Three Seniors Receive Negley Award
Seniors Arianna Serafini, Jack Hirsch and Hanan Lane were selected as this year’s Negley prize recipients for their exemplary 333 history papers. The three recipients focused on a diverse array of topics in U.S. history, including, respectively, press coverage of the 1950s discovery of an antipsychotic drug, the rise of mass incarceration of blacks and convict leasing following Reconstruction and a landmark Supreme Court case addressing the ethics of contraception.
The 333 is known as a milestone paper at Exeter, in which students choose a topic from the year-long American history sequence and spend around a month researching and composing a final paper ranging from thirteen to twenty pages in length. The paper is named after the course number for the final leg of the U.S. History course, United States History: 1941 to the Present, which convenes in the spring.
Each 333 history instructor nominates papers they believe meet the standards for a prize. The Negley Committee, composed of eight history instructors, meets over the summer to discuss those papers and choose three to five winners, basing their criteria on aspects such as originality, research depth and writing quality.
“We look not just at the A papers, but the papers that just really stood out in terms of originality or skills in research or quality of writing,” history instructor and Negley Selection Committee member Michael Golay said. “I like the way we approach the reviews of the papers. We have really great discussions on the committee, and I think we come up with good decisions.”
“I would advise that students try to manage their time well and get stuff done on a daily basis so you don’t end up overwhelmed.”
According to history instructor and Negley Selection Committee member Aykut Kilinc, this year’s preliminary selection of papers demonstrated an impressive understanding of American history. He described them as especially well-crafted considering the time-frame and age of the writers. However, Kilinc added that the committee’s job was to simply “to choose the exceptional ones,” although many of them were qualified.
The group of finalist papers was winnowed to three winning papers, which will be published in the spring as a reference source for current uppers and high school students outside of Exeter.
Hirsch wrote about the mass imprisonment of African Americans for inconsequential crimes and their subsequent rental to private industries to replace slave labor following Reconstruction. He said he was inspired by a documentary he watched last winter called “Slavery by Another Name.” In his research, Hirsch found “yet another repulsive case of blatant discrimination.” The American government, especially in the South, incarcerated mass numbers of African Americans for petty crimes to rent them to previous slave owners. These slave owners could then work the prisoners to death without repercussions, knowing the prison would simply replace the ones that died.
He felt drawn to this topic, and as a result, was truly able to immerse himself in his work.
“Both my dad and Ms. Schwartz advised me to write about something that I was passionate about and that sparked my sense of social justice,” Hirsch said. “I realized, especially with the racial injustice in this country which really flared up last year, that this topic was going to be a good way for me to address that personally.”
It was this strong sense of personal motivation that history instructor Amy Schwartz believes distinguished Hirsch’s writing. She could tell he was writing for himself, rather than just to win a prize or get an A on the paper. “There was a lot of heart and intelligence behind this essay, and a lot of integrity and sensitivity, too,” she said. “This is why I think it’s a special piece of work.”
Lane wrote her paper on Griswold v. Connecticut, a Supreme Court case debating the ethics of birth control and contraception. During the case, the justices wanted to strike down the Connecticut statute banning the distribution of birth control, but struggled to find Constitutional justification.
The case was mentioned in one of Lane’s 333 history readings and particularly interested her. After finding an engaging topic, she broke her paper down into sections, easing the process for Lane and allowing her to concentrate on polishing her essay.
Golay, Hanan’s 333 history instructor, said her thorough and well-organized research allowed her to “think like a Supreme Court justice or lawyer,” putting herself in “the middle of the case.”
“She did her topic just about as well as it can be done,” Golay said. “It was a very sophisticated analysis, complemented by high quality writing. I think the quality of writing and thinking, the argument and the way she dealt with the justice’s very human responses to this issue were all handled well.”
Serafini’s essay took a more abstract approach, researching chlorpromazine, the first effective antipsychotic drug, and its sensalization in the media as a “miracle drug.” According to her spring term history instructor William Jordan, Serafini found an original viewpoint on her topic through primary documents, rather than composing a “rehash of secondary sources.”
This allowed her to take her paper a step further, connecting it well to the historical context of the 1950s, when the use of technology to win World War II aroused confidence in America regarding new advancements. She also drew connections between her topic and relevant contemporary issues, something Jordan noted can be hard for history students.
“It was just a wonderful paper,” Jordan said. “When you do the 333s, you get a big stack of papers and it is quiet an arduous job getting through them all. But every so often you come up to one that is just a pleasure to read. That is what Arianna’s paper was like.”
Serafini said the editing process was crucial to her paper, recalling that she kept only a third to a half of her original draft.
According to Serafini, the 333 is a working process, and students should be flexible to all the obstacles that arise in writing the paper. To aid the process, Serafini suggested that students divide up their time wisely.
“You don’t really have any homework when you are in the library for class. You have deadlines, but no one is checking in on you, so if you’re busy one night, it can be easy to put it off. I would advise that students try to manage their time well and get stuff done on a daily basis so you don’t end up overwhelmed,” Serafini said.
Likewise, Lane advised current uppers to outline and take notes throughout the research process to make writing easier later on. For Lane, this made the processes less daunting.
“I wrote all of my research on index cards, and to start writing, I organized the cards into piles for paragraphs. Then, I outlined the whole essay and began writing. I didn’t stress very much over the essay because I broke it down into smaller steps,” Lane said.
Despite the seemingly arduous process, the Negley Prize winners found the overall experience very fulfilling. “I think that my 333 was easily the work which I dedicated the most time to in my life and also the thing I found most satisfying thus far,” Hirsch said. “I’ve never immersed myself in a topic as much as I did with this paper, and the process itself was fascinating.”