A Brown County high school student will compete against students from across the U.S. and the world at National History Day’s national contest in June.
Senior Genevieve Laguna placed second in the state for National History Day, qualifying for nationals with her history project addressing the Green Feather Movement of the 1950s at Indiana University.
This will be Laguna’s second time attending the national contest. The first time was two years ago, but she didn’t place.
“It is super exciting because I haven't been back to DC since that time, and I love presenting,” Laguna said. “I love getting to talk about this project. So it's just exciting in all the different ways.”
National’s will be held from June 14 though June 18 at the University of Maryland College Park. There will be students from the U.S., Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Department of Defense Schools in the Atlantic and international schools in China and Korea.
National History Day is a competition in which students from fourth to 12th grade choose a topic that relates to the theme for that year. This year’s theme was revolution, reaction and reform in history.
Then the students conduct research to be able to assemble and present their findings in a paper, exhibit, performance, documentary or website. Students can compete as a group or individually. There is a regional contest, a state contest and a national contest.
Laguna’s project on the Green Feather Movement is a 10-minute video. It consists of photos and newspaper clippings that she narrates.
“So it basically covered the context, you know, what is McCarthyism? What was the Cold War?” Laguna said. “And then I went into the details of the Green Feather Movement, how it started, how it spread. And then I ended with the modern-day impacts.”
She said the movement was a student protest starting in 1954 at IU. A woman on the Indiana Textbook Commission wanted to ban Robin Hood in state textbooks because she thought it was communist propaganda to celebrate the robbing from the rich and giving to the poor.
“This movement started in protest to that originally, but grew into something much larger, in an anti-McCarthy, pro free speech, anti-book banning movement that would start at IU and eventually spread to universities and colleges across the nation,” she said.
Laguna said she started her research in July and by January started recording her narration for the video. For her, regionals was in February.
“There's a couple months where it's just purely research, finding all your secondary sources, finding all your primary sources, making that timeline and putting it all together,” Laguna said. "And after that, you have to take that timeline and put it all into a script. And so that took a couple months.”
Laguna got the idea for the Green Feather Movement when she and Emily Lewellen, her social studies teacher and National History Day coordinator, attended the Young People’s Continental Congress in July. Several guest speakers discussed student free speech and campus protests.
“So we looked up student free speech cases at IU, and the Green Feather Movement came up,” Laguna said. “And in general, I'm very interested in Cold War era history. Because it took place during the McCarthy era, it was just very interesting to me, as far as what the Green Feather Movement is.”
Lewellen has worked with Laguna for a few years. She said as National History Day coordinator she edits Laguna’s script and gives feedback. She has also helped Laguna research sources.
Lewellen said it’s special that Laguna gets to go to the national contest twice. She said a lot of students make it to nationals only once.
“It's absolutely amazing. I'm not surprised in the least, because she deserves it,” Lewellen said. “She had a really quality project, and I'm glad the judges saw that whenever she was at the contest.”
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Laguna said understanding the Green Feather Movement can help with understanding why IU’s student protests take place in the way they do today.
“It was, in a way, pivotal, not in that it had a super large impact (and) everybody knows about it, but in that it came at the beginning of the 1950s which was an era where students didn't really speak out,” Laguna said. “They were known as an almost silent generation of students.”
The Green Feather Movement at IU still exists, but it has never been an officially recognized student group at IU.
Laguna started to participate in National History Day in the fifth grade and will be attending Harvard University in the fall to study history and government.
“Doing these projects for so long has definitely informed my choice to major in history. It's really helped me understand that it is something that I love researching,” Laguna said.
