punks. Her design was inspired by a 1980s teenager’s bedroom, complete with pink shag carpeting, shelves of cassette tapes and a boom box that played excerpts from her 53-minute telephone interview with Dee Snider from Twisted Sister.
“It turns out if you email Dee Snider,” she told the judges, “he answers.”
Olivia’s argument was that the efforts backfired, since the parental warning labels many record companies adopted just made explicit lyrics more intriguing to kids — and easier to find. “Censorship never works in the long run,” she said.
Over the four days, there were Silly String fights, scoops of “N. H. Dough” ice cream at the dairy bar and, in the hallways, a frenzied pursuit to acquire buttons from all 56 stateside and international contingents. (China, Thailand and North Dakota were hot commodities.)
Still, it’s a contest. And at the end of the two days of preliminary rounds, participants crowded into the lobby of the student union to find out if they were among the 10 in each category who would advance to the final round.
Four home-schooled seventh-graders from near Asheville, N.C., wearing T-shirts printed with “Society of the Living Dead” (the title of their entry, about the Radium Girls), said that making it this far was enough. When their names flashed on a television screen, they jumped up and down and screamed.
At the finals the next night, their performance featured cloche hats, radio jingles and, in a surprise reveal, glow-in-the-dark costumes. There was also a rap about 19th-century abolitionists by a group from South Windsor, Conn. A quartet from Akron, Iowa, (pop 1,400) gave a full-throated performance on the 26th amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, that wove in snippets of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”
The last performance of the night, by a team from Nashville, Ind., was about Ryan White, the Indiana teenager with AIDS who had to fight for his right to attend school in the early days of the epidemic. When it was over, the group stood by the stage, almost quivering with relief.
“Nailed it!” said Aesop Bierkemeier, 13, who played White, high-fiving a family member.
At the closing ceremony, held in the university’s basketball arena, the contestants paraded in state by state, with banners and inflatable mascots — a giant crab for Maryland, fast-food French fries for Idaho.
“Do not underestimate what you’ve learned through this amazing program,” Celie Niehaus, the group’s board president, told the crowd. “A.I. cannot do what you do.” Then, finally, the medals were announced.
The team from Iowa, with the performance about the 26th amendment, won gold in their division, followed by a group from Ohio, who had presented a drama about the debate over whether the British Museum should return the Elgin Marbles to Greece. The Ryan White performance took third.
Aesop Birkemeier, who portrayed White, said that the consensus among most kids at home is that history is boring.
“Which is kind of sad,” he said. “You have to learn about the past to build the future. Plus, history is actually cool.”
Jennifer Schuessler is a reporter for the Culture section of The Times who covers intellectual life and the world of ideas.
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