A trip to our state archives

My son and I had a fascinating morning at the North Carolina State Archives Friday. He was there to do research for his National History Day project on World War I. This was a new experience for us both and we loved digging through the primary sources to be found there.

First you have to search through a finding aid. We looked through a volume on their military collections and a volume on private collections. Our first selection was a private collection of a college professor, Dr. Daniel Hill. It was mostly letters. As we read through, we began to form a picture of parts of this man's life. It turned out that the letters relating to WWI were about his son who was initially rejected because of his physical size. As we continued to dig further, we saw the trail of his father writing to people he knew and persons of influence to find a place for his son in the war effort. It did not lead to information pertinent to my son's project, but we certainly enjoyed the discoveries we made.

We did eventually find several items that he wanted photocopied or scanned including a booklet on the specific activities of two units in the war and two aerial maps of France. He will need to turn to the internet to look for other primary resources for his project but I look forward to future trips to the archive.

National History Day - Get Involved!

I just learned about a drive to get students involved in real history study disguised as a contest. The tagline at National History Day reads It's Not just a Day, It's an Experience! In this event, the contest is downplayed in favor of the process and the learning which suits me just fine.

The initial information came through a local homeschool list and I immediately got excited about it. I have bribed my history loving son into doing a project by promising it would also count for part of his english credit this year since there is a 500 word process paper involved. Advanced homeschool mom tactics in action.

My son's project will naturally include some aspect of military history which won't be difficult to fit into this year's theme of Conflict and Compromise in History. He is already scheming to use this as an excuse to build a diorama of trench warfare in WWI.

You can get involved as a student, a parent or a teacher so check it out! It is open to all students, public, private or homeschooled, in grades 6-12. You can get more information from your state coordinator. Projects can be started by teams or individuals and the final presentation can be in a variety of forms as shown in this introductory video.