Three Seniors Honored With Negley Award for 333 Work

Seniors Jack Hirsch, Hanan Lane and Arianna Serafini were selected in the fall as this year’s Negley prize winners for their outstanding history 333 papers. The three students covered a broad range of events in U.S. history, running the gamut from, respectively, the rise of mass incarceration of blacks and convict leasing following Emancipation to an analysis of a landmark Supreme Court case to an examination of the media’s take on a newly discovered antipsychotic drug in the 1950s.

The 333 is well known as a milestone paper for students at Exeter in their upper year. Each student chooses a topic from their year-long American history sequence and spends approximately a month researching and composing a final paper between 12 and 20 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 qualify for the award. Following that, the Negley Committee, composed of eight history instructors, meets over the summer to discuss these papers and to choose between three and five winners, basing their criteria on aspects ranging from originality to research depth to the quality of the writing.

According to history instructor and Negley Selection Committee member Michael Golay, the committee does not merely review A papers, but any papers that meet this given criteria. “I like the way we approach the reviews of the paper,” he said. “We have really great discussions on the committee, and I think we come up with good decisions.”

“Although my paper only scratches the surface of one particular aspect of the conditions they faced, it still helped me to shed light on the history of racial injustice in this country.”

The committee eliminated all but the winning three of the finalist papers, which will be published in the spring as a reference guide for current uppers and high school students outside of Exeter embarking on their own papers.

Serafini wrote her paper on the media’s representation of and sensalization of “chlorpromazine,” an antipsychotic drug that was hailed as a miracle in the world of mental health medicine. According to her spring term history instructor, Bill Jordan, Serafini’s copious use of primary sources allowed her to find an original point of view on her subject,  rather than composing a “rehash of secondary sources.”

Serafini explained that she read almost exclusively primary sources because she found that secondary sources, particularly ones written recently, came with a considerable bias. “It was important to read both sides of the story,” she said.

Serafini’s unique research process helped her to hone in on her very specific topic, rather than writing about something more general. “I chose a topic that was relatively narrow in a time frame that was relatively narrow,” she explained. “Instead of trying to work in every factor possible, I focused on one specific thing and it turned out that there was enough information for me to research that.”

Furthermore, Jordan noted that she drew connections between her topics and pertinent contemporary issues with grace and connected her topic to the historical context of the 1950s. “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 threw out the first six pages of her first draft and did significant research in between the first and final draft. Although she wrote her final paper in about a day, she said that she wished she had assembled the body of her essay earlier, and recommended that future 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.

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.

Lane explained that she encountered the case in one of her 333 history readings and found it particularly intriguing. After she had settled on an engaging topic, she relied on organization to ease her process: she divided  her paper into sections, 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.”

Lane advised current uppers to outline and take meticulous notes throughout the research process to make for a less daunting job later on.

“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,” she explained.  “I didn’t stress very much over the essay because I broke it down into smaller steps.”

Hirsch wrote about convict leasing, which essentially replaced slave labor in the South after Emancipation. He described this mass imprisonment of African Americans for inconsequential crimes and their subsequent rental to private industries. He said he was inspired by a documentary he watched last winter called “Slavery by Another Name,” and that he chose the topic after his teacher and his father gave him the same piece of advice—write about something that sparks your sense of social justice.

Hirsch explained that in the midst of the Black Lives Movement, he began to wonder what the history of African American oppression was between Emancipation and today. “Although my paper only scratches the surface of one particular aspect of the conditions they faced,” he said, “it still helped me to shed light on the history of racial injustice in this country.” For current uppers, Hirsch recommends that they try to find a topic that in some ways relates or speaks to them. “Even if you lose track of the paper itself or find yourself struggling, you still remember why you’re writing it,” he explained.

The passion Hirsch felt for the subject helped him to write his paper with more ease. “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,” he said. According to history instructor Amy Schwartz, it was Hirsch’s powerful sense of motivation that set his writing apart. She could tell he was writing for himself, not to earn an A or win a prize. “This is why I think it’s a special piece of work,” she said.

Despite the arduousness associated with writing the 333, the Negley recipients found the experience fulfilling and profound. “This was probably the most interesting and rewarding endeavor of my Exeter career, and [it] gave me the freedom to truly delve into a topic that is entirely mine,” Hirsch said. “I hope that all of the uppers can find the same satisfaction in their papers.”