Molly McGaughran got her idea from books about the Salem witch trials. Kyle Lowden got his from anthologies of the Beatles' work. A movie about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was Courtney Istre's inspiration.
The origin is not nearly as important as the result, say the judges in the National History Day contest, and the result should make history come alive.
The three middle-school and high-school students are representative of 2,000 from 47 states competing for scholarships and cash awards at the University of Maryland College Park this week.
All of them got this far by winning local and state history fairs, and now they face their toughest competition -- other winners.
If they expect to take home the top prize, a scholarship of $60,000, they had better be the best at showing judges they've done their research and at telling them just why their project is significant.
How does Courtney's topic, sparked by a movie, qualify?
What made it stand out in the state contest, said Tim Hoagland of the Minnesota Historical Commission, was that she put the league into perspective, showing what came before -- Rosie the Riveter -- and what came later -- Title IX and equal access to sports for women.
The latter is something that Courtney, an eighth-grader who participates in several sports at her school in Minneapolis, benefits from.
As for history: "I knew that women have always been written out of history," Courtney said, as she waited for the three judges to give her a 10-minute query about her project. Behind her stood the three-paneled exhibit of photos and text.
Courtney brought the subject to life through plenty of research, but her prize find was tracking down former All-American Girls Professional Baseball player Kay Heim, who supplied her with a scrapbook and mementos.
It started a few years ago when Courtney saw the Penny Marshall film, "A League of Their Own."
She looked up books on the topic -- students must do their own research for these projects, using primary sources instead of textbooks and encyclopedias. Courtney discovered a book written by a fellow Minnesotan, Margo Galt of St. Paul.
"I called 411 to get her number," Courtney said. She interviewed Galt, and got the phone numbers of three league players who lived in Minnesota, including Kay Heim.
"Back then, we only had volleyball and basketball," Heim told Courtney. "Now, well, you've got it all."
The sentiment was not lost on Courtney. Tennis is her sport, but she also plays baseball and basketball, runs track and has taken gymnastics and ballet.
"I knew it, but I hadn't really thought about using it in the report," Courtney said.
But after talking with her history teacher at Susan B. Anthony Middle School, Courtney put the women's league into perspective, starting with the Bloomer Girls, a women's team that played men. From the 1890s until they folded in 1934, the Bloomer Girls were seen as more akin to a freak show than serious sports, Courtney reported, but Bloomer Girl Jackie Mitchell once struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
She took it through the Depression and into World War II, which depleted both factories and baseball of strong men. Women filled in in both places, and in both places were asked to step aside when the men returned.
Courtney wrapped up her exhibit with the passage of Title IX, which required girls to have equal access to sports in schools.
To attract more students to such historical research, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland started the contest in 1980. College Park took it over in 1992. Now five days long, National History Day operates under a misnomer. Students can produce standing exhibits, video or slide documentaries or dramatic performance.
"Basically, we looked at the science fair," said Hoagland, who is one of the historians who helps run the affair. "The neat thing about science fairs is kids get to do what real scientists do -- laboratory experiments. In history, kids would read a textbook and be asked to do multiple-choice tests. That's not what a historian does."
Kyle Lowden, a seventh-grader from Fort Wayne, Ind., became John Lennon, giving a soliloquy on how he graduated from writing simple love songs to songs that inspired the peace movement.
"School projects are just looking up something," said Molly McGaughran, who lives in Chesapeake Beach and completed seventh grade at Plum Point Middle School. "Here, I could write my own script, do it in front of people. It's more fun."
As Molly began putting together her research, she used her father's e-mail account to communicate with the education director of the Salem Witch Museum in Massachusetts. And she happened to find a relative who had the perfect costume: a plain black dress and muslin cap and collar that belonged to an ancestor in the 19th century. This great-grandmother was a member of the Dunkard Brethren, a branch of the Church of the Brethren named for its form of baptism, and distinguished by plain dress. Not exactly 17th-century Puritans, but the dress was close enough.
The contest sets a theme each year. This year, it was "Triumph and Tragedy."
Next year's theme is to be migration in history.
"I work in a public library, and we already have kids coming in to work on it," said Robbie McGaughran, Molly's mother.
Pub Date: 6/17/97
