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This year's National History Day program at Marshall Simonds Middle School opened with 80 students. Now, with the national competition less than two weeks away, Burlington's Junior competitive field has narrowed to 11 students in four groups – two of which have already received exclusive honors – that will travel to the University of Maryland to showcase the hard work they've accomplished as a part of this program.

National History Day is an international competition that encourages students to create a presentation around a specific theme – this year, Revolution, Reaction, Reform in History. Students are judged either individually or as groups of 2-5 in six different formats: documentary, paper, performance, website, exhibit, and – piloted for the first time this year – podcast.

Students are judged using a rubric that with standard components such as thesis, theme, research, primary sources, historical context, multiple perspectives, historical accuracy, and significance, as well as components specific to their category. They're also interviewed by the program's judges. The top eight individual and group projects from each category move from Regionals to States, and the top two advance to Nationals.

Students spent the year following their curiosity, researching deeply into topics their school classes may not have focused on, such as the 2000 Bush-Gore election, the Station Nightclub fire, the Woburn cancer cluster (which won special honors by being named Outstanding Project in Public Policy, Environmentalism, or Sustainability from Northeastern University), the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Indian Revolution.

"This is your chance to study something you may never ever study in school, or if you do it's for one day and that's it," said Barbara Sturtevant, 6th grade social studies teacher at Marshall Simonds Middle School and one of three National History Day mentors. "And it doesn't have to be something we think of as history. It can be anything, because anything has a past."

All this year's projects were unique and innovative, said Barbara Sturtevant, but in the end 33 students made it to the state competition and only 11 of them (four groups) made it to Nationals. Students from 6th, 7th, and 8th grade are represented, including Amelia Cheng, who has spent three years vying for a spot in D.C., and Abby Duffield, the only competitor going to Nationals for the second year.

National History Day competitors from Marshall Simonds Middle School who will be advancing to the National competition: (From back left: Avery Nguyen, Harper Albert, Paige Finkel, Abby Duffield, Elise Greene, Gaadha Anil, Maya Goodman, Amelia Cheng, Hazel Leppo, Regina Martin, & Maddie Haigh.

Meet the Competitors and Projects

Eighth graders Abby Duffield, Elise Greene, and Paige Finkel are performing a piece called Silence Before the Sirens: Reaction and Reform in the Kitty Genovese Case. Kitty Genovese was a bar manager in Queens whose 1964 murder and the public outcry that followed directly spurred the creation of the 911 emergency system.

"We thought it was a very cool story," said Finkel, who hopes to start an NHD club at her new school, Gann Academy, next year. Duffield, a returning national competitor who placed top ten in the documentary category last year, said the group chose the performance category because it's fun and because students have a greater chance of progressing due to the field being narrower than others.

Eighth grader Amelia Cheng's website Sleeping Through the Pain: How the Discovery of Modern Anesthesia Revolutionized the Medical World and Reformed Surgical Procedures explores the history of anesthesia — a topic she chose because of her own interest in pursuing medicine. What surprised her most? "How much of a trial and error process it was," she said. "I didn't realize how many mistakes were made before anesthesia got to what it is today." Cheng is a three-year NHD veteran making her first nationals appearance, and after three years of building websites, she feels like an old pro. She's also helping design the team's pin for button trading — a time-honored nationals tradition.

Sixth graders Harper Albert and Hazel Leppo are the youngest of the group, first-year NHD participants who chose to chronicle the history of the barcode through a group documentary called From Bull's-Eye to Barcodes. They chose the format because they felt it offered more freedom and a little extra time compared with other categories such as website.

Their favorite discovery? The UPC code was inspired by Morse code — inventor Norman Joseph Woodland was sitting on a beach in Miami when he sketched the idea. The code, inspired by Morse code, featured at different points a bull's-eye, colored bars, and black bars of varying length; the modern QR code, which holds even more information, evolved from the bar code. Now, barcodes are ubiquitous ways to store information and make shopping more efficient. "Everywhere you go, you see at least one barcode a day," Albert noted.

And then there's the refrigerator team.

Maddie Haigh, Gaadha Anil, Maya Goodman, Regina Martin, and Avery Nguyen built a group exhibit called Ready, Set… Refrigerate! Transforming Preservation through Refrigeration. The project showcases information about the invention and development of the refrigerator — and the group built it as a refrigerator, complete with a working door, a title made of magnets, and a series of flaps that open to reveal historical facts.

"We're all more hands-on and artistic than we are technological," said Anil, explaining why the exhibit format appealed to them. Plus, the interactive format, featuring food-shaped flaps that open to reveal facts, makes their ideas easier to demonstrate.

Haigh, Anil, Nguyen, and Martin all participated last year but didn't make it past regionals. When asked what made the difference this year, they all pointed to Goodman, who they said keeps them on track despite some group members' tendency to struggle with distraction and time management.

The project's creativity caught the attention of National History Day organizers, who selected it as Massachusetts' representative exhibit to be displayed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History this summer.

"I was so excited when I got the email," said Haigh.

A Year of Dedication Pays Off

Creating a National History Day presentation is no simple task. Students spend an entire year researching, and those who advance in competition take additional time to refine their work so they can present the best possible product. They meet one afternoon per week at the beginning, but, Sturtevant says, "As Nationals gets closer, we basically live at the school." Students with conflicts like sports or theater somehow manage to make time for it all, whether that means working at home or assembling at one teammate's house on the weekend.

Sturtevant, who has run the program since the 2018–19 school year, said the real product of NHD isn't the projects — it's the students. "They'll get to high school and be told they need 10 sources, and they'll say, 'That's it?'" she said with a laugh. "They come out of this knowing how to find primary sources, write a thesis statement, annotate a bibliography. Those are college-level skills."

The national competition runs Sunday, June 14, through Thursday June 18, and beyond the academic competition, the students are looking forward to a few things: sunning, sightseeing, and the opening ceremony march — an Olympics-style procession of student delegations from across the country and around the world. International schools and Department of Defense schools from places like Guam, China, and Korea also participate, and all of them bring custom-made buttons for trading with the other schools.

Burlington Buzz will follow up with results from the national competition and wishes competitors the best of luck!

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