Negleys Awarded to History Students

By Indrani Basu, Alia Bonanno, Evan Gonzalez, Lily Hagge and Amy Lum

The Carter Administration’s funding of the East Timurese Genocide. Black social and economic development through the Harlem Renaissance. American media’s response to the Spaniards sinking the USS Maine. These are just a few examples of winning topics from this year’s batch of Negley Awards. 

This year, Negleys were awarded to eleven students instead of the typical three to six. Prizes were awarded to final essays from HIS420 in addition to HIS430. 

In their final term of the year long United States history sequence, HIS430 students spend a month writing a comprehensive 10-15 page research paper on any topic of their choice, a graduation requirement colloquially known as the “333.” A relatively shorter essay is also due at the end of the U.S history winter term course ΗIS420, colloquially known as the “332”. Recipients of the prestigious Negley Prize were selected this year by a committee of history instructors after an extensive and rigorous review.

Uppers Jasmine Xi and Emma Finn, and seniors Max Tan, Cooper Walshe, Wiliam Vietor, Jeffrey Cui, Dillon Mims, Osiris Russell-Delano, Alicia Coble, Tommy Gannon and Jacob Feigenberg were awarded the 2019-2020 Negley Awards for their HIS420 and HIS430 final research papers.

According to Negley Committee Chair Meg Foley, the selection process for a Negley Award winner begins with history teachers anonymously submitting outstanding papers for consideration. A few members of the committee then read the papers, and winners are chosen on a basis of style, scope and quality of research.

Foley said that the Committee adjusted their selection standards in a few ways to accommodate COVID-19 distance learning. The most significant change was that rather than only accepting 430 paper submissions as they had in previous years, they asked teachers to submit exceptional 420 papers as well because they were “written in more equitable circumstances.”

Foley said that this accounts in part for the increase in prize winners this year, though she noted that, “...we have no specific number [of winners]. I think over the last several years, it’s been as low as three and maybe as high as six or seven… so we did have more this year than in previous years, but of course, we were accepting nominations from two terms.”

Due to COVID-19, students were sent home for spring term and had to write their 430 papers off-campus. While students could not check out books from the Phillips Exeter Academy Library in person, the Library provided many online databases and other outside resources for students to use for their research. Due to this support, some students’ found digital ways to conduct their spring research. 

However, senior Jacob Feigenberg described the difficulty of staying focused at home. “It made me less productive just cause I was at home with my siblings…when I would be at Exeter, if I had a huge history paper like that, I would probably spend more productive time in the library,” he said. 

Students also experienced unusual circumstances that wouldn’t normally occur at school. “The last week of school, my power went out. It was actually out for a few days…So I actually turned in my paper late, [so I was] kind of writing in the dark,” Feigenburg said. 

Upper Jasmine Xi described how she kept herself motivated away from campus.“You’re not writing it for a grade or anything, you’re honestly just writing it for yourself. And I really just wanted to write a paper that I would be proud of,” she said. 

Exonians covered a diverse array of topics in their research, spanning across the globe and across the 20th century. 

Walshe investigated American interference regarding the construction of the Panama Canal for his HIS420 paper The Canal Heist: How the United States Stole Panama. Walshe said he’s always been interested in the Canal and its significance to modern day trade.  “Panama was controlled by Columbia at the time,” Walshe said. “Columbia wanted to remain in sole control of the land. In my research, I found compelling evidence that the United States prompted a rebellion among the Panamanian people against the Columbian government. It was remarkable to me that the U.S. would incite a rebellion for their own gain.”

Cui wrote his HIS430 paper No Nobler Nor More Ambitious Task: The Carter Administration’s Involvement in the East Timor Genocide about the Carter administration’s financial ties to the East Timorese genocide, an atrocity perpetrated by Indonesia on East Timor in the mid-1970s. “There were a lot of conflicting articles,” Cui said. “Some said [Carter] committed horrible war crimes in Nicaragua… others said he ended the conflict between Israel and Palestine and did a lot of anti-nuclear proliferation. Because of this, I wanted to see some of the structural causes behind the more controversial bits of his presidency.” 

Vietor’s HIS420 paper, entitled Remember the Maine: How America Responded to the Sinking of the USS Maine, analyzed the role of Catholicsm in the American public’s reaction to the sinking of the USS Maine, one of the catalysts for the Spanish-American war. “I didn’t know that I was going to focus on the religious perspective,” Vietor said. “Scrolling through [and] reading some of the papers [in the library] led me to… what I thought was the biggest influencer, which was religion.”

Xi researched the atomic bomb for her HIS430 paper The Atomic Bomb: A Question of How, Not If. Xi explored the events leading up to the creation of the bomb and the debates President Harry Truman’s cabinet had before the decision to use the atomic bomb in warfare. After extensive research, Xi reached the conclusion that there wasn’t a question if America was going to use the bomb on Japan, it was more of how they were going to use it on Japan: “Ultimately it was decided that the atomic bomb would be used against Japan without prior warning and as soon as possible,” Xi said.

Gannon’s HIS430 paper, Saddam Hussein: How the US Created its Own Worst Enemy,  covered Saddam Hussein and his drastic change from one of America’s allies and financial beneficiaries to one of America’s greatest enemies. Gannon wanted to write about “something that…highlighted America’s sometimes misguided foreign policy when dealing with authoritarian regimes.”

In his HIS420 paper Jazz and Duke Ellington: The Innovation of Music a Key to Racial Unity, Tan explored the ties between jazz and growing widespread acceptance of Black culture through the lens of Duke Ellington. “I do focus on Duke Ellington in terms of his rise to popularity, and how that promoted the integration of clubs in Harlem and of radio shows,” Tan said. In his research process, he noted an interesting shift in the way jazz was portrayed nationwide. “By reading periodicals in the Boston Globe and New York Times, I was able to study the change in the perception of jazz. I was able to use these articles to document a shift from jazz growing from being perceived as inferior compared to classical to being well respected,” he said. 

Russell-Delano wrote his HIS430 paper Legacy of Black Empowerment: The Harlem Renaissance about Manhattan’s renaissance of Black culture and how the Harlem renaissance propelled the social and economic advancement of Black citizens through art. “The goal was to highlight the unseen triumph of the Harlem Renaissance,” he said. “It was an in-depth view of the Black psyche, and how the Harlem Renaissance helped it to evolve within America.” Osiris reviewed pieces by prominent Black artists such as James Weldon Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston, and how their works affected the development of social justice.

Finn’s HIS420 paper, entitled Cigarettes As A Civil Right: Big Tobacco’s Systematic Exploitation of African Americans and the Civil Rights Movement From 1943-1970, covered the influence of cigarette companies in the Civil Rights movement. While working in a lab, Finn read a paper that discussed how Black patients, in general, have the highest rate of morbidity from tobacco related diseases. She found this “really disturbing and… was wondering why there wasn’t… a larger scale rejection of tobacco, especially because tobacco in the early days of the U.S. and the colonies was… so intimately related to racially based slavery.” 

At the center of Mims’s HIS430 paper Guilty Until Proven Innocent: How Police, Prosecutors, and Press Sent Five Innocent Boys to Prison is the Central Park 5, a group of boys who were wrongfully convicted of a sexual assault accusation. He was inspired by Ava DuVernay’s Netflix documentary When They See Us, and chose to highlight the legal handling of the case, which serves as a reminder of America’s racially prejudiced criminal justice system. Mims described his surprise at “how the police and the prosecutors were able to manipulate the boys into their confessions… and that was something I didn’t completely understand until I did in-depth research.” 

In order to evidence for her HIS430 paper Phyllis Schlafly and the Army of Housewives: How the Equal Rights Amendment Was Stopped, Coble said she watched “a lot of [historical] morning shows, which is kind of cool because [she] could just sit back and watch [Schlafly] do her thing.” She wrote about Phyllis Schalfly, a white conservative activist who worked to block the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, a bill that would have made it unconstitutional to discriminate based on sex. Coble describes the difficult process of having to understand and research a movement so contrary to her own beliefs. “It was interesting to do research on someone that I don’t agree with, but then be able to recognize how she succeeded,” Coble said.

Feigenberg wrote HIS430 paper The 2008 Financial Crisis: Forty Acres, A Mule, and $150,000 in Debt on the consequences of Wall Street actions on everyday lives. Targeting the causes of the crisis and the goals that led up to the crisis, Feigenberg ended up focusing on the history of home ownership in America. “A lot of lending companies were giving loans to people who didn’t necessarily qualify for them,” Feigenburg said. “[It] was a part of a government initiative to make home ownership more equitable…[but] that kind of effort ended up backfiring and actually made that disparity worse. There were a lot of people in disadvantaged communities getting more houses, [but] they couldn’t really afford the loans. So when they actually had to pay the bills, they couldn’t, and it all came apart.”

This year’s Negley Awards recognize a wide scope of topics and interests among the eleven winners. Mims offered his advice to future writers of the 333:  “Choose something you love, and everything else will fall into place.”