Long Day’s Journey Into the Past

NEW YORK —  Preston knows plenty, but few facts are as fascinating as the best way to remove a man’s brain. “Through the nose,” he says.

Draining the brain was part of the process for pickling a dead pharaoh. Ancient embalmers simply slipped a rod up a royal nostril and stirred vigorously. The cerebellum seeped out like a cold symptom.

Preston got this knowledge from a professor who actually mummified a man, some guy who’d probably thought donating his body to science would help cure cancer. The professor showed Preston the video. He was grossed out, as any eighth-grader would be. “Gruesome,” he says. “But fascinating.”

Preston’s ability to get an eminent Egyptologist to explain mummification won him third place last year in the documentary film category of a contest known as National History Day. This year, Preston Burger, a seriously smart 14-year-old from Massapequa, Long Island, is going for gold.

“He is always shooting for the big prize,” says his mother, Susan Burger.

Preston is among 700,000 students from the Class of 2000--and beyond--who have written papers, produced documentaries, created performance pieces or constructed exhibits that explain how a bit of history changed the world. To the first crop of 21st century adults, none born before 1982, the Berlin Wall and the barrier-free access movement have been consigned to the same book bin of history as Caesar and Saladin.

Though chestnuts like Gettysburg and Galileo are perennial favorites, boomers will find that much of their dwindling lives is as contemporary as cave drawings. Title IX, Proposition 13 and the stock market plunge of 1987 have made the leap from yesterday’s headlines to today’s history. Everyone who turns 18 this year was born four years after the first test-tube baby.

“You get a lot of history that you still don’t find in textbooks,” says Andy Meyers, a history teacher at New York’s Fieldston school.

National History “Day” is actually up to nine months’ work and a gantlet of regional and state contests. (California’s winners will be chosen Sunday in Sacramento).

Two thousand survivors then meet for four nausea-inducing, flop sweat-producing, sanity-reducing days of national competition. The 22nd edition begins June 11 at the University of Maryland, where the nonprofit National History Day Inc. is based.

At that level, most projects have jaw-dropping material and flashy production values. Last year, a suburban New Yorker convincingly transformed herself into a 1920s-era Virginia woman to spin the surprisingly spellbinding story of the air conditioner’s impact on the culture and economy. A Fresno boy took first for a paper showing the social impact of modern advances in artificial limbs.

“It’s the best-kept secret in America and one of the most exciting things around,” says Jo Ann Burton of California’s Constitutional Rights Project, who helped judge the recent Los Angeles County regionals. “The kids have no qualms about calling up a Stanford professor or Chuck Yeager.”

National History Day was founded in Cleveland by a group of Case Western Reserve University educators appalled by incoming freshmen who couldn’t tell Nixon from China and had less insight into the Marshall Plan than Marcia Brady’s party plans. It quickly spread, spurred by teachers upset that schools were sacrificing humanities to expand math and science.

History teacher Robbie Harte introduced it to Long Island 19 years ago, and not a decade too soon. After John F. Kennedy was assassinated, it became a tradition for her students to lay a wreath on his grave during the annual trip to Washington.

“Then, one year, the kids started asking, ‘Who’s Kennedy?’ ” says Harte.

Required for Seventh-Graders

Preston plunged into National History Day in 1998 only because it was required for seventh-graders at his school. A budding actor, dancer and singer, he decided to make a documentary on the 300-year-old history of tap dance. He found that tap was rooted in West African dances preserved by slaves, and that it would prove to be their entree into show biz.

“I killed myself preparing,” Preston says.

He nailed first place at his school, then topped the field at the Long Island regionals. That took him to the state championships at Cooperstown, N.Y.

About a dozen kids in Preston’s category showed their films and fielded questions in two rooms, each with three judges. The top two in each room would go on to a runoff.

This is where Preston first laid eyes on a young man from upstate Clarkstown, who had a documentary on the making of Las Vegas. “I was like: Uh-oh. This was competition I’d never experienced before.”

But Preston made the runoffs. He took his tape into another room to play it for another three judges. Only four kids were left, including the kid from Clarkstown.

Preston showed his video. Four hours later, all the finalists gathered at an auditorium to await the outcome. “The tension you feel is 10 times greater than during judging,” he says.

His category came up. Third place? Nope.

Second? Kid from Clarkstown.

First? Could it be . . . first?

Preston leaped out of his seat but tried not to run to the podium. He was going to the nationals. As the second-place finisher, so was that kid from Clarkstown.

A month later, Preston and his mom took the 5:45 a.m. train to Washington and the University of Maryland. The sprawling campus was a sea of exhibits and serious young faces.

Preston was assigned to a small room with a handful of other contestants. The three judges were chatty and friendly, and Preston felt comfortable as he screened his documentary and fielded questions.

The results of the semifinals were posted hours later on boards at the student center. Preston had to wait in line to get close enough. Students ahead groaned, squealed, wept.

Preston yelled. Out of 72 kids in his category, he’d made the final dozen.

One round was left, this time in a much bigger room with lots of spectators. Preston noticed that the kid from Clarkstown had made the finals too.

Preston had to sit through nine other documentaries before his turn came. His nerves were shot by the time he played his 10-minute documentary for the judges. “I was so relieved when I got a big round of applause,” he says.

Just as in the state competition, the winners weren’t announced until the actual awards ceremony. Preston waited two agonizing hours for his category. “I was going nuts,” he says.

The moment arrived. Documentary film, individual, junior division.

Third place? Nope.

Second place? Uh-uh.

First place? Could it be . . . first?

“The kid from Clarkstown,” Preston says. “My pride went on a downhill slope. I congratulated him. I had that long trip home.”

‘The Invention of Bubblegum’

The view to the past from the men and women of the future is often bracingly original, sometimes to a fault. “The Invention of Bubblegum” was blown away by weightier topics at the Los Angeles contest. Yet that sort of unfettered examination can also produce a fresh-eyed perspective that eludes stodgier historians. “They turn over new stuff,” says historian Lisa Lisowski, policy and program director for the National Archives.

A group of rural Kansas students reunited one of the first black students to integrate the Little Rock, Ark., schools with the one white boy who was nice to her. A Washington state student found that the local American Legion, honored by a monument for defending her town against a labor group a century ago, had actually instigated the lethal rumble. A group of D-average jocks got so inspired by their subject--skinheads--that they won the 1996 Iowa finals.

“Their parents were so elated,” says their teacher, Sue Strube.

Some history is so fresh it’s still unfolding. A boy won the New York City regionals this year with a paper that analyzed post-Cold War population upheavals from the perspective of his family: Jews who fled Arab nationalism in the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan.

Organizers say academic historians often dismiss students’ historical spadework. Yet youngsters do naturally what professionals have only recently been forced to do to more clearly interpret the past: study how big events affected the little guy.

“They are looking at how their own family’s history played a role in American history, how to make the study of the past relevant to today,” says Maryland history professor Cathy Gorn, National History Day’s executive director.

Civil rights in all its forms has huge appeal, but gay rights is a growing part of the pantheon. With the Cold War’s end killing off anything resembling a pure ideological struggle, more youngsters are finding pop culture a portal to the past. One project tied the roots of the paparazzi to the rise of the Beatles.

Soberingly enough, the history of sexually transmitted disease has joined the spectrum of subjects. And while Watergate and Woodstock are so Mom and Dad, World War II is, like, da bomb.

“I think they find their grandparents more fascinating than their parents,” says Gorn.

Two years ago, a Latino student researching Southern California migration found out that his grandfather had been a migrant worker. And a Japanese American kid learned that his grandfather had been interned after Pearl Harbor. “His father was floored,” says Gorn.

Yet History Day rarely gets any news coverage. The winners never get the big press of, say, the geek chic Intel Talent Search.

Lisowski likens the apathy to the arched eyebrows she got when she graduated with a history degree, rather than something custom-fit for the economy. “It still comes down to people thinking critically and doing analysis and learning to read well and write well,” she says.

Though that may explain why the Internet is a high-tech showcase for chimp-caliber grammar, the Intel science winner walks off with $100,000 while the nation’s top teen historian pockets a measly grand.

“Trying to raise money is tough,”’ says Gorn. “Corporations line up to sponsor science awards.”

California’s shoestring operation has a database that only goes back four years, says state coordinator Andy Schwick. Who won History Day before that has been lost to history.

Yet thousands of people are addicted to it. The National Archives and Smithsonian Institution regularly showcase the top projects.

Lisowski takes a week off to help set up and judge the nationals, where each state’s top two finishers in four categories of presentation try to out-wow the judges.

“Students who excel are the ones who talk to the former president or the spy who was shot down,” says Jamison Prime, a Federal Communications Commission lawyer and a contest judge.

One national contestant last year found an obscure official who mapped the interstate highway system. Judges learned that the Eisenhower administration warned that Americans might need superhighways to flee Red Menace mushroom clouds. Obviously, Ike didn’t factor in rush hour.

Judges like nothing more than to be floored by a factoid. Take “Spam: A Turning Point in History.” Spam isn’t just processed pork parts shaped like a can, let alone slang for junk e-mail. Spam was a weapon that won World War II, and not because it made for a nice bazooka round.

Nikita “Khrushchev said if not for Spam, Russian soldiers at the front would not have been able to survive the German invasion,” says Marina Polyakova, a junior at Townsend Harris High School in Queens, N.Y.

Marina finished second in documentary film at the recent New York City finals, which qualified her for the state finals. Students from her school whooped and brayed like she’d won with a tomahawk jam instead of a spreadable ham.

“I find the idea of hundreds of kids screaming their little hearts out for somebody who had written a historical paper mighty heartwarming,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Mike Wallace, who helped that contest.

Andy Meyers wasn’t so sure. The Fieldston history teacher was chagrined that his prep school’s 18 entrants got 13 awards. The entire working-class borough of Staten Island got none. Meyers wouldn’t mind seeing the event become more exhibition than competition.

“Some kids were turned off by the cheering,” he says. “And the criteria seems to vary from judge to judge.”

Organizers say a handful of states--particularly California, Texas and Minnesota--dominate the nationals, and a few districts dominate the states. California won 10 national awards last year, more than any other state, but seven came from Fresno or Kern counties.

Prime says some judges seek to factor availability of resources into the scoring. But Prime points out that a boy at the District of Columbia’s cash-poor Alice Deal Junior High, which is still stuck in the mimeograph era, finished first last year with a simple yet outstanding paper about how improved rail technology compelled this country to adopt time zones.

Prime, who won a national title as a boy only after getting blown out in previous years, says giving kids constructive criticism is more helpful than giving them a break.

“What I hope is they don’t burst into tears.”

Adults Are Poorest Sports

Though kids take losing hard, adults are the poorest spots. Gorn got a call years ago from a father enraged that his kid finished second in Ohio--even though that was good enough to make the nationals.

Sometimes, parents help too much. One kid, during questioning, credited Mom with his research.

But the line between healthy feedback and family fraud is elusive. Preston’s father, for example, is a film editor for NBC-TV’s “Dateline.” Even though Preston has his own computer equipped to make movies, he does have a pro in the house.

“The editing my son does is very simple,” Susan Burger says. “We see kids with special effects. My husband won’t teach Preston that. You do a cut, a dissolve, and that’s it.”

And judges say Preston, a straight-A student, is dripping with brains, not to mention a drive to succeed. After the 1998 nationals ended in crushing disappointment, Preston took aim at next years’ contest.

Every National History Day has a broad theme, and 1999’s was to be science in history. Preston mulled over the moon mission, but decided it was too obvious.

Then, a brainstorm: Mummification. The science of mummification.

Preston got books, watched film, absorbed. He heard about a professor who supposedly replicated an actual mummification and who just happened to be teaching at Long Island University. Preston called him up.

“He was the nicest guy,” Preston says “He said, ‘Come over to my home.’ ”

He showed Preston his two vintage mummy heads, the tools he’d gone to Egypt to get, the video of a mummy in the making. The professor slit the sides of the abdomen and removed the organs. He dried the body by covering it in a mineral salt. He washed the cadaver with oils and spices, then wrapped it in linen strips.

Preston produced a knockout documentary that again finished first on Long Island. Then it was back to Cooperstown. He quickly sensed an implacable presence on the streets where the ghosts of the baseball greats lurked.

“I run into the kid from Clarkstown. He’s doing the Panama Canal,” he says. “We say hello.”

Once again, the two made the runoffs. This time, the kid from Clarkstown finished first and Preston was second.

A month later, Preston was back on campus at College Park, Md. Again he made the national finals. Again, he endured the slow torture of sitting through the awards ceremony.

Then his category was called. Documentary film, individual, junior division: Third place?

Why, Preston Burger.

“I did not hold back. I jumped up and gave a little yell and ran down the aisle and across the floor to the podium and got the award.”

Preston had a piece of the pinnacle. First place? Ah, some kid from Clarkstown. No matter. “This time there were no tears behind my congratulations. That was an easy ride home. I felt great.”

One week after Marina’s Spam saga snagged a spot in this year’s state finals, Preston took first in the Long Island competition with his latest entry: a documentary about the 1944 explosion of a Navy ammo dump at Port Chicago near San Francisco, which hurled house-sized chunks of flaming metal past planes flying at 9,000 feet.

It also killed 320 men, most members of an untrained, overworked, all-black ordnance unit. When the Navy ordered the shell-shocked survivors to resume duty, hundreds refused. Most were dishonorably discharged or convicted of mutiny and sentenced to years of hard labor. The tragedy was a key factor in the decision to desegregate the military.

Preston got the idea from a news article last year about one of the survivors seeking (and ultimately getting) a full pardon from President Clinton. He got original court-martial transcripts and a trove of records from the National Archives. He found a veteran who had been there and remembered the pure terror of handling live bombs sent clanging down loading ramps.

“It was the most powerful thing I ever heard,” Preston says.

The Long Island judges agreed and sent him to Cooperstown for the third straight year.

On Friday, Preston, Marina and the kid from Clarkstown came to a crossroads in Cooperstown.

The Clarkstown boy had a documentary about how the assassination of President William McKinley gave birth to the environmental movement. Teddy Roosevelt assumed the presidency and made conservation a national issue.

Both he and Preston were competing for the first time in the senior division, where the competition was stiffer. But both made the finals, along with Marina.

A few hours later, the awards were announced. Marina finished fifth in the state, a good showing. But only the top two go on to the nationals.

As the saying goes, those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it. But Preston knows plenty. He took second.

First? Jonathan Menitove, a 14-year-old boy with a passion for history and two national titles to prove it. A kid from Clarkstown who, despite his success, can’t afford to be cocky.

He knows Preston knows plenty. “He does incredible work,” says Jonathan. “He’s definitely the one making me nervous.”