Seniors Win Negley Awards in U.S. History

Seniors Samuel Farnsworth, Jasper Ludington and Nick Schwarz were awarded the 2018-19 Negley Prizes for their outstanding History 430 papers about the National Rifle Association (NRA), black businesses in Durham, North Carolina under Jim Crow segregation and the Fighting Words Doctrine, respectively.

In their final term of the year long United States history sequence, students spend a month writing a comprehensive, 10-15 page research paper on any topic of their choice—a massive academic undertaking commonly known as the “333.” Recipients of the prestigious Negley Prize, awarded annually to the year’s best 333s, were selected this year by a committee of history instructors after an extensive, three-month review of 22 nominated papers submitted for special consideration.

Farnsworth decided to explore the history of gun control in the U.S. by analyzing the impact the NRA had on jurisprudence in the Supreme Court. “The NRA is an organization that’s always interested me,” he said. “I knew that I wanted to write about politics or the law, and gun control is an intersection of the two.”

Farnsworth said that his perspective on the topic would have been incomplete without the shared wisdom of his now-retired History 430 instructor Kwasi Boadi. “Dr. Boadi had a great analogy that carried through [in my paper]: throughout history, a pendulum has swung between liberty and equality,” Farnsworth said. “When you grant people more liberty, they end up abusing it in a hierarchical way…but on the other hand, when you get more equality, you have to put up more restrictions on groups of people. The cultural context can play a vital role in determining where the pendulum is and should be at any given time.”

Farnsworth elaborated on the specific thesis of his paper. “The NRA has been a major player in the debate surrounding the right to own a firearm in America. Regardless of your stance on gun control, it is worth studying how the organization began and its role in the gun debate today,” he said.

Committee members commended Farnsworth for writing an essay that “made them think,” adding that his scholarship was “detailed and thorough.” “This essay moved easily between historical context, internal maneuverings at the NRA and the legal issues,” members said.

Meanwhile, Ludington wrote about Durham, NC’s black-owned businesses in the Jim Crow era. His main focus of study was “[trying] to put into context the idea that while the existence of a strong black community and business district was very impressive during the time, it was still very much circumscribed by and at the mercy of whites.”

Much of Ludington’s research was conducted using research material from libraries at the University of North Carolina and Duke University, as well as several prominent North Carolina companies. His research led him to a person at North Carolina Mutual, who Ludington recalled was very excited about his paper. "She gave me a book on the company’s history that is extremely hard to find and asked for me to send my paper to the company after I finished it," he said.

The committee lauded Ludington’s willingness to take the risk of pursuing a more obscure topic and his ability to make effective use of the few resources available to him. “[The essay made] terrific use of primary and secondary sources,” committee members said. “[He chose] a rather daring topic since the source availability was less obvious than is true for some topics.”

Schwarz wrote about the ambiguous legal lines between free speech and hate speech through a narrative of the “fighting words doctrine,” which sought to define the difference. “The doctrine arose from an incident that happened 17 miles from Exeter. A Jevovah’s Witness anti-war protester was harassed by a mob and the police were clearly on the side of the harassers,” Schwarz said. “When the protester objected to the police harassing him, he was arrested for using ‘Fighting Words’ against the police.”

The case eventually reached the Supreme Court and came to be known as the Chaplinsky Supreme Court case. “Laws against Fighting Words [a term for words considered provocative] are often used by local law enforcement to quash dissent and minority groups,” he explained. “The Court radically restricted the doctrine. The lesson for today is that laws to curb speech all but inevitably end up being used to punish dissent and to squelch protest against authority.”

The committee praised Schwarz’s scholarly fortitude, saying that “this paper made complicated jurisprudence understandable. The author raised absorbing questions about whether democracy is at times best preserved by curtailing civil liberties.”

Members continued, “[Schwarz had a] strong connection to the important context of the rise of WWII-era fascism and the evolving understanding of the clause as the context changed.”

Selection Committee co-chair Meg Foley explained that Negleys are awarded based on individual merit, with less consideration for the total number of prizes given. “We just decided ‘is it prize-worthy?’ and if it’s prize-worthy, it’s prize-winning. It doesn’t matter if there are six prize-worthy papers or three,” Foley explained.

Some standards of evaluation have remained constant over the years. “[Negley-winning papers] have to meet the standards for research, citation, clarity and writing. We’re also looking for compelling history and really interesting source use or really artful writing, but it’s not the same combination of things that necessarily means a paper is prize-winning,” Foley said.

Both the History department faculty and this year’s Negley recipients noted the importance of regarding rigorous research and high-quality scholarship as an end goal, in and of itself. Worrying about awards only “put an undue amount of stress on younger kids, which can certainly harm their mental health, especially in a stressful time like upper spring,” Farnsworth said.

Foley concluded by voicing great praise and admiration for the extraordinary writing and research abilities of Exeter students. “It’s a real pleasure to read all of these great papers,” she said. “There were three winners, but it’s helpful to know there are so many great papers that have attributes that are really exciting. Student writing is strong right now.”