Negley Prize Awarded to Five Students

The U.S. History 410/20/30 series, renumbered over the summer from 331/32/33, is one of Exeter’s most intensive and frequently discussed course offerings. After covering five centuries’ worth of material in three terms, focusing on the development of the United States, students end with an extensive research paper, notorious for its length and accompanying heavy workload. This year, the history department awarded Alex Zhang ’16 and seniors Maya Pierce, Carissa Chen, Eric Tang and Sally Ma the Negley Prize for their work on the paper.

Historically, the 333 has served as a rite of passage for Exonians. After years of training in analysis and historical research, generations of Exonians have had the challenge of putting their skills to the test in the spring of their upper or senior years. The paper also offers an opportunity for a select few outstanding history students to further distinguish themselves and receive the prestigious Negley Prize.

Over the summer, several history instructors as members of the Negley Selection Committee, sorted through and picked the best papers to be distinguished for their excellence. There are hundreds of submissions each year.

“My 333 made me realize how important historical research is in helping to ensure justice and giving voice to those whose stories have been erased."

While the Negley Committee aims to recognize the top three to five essays of each year, this year’s relatively high number of recipients points toward a crowded and well-accomplished field. The winning students examined a variety of topics, from Laud Humphrey’s 1970’s Tearoom Trade study to America’s role in the 1971 Bangladesh Genocide.

Pierce focused on the misconceptions, prejudice and discrimination victims faced during the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s in her paper. She was interested in exploring this topic because she knew people who were working in the public health field. She explained that it was a specific event that illustrated a “concept that is widely applicable.”

Pierce’s history instructor, Kwasi Boadi, explained that she went beyond her library resources and conducted phone interviews with people she knew who had personally gone through crises themselves. “The result was a remarkably compelling report that was outstanding for its breadth and depth,” he said.

Tang chose to write about freed slaves’ search for their loved ones in the aftermath of emancipation. “Their struggles to reunite—often across hundreds of miles of hostile terrain—were just beautiful yet heartbreaking,” he said.

However, some papers took a different perspective, choosing instead to analyze certain works and their impacts on popular culture, rather than an observation of a certain movement or struggle in our history. Ma re-evaluated the importance and impact of Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” to the second wave feminism of the 1960s and 70s in her paper, and Zhang wrote about The Tearoom Trade, a study by Laud Humphreys from 1970 that analyzed the large number of socially conservative men who identified privately as homosexual and went “to public toilets to engage in anonymous, homosexual acts.” Zhang went on to connect this with events like the Stonewall Riots and the Lavender Scare.

When Zhang began the 333, which was his final paper at Exeter in his senior year, he thought he had an understanding of the paper’s structure and its argument, but that all changed when he set about writing his piece. His original thesis claimed that Humphreys’ results “reflected the movement of gay men ‘into the shadows’ that historical events in the twentieth century had provoked.” However, as Zhang continued his research, he found that Humphreys discovered a group of liberal and openly gay men who also went to the public toilets. “This showed that there was not just one single movement within the gay community, but rather two—there was a split,” he said, expressing his fascination that came with discovering new information that transformed his paper and understanding of the subject. “Each new source I found was like another new piece of the puzzle,” Zhang said.

In order to make his 333 engaging, Zhang lead the reader on a journey of his thought process, starting from his pseudo-thesis. Then, he disproved it, explained the reasons why it was wrong, and finally revealed his true thesis at the end of the paper.

Chen, on the other hand, chose to analyze an example of Henry Kissinger’s foreign policy strategy during the Cold War by analyzing American actions during the Bengali genocide of the 1970s, and focusing on Nixon, Kissinger and Archer Blood. Chen took a critical eye at American military actions. She said, “While hundreds of thousands of US Soldiers died in Vietnam for Nixon’s passionate pro-democracy rhetoric, the president and Kissinger secretly supported a genocide against Bengalis seeking democracy—funding over 80 percent of the military equipment used… to quell rebellion.” Instructors on the selection committee took note of the passionate and incisive voice of Chen’s piece.

Chen said that other than just having a paper at the end of the project, she also took away some important and life-long lessons from the experience, driven from the opportunity to delve into a subject that, for most Americans, remains relatively obscure. “My 333 made me realize how important historical research is in helping to ensure justice and giving voice to those whose stories have been erased. It made me consider how our stories are told,” she said.

For some of the seniors, the final history essay was the culmination of a year of exciting learning. When asked if they had any favorite parts of the three-term course, both Tang and Chen responded that they had difficulty picking any favorite part in a year of adventure. Tang simply said, “I have no favorite part [to be honest]—I really liked everything we learned about!”

Along with plenty of reflections and life lessons gained, the seniors also offered advice to future classes of history students. Tang explained that the process of writing a great 333 is “… about taking facts and turning them into a story.” Chen reminded students to write about what is dearest to them by offering a personal example from her own life.

She advised that, “The topic you choose should be something that aligns with what motivates you to write. I grew up on my grandfather’s stories of his childhood in Nanjing during World War II… I became really engrossed in my history research because it aligned with those personal childhood memories.”

Finally, Ma highlighted the importance of finding great primary sources. She said, “Delve into primary sources as early as possible—they are truly open gold mines and our library has a [lot] of them waiting silently and eagerly to be discovered!”