Over the past six months, Fifth Former Daniel Khan and Fourth Former Edward Cheung have toiled away at their research and video presentation for National History Day. Their teamwork first culminated at the Bucks County regional competition and recently at the state-level competition at the University of Scranton, both of which granted the pair first-place commendations.
Initiated in 1974, National History Day gives middle and high school students the opportunity for in-depth historical research. Each round of competition has a unique theme; this year’s theme is “Revolution, Reaction, Reform in History”.
Serving as their advisor, upper school history teacher Mr. Bhelly Bagbonon guided them through the different angles of research. He noted how his previous experience with National History Day proved helpful in providing steady assistance.
“I’ve had experience working with National History Day in my previous institution, and with students from local public schools here on the Main Line, so I’ve familiarized myself with the rubric and some of the requirements,” Mr. Bagbonon said. “I was able to help these two boys—Daniel and Edward—with ideating and thinking about how they wanted to present their research.”
Their project, “Asphalt Genesis: The Hidden Cost under the Forced Revolution of America’s Roads,” chronicles the revolution of the American street from mixed-use development to car-dependency with respect to the influence of the automobile industry.
As part of their project, the team uncovered archival documents, ranging from census data with car registration statistics to 1924 conferences on street and highway safety. Conducting such in-depth research proved difficult.
“The internet’s a big place, and we’re trying to find very specific, very niche documents,” Khan said. “To do something as in-depth and as high quality as us, to be able to make it to nationals, is time-consuming, and it’s really frustrating.”
The team used every source of information they could find, including archival documents from the Philadelphia Archives and the Detroit Collection, along with an interview, allowing for words beyond the page.
“At first it was boring, but as you get into finding all these cool documents and when you interview people, it’s less about researching and more about being able to tell a story, and a factual story at that.”
Daniel Khan ’27
“It was an elderly woman named Phyllis Ewing, whose dad was a mechanic. She was a witness to our topic, the revolution of roads and automobiles in our modern society,” Cheung said.
Khan emphasized his own growth in mindset over the course of research.
“At first it was boring, but as you get into finding all these cool documents and when you interview people, it’s less about researching and more about being able to tell a story, and a factual story at that,” Khan said.
Mr. Bagbonon also grew more interested in the topic.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about cars and pedestrians,” he said. “Every time I walk past the street, and I see the little white guy on the sign, I think, ‘Whoa, am I really safe? Who really runs the road? Is it the pedestrian, or is it the vehicle?’”
National History Day provided a unique opportunity for the pair to put their in-class skills to real-world historical use.
“It’s an outlet for young people to test their journalism skills, to test their research skills, to test their ethnographic skills of interviewing other people, and their anthropological skills. It’s really inspiring, as a teacher, and as a member of the community, to leave no stone unturned, to look underneath questions that we oftentimes just glaze over,” Mr. Bagbonon said.
For Khan, however, the unique aspects of National History Day came not in the process itself, but in the atmosphere of the competition.
“What sets National History Day apart is that everybody’s passionate. Everybody wants to do the work, and everybody enjoys seeing it all come together for the competition and potentially getting rewarded for it,” he said.
That supportive and joyful atmosphere allowed the team to create a project truly refined and special. Upper school physics teacher Mr. Jamison Maley served as the teacher chaperone for both levels of competition, providing encouragement and, occasionally, offering a different perspective on aspects of their projects.
“[Their project] was quite comprehensive and offered a very nuanced look at the impact of the automobile on our lives. The history was impeccably researched, while on the more technical side of things, the production of the video was equally impressive,” Mr. Maley said. “It became abundantly clear that what Edward and Daniel created was heads and shoulders above the competition.”
To assist with part of the process at state-level competition, Mr. Maley worked with Khan and Cheung, asking practice questions similar to what the judges would ask them during the panel.
“I would just play devil’s advocate sometimes, or I’d try to riff or improvise off some of the questions they were already asking each other, offering secondary questions in that capacity,” Mr. Maley said.
Despite their preparation, the team faced uniquely challenging questions, many of which they had not accounted for.
“A lot of the questions we’d been asking were simply just fact-checking with research, like ‘What year was this founded?’” Cheung said. “The questions that they asked were a lot more broad… And these questions were actually quite difficult—definitely a step up from districts. ‘How do your video’s topics speak to the virtues of the life of America?’… That was a pretty difficult question to answer.”
Nevertheless, the duo will advance to the national competition. They are worried about heightened competition, which includes foreign English grammar schools, but are hopeful to present their research at even higher levels.
Cheung said, “We have teams from China, teams from Singapore, teams from South Korea that will be the best from all these nations. Last year, it was a South Korean team that won…We need to ensure that our thesis is bulletproof and that our evidence buttresses our thesis.”
Khan recalled a motto that helped carry them through the research process, and that will prove especially helpful when progressing to the national level.
““When it’s one in the morning in your research, and you’re looking at a document from Herbert Hoover talking about intersection widths, you’re just wondering what you’re doing with your life, but if you want to win, that’s the work it takes.”
Daniel Khan ’27
“We followed one very simple rule: simply to be honest with ourselves. A lot of the time, kids will look at a paragraph and they’ll say, ‘Okay, this is good,’ but what Edward and I did is this: whenever there’s even a very slight, minor issue that we thought would bring any sort of attention—it could be as simple as an opacity being set 2% higher—we wrote it down and we fixed it,” he said.
Both members emphasized the importance of their determination and precision to detail.
“When it’s one in the morning in your research, and you’re looking at a document from Herbert Hoover talking about intersection widths, you’re just wondering what you’re doing with your life, but if you want to win, that’s the work it takes. That’s what needs to be done,” Khan said.
Khan’s relentless work ethic toward National History Day propelled Cheung to put in the same intense work, providing him with a reason and a way to balance his busy schedule.
“It’s not going to affect the transcript. So the mindset almost becomes, ‘Why should I work on this? Why am I spending time with this?’ It almost becomes your last priority,” Cheung said. “But in the wake of the competition, seeing how much work Daniel is putting in, I thought, ‘I want to match that.’”
Everyone involved came away from the competition with a renewed sense of the importance of National History Day in encouraging historical learning and of the importance of history itself.
Mr. Maley emphasized the importance of history in the understanding of science.
“To cultivate a genuine love of science, you must also be a student of history,” he said. “The historical timeline of cultural and intellectual movements, landmark equations, and technology provides essential context for understanding seismic discoveries in the timeline of science. You can’t divorce history from science and fully appreciate science.”
Khan said, “History answers why everything is the way it is in life. And I think people need to understand the fact that history is more than studying the past. It’s studying how different patterns in the past lead to the things we have in the present, and it creates a very good indicator for what things may happen in the future.”
Mr. Bagbonon said, “I’ll borrow the line of Mark Twain: ‘history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes’… National History Day brought [road construction] to the surface, and I think these boys took the opportunity, and they’re scoring a touchdown with it.”
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