Bigfork students delve into the past for National History Day fair

Five months of research led up to Bigfork Middle School’s first National History Day fair.

Under the national theme “Leadership and Legacy in history,” eighth-graders in teacher Cynthia Wilondek’s social studies class presented famous — and infamous — historical figures through exhibits, documentaries, skits, papers, PowerPoints and websites.

The presentations didn’t just count for a grade but provided an opportunity for five students to advance to the Montana National History Day competition March 28 in Bozeman. State winners will advance to the 2015 National History Day Contest.

In the school gym, judges Jane Renfrow (a retired Columbia Falls teacher) and Michele Paine (assistant principal at Flathead High School) engaged eighth-graders Grant Gibson and Cole Hider with questions about their history project. Gibson and Hider created a website about Hannibal Barca, a general from Carthage noted for his military prowess during the Second Punic War.

“What did you learn about preparing a website?” Renfrow asked.

“It’s not really, really hard but takes a lot of learning and preparing,” Hider said.

Both judges were impressed with the extensive research the eighth-graders had to complete.

“They pick their topics in the fall, so having eighth-graders do a sustained project for that many months — that’s hard,” Wilondek said. “They were invested.”

Renfrow added, “These kids are using some high-level thinking skills.”

Interpretation is key when learning and writing about history and controversial figures, Wilondek said.

“One topic was Columbus,” Wilondek said. “They had to judge whether or not his legacies were positive or negative. And we had Custer. It was fascinating because they said at one point he was really popular and a hero, and then he became this weird villain.”

Before starting their projects, students visited Flathead Valley Community College where they learned about conducting good research.

“One of the big things that we tackle every day is how do you tell a good source from a bad source and how do you research in the age of the Internet and so we needed to broaden our idea of what research can be,” Wilondek said.

The eighth-graders also visited the Museum at Central School, where students learned how documents are processed and were able to go through newspapers more than 80 years old.

“We had a very tactile experience with some of our local resources. It was a really cool experience,” Wilondek said. 

Wilondek said students had to analyze secondary and primary sources.

“We start with secondary sources, meaning other people’s interpretations and getting broader ideas,” Wilondek said. “With primary sources, part of the requirement of this project is they needed to go and interpret photographs, they needed to look at letters that were written by these people, they needed to have a firsthand interpretive experience with very real products. It was a tough thing for an eighth-grader.”

Finding primary sources was particularly tough for students who chose ancient people such as Hannibal Barca, who lived from 247 to 183 B.C. Gibson said there wasn’t much readily available to them. The closest they came was an online translation of works by the Greek historian Polybius, who wrote “The Histories.”

The fair offered an eclectic mix of old and contemporary, international and state historical figures such as Sitting Bull, Louis Armstrong, William Wallace, Wyatt Earp, Ben Franklin, Paul Revere, Jack the Ripper, Alexander the Great, Doris Miller, Walt Disney, Crazy Horse and suffragettes Belle Fligelman, Jeannette Rankin and Maggie Hathaway.

One exhibit was in the shape of a stone cathedral. At the top, a portrait of a young woman dressed in armor is displayed in backlit “stained glass.” This is eighth-grader Anya Young’s exhibit of Joan of Arc. 

“I was looking for a woman leader,” Young said. “It’s usually men who are leading and I wanted something different. I knew nothing about her when I picked my topic.”

What surprised Young the most about Joan of Arc was that she was just a teenager when she led military campaigns in the 1400s.

“She changed the course of the war and she was just a teenager,” Young said. “She was burned at 19 and started having visions at about age 13, so she was just a teenager and she accomplished so much.”

Also part of her display was a banner Young made to resemble the one Joan of Arc carried.

“She liked it more than her sword. See, in these pictures she’s almost always carrying with her,” Young said pointing to different images on her display board.

Other objects in her exhibit included printouts of old texts, browned by age.

“She couldn’t write but she dictated them and these are the three that have her signature on them,” Young said noting that the primary sources help historians separate fact from myth.

Although students such as Gibson and Hider were vying for state, Wilondek said she wanted the fair to be more of a celebration rather than an intense competition. The celebration was evident in the voices of eighth-graders Isabelle Gomez and Jamie Duke, who pranced down a hallway past Wilondek, chanting “we got a ‘superior’ and ‘excellent,’” for their psychedelic display on the Beatles.

For more information about National History Day, visit www.nhd.org.