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Two Students Win $2,500 For History Essays

Winners Of "What History Means To Me Contest" Announced, Essays To Be Published

New York, NY - November 5, 2002 - American Heritage, the nation's leading history magazine, and educational publisher Pearson Prentice Hall School awarded two grand prizes in their 2002 What History Means to Me Essay Contest-a $2,500 cash award for:

• Amber Kunkel, a seventh-grader from George H. Moody Middle School in Richmond, Va.;
• and Arye Emert, a twelfth-grader from West Windsor-Plainsboro HS in Princeton Junction, N.J.

American Heritage will feature Kunkel's and Emert's essays in its November/December 2002 issue. The essays will also be posted on Pearson Prentice Hall's website, www.phschool.com (Essays are included on following pages.) American Heritage Editor Richard Show and Prentice Hall School President Rick Culp presented the awards.

"[My essay] started as a research paper and I started thinking that history isn't black or white, good or bad," Amber Kunkel said about her essay. "History is about human behavior and about what that behavior means to you…and what inspires you."

"There's so much we don't know about history. It's a road away from home," Arye Emert said.

Similar to President Bush's recently announced initiatives to promote civic involvement and American history, the History contest awards students for their exploration and explanation of history in a 500-750 word essay. This is the fourth year that American Heritage and Prentice Hall School have sponsored the contest. More than 1,000 middle and high school students from across the country submitted their essays.

"Sixth graders never win this contest. Usually the eighth graders win because they write with more depth," Glenda Hite, Amber's sponsoring teacher, said. "But Amber talked about history as not always good and bad-it's in between. That's mature for a sixth grader." Hite says that her students can't wait for the 2003 contest.

"I have classes full of exceptional students and Arye writing is head-and-shoulders above the rest," Leslie Levin, Arye's sponsoring teacher, said. "She writes in a very adult manner. She's not verbose and she gets right to the heart of the issue."

Ten students received honorable mentions in the contest; excerpts from their essays will also appear in American Heritage. They include: Minov Arjamand of Setauket, N.Y.; Colin Brooks of Mt. Lebanon, Penn.; Ryan Bullock of Long Beach, Mass.; Alex Lemy of Cincinnati, Ohio; Hana Mamont of Cypress, Calif.; Aletheia Miyake of Anaheim, Calif.; Chris Shuptrine of Lynchburg, Va.; Sarah Thomas of Richmond, Va.; Marissa Troiano of Rosenberg, Texas; and Daniel Yano of Virginia Beach, Va.

Teachers that sponsored the grand prize-winning and honorable mention students will receive $3,000 worth of classroom resources from Pearson Prentice Hall. Information for teachers and students on 2003's What History Means to Me contest is available at www.phschool.com or (800) 848-9500.

About American Heritage

Published eight times a year, American Heritage® explores the past to illuminate the present. Founded in 1954, it is among the industry's most enduring success stories. Since its acquisition by Forbes Inc. in 1986, the magazine's circulation has more than doubled and advertising pages have quintupled. American Heritage is also known for its classic illustrated histories.

About Pearson Prentice Hall School

Pearson Prentice Hall School, a division of Pearson Education, is a leader in the U.S. secondary education market, providing educators with more than 100 programs in every medium in social studies, language arts, mathematics, science and the foreign languages for diverse student populations in grades 6-12. Pearson Education is part of Pearson (NYSE: PSO), the international media company. Visit www.phschool.com.

2002 Middle School Grand Prize-Winning Essay

Amber Kunkel, seventh-grader at George H. Moody Middle School in Richmond, Va.
Sponsoring teacher: Glenda Hite

History is a tangled web of stories, opinions, and mysteries. True facts are hidden by the mess found in the web. We are spiders, climbing around the web, searching for facts so that we may make our own opinions, yet only finding them drowning among everything else that has gotten tangled inside. Because of this, history used to be boring for me. The opinions that I found were not appealing to me and drew me away from it. Two things happened this year that completely changed my view of history. The first was September 11th. The second was my first research paper.

On September 11th, I ran home from the bus stop, anxious to hear what had happened. The seventh and eighth graders on my bus were discussing the plane crashes in whispers but refused to tell us sixth graders what had occurred. The sixth graders, like myself, had not been told about it at school, unlike the seventh and eighth graders. I caught a few words, such as "twin towers" and "plane," but could not see a connection When I finally got home I found my mom sitting on our front steps. When she told me what had happened, I reeled back in shock and disbelief. A fact had just flown out of my web and slapped me in the face. In the next few days, some of my web began to unravel. This was how Americans had felt after Pearl Harbor. Japanese children had felt the same way after the atomic bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I was feeling what Sudanese boys had felt while their village was being attacked-horrified, shocked, and terrified. September 11th gave me a chance to see these historic events through my own eyes, not another person's.

Later in the year, around December, I took on a project that would change a large portion of my web forever. The project was a research paper, and my topic was Charles Cornwallis. I entered the assignment very reluctantly. I knew that Cornwallis had surrendered to George Washington, at Yorktown, Virginia. My web told me that since he was British he must have been malicious and inhumane, as well as strongly in agreement with taxes and tyranny. However as I began to research him I found that my web had lied to me. I recall staring at my computer screen in disbelief after reading a particularly informative Web site. After a while, I began to see a connection between the two of us. Before researching Cornwallis, I had been seeing history in terms of black and white, good and bad. This paper forced me to recognize that life is not a Batman movie or a fairy tale. As I turned in my report, I could almost see my web start to slowly untangle itself.

The way I look at all of history, and at the whole world, changed as my web unraveled. I began to see deeper into every situation, every war, and every story. I have found that I can no longer see only good guys and bad guys. I no longer believe that someone is wicked because they believed in what my country sees as the wrong cause. When I expressed these feelings to my mother, she said that I was seeing in shades of gray. I prefer to call it color. From that perspective, this year has made my world a lot more colorful.

2002 High School Grand Prize-Winning Essay

Arye Emert, 12th-grader at West Windsor-Plainsboro High School in Princeton Junction, N.J.
Sponsoring teachers: Leslie Levin and Brian Welsh

The Sufis, whose religion is thousands of years old, describe a myth of a tradesman who twirls wool around a large spindle, working continuously. A moment's loss of concentration or lack of "awareness" will cause the strand of wool to break and the day's effort to be lost. The myth instructs us to be aware of our circumstances and accept our circumstances no matter how difficult. It is this awareness that allows us to navigate the shoals of our lives, but to achieve this awareness we must first understand who we are and where we come from. History teaches us this. Those of us who view history as dry facts upon a page forget that we are history, and that our lives are to be studied by future generations. Our thoughts, feelings, and experiences are the raw materials for future historians. The facts of our lives are important, but they are not the sum of history. The study of history develops over time, when hindsight provides the perspective w4 need to place our ideas within the context of the times. A living entity, history provides us with an awareness of the present through an understanding of the past. It is a guidepost to the future, uncovering the facts behind our existence while providing us with an understanding of the present.

My father owns a photograph of a very old woman, her face deeply wrinkled yet containing all the wisdom of the ages. "Grandpa's mima," he explained to me one day, "the matriarch." The photograph once hung in the Seward Park Library, on New York's Lower East Side, where my grandfather's mima, or great aunt, lived, and where she died at the age of one hundred. The library had given the photograph to my grandfather who in turn gave it to my father. The mima, as my grandfather called his aunt, had escaped the Nazis' rise to power, having realized that the Jewish people would soon be unwelcome in her native Germany. Relatives of hers, including her sisters, disagreed with my aunt's assessment of the situation. They felt she was overreacting. They and their families had lived in Germany for generations. Surely, they argued, we are as German as everyone else is. Besides, things cannot get much worse for us. They will certainly improve. Despite the ever tightening noose on Jewish rights, my aunt's family refused to accept the reality of the situation, and they paid too great a price for their trust. True awareness had escaped them. By the time they realized the danger, it was too late. Hitler closed off the escape routes, and my great aunt's sisters and so many others like them perished in the Holocaust. They had trusted too much in the goodness of man. History proved them wrong.

My father loves studying history, and he is rarely found without a book on ancient or modern warfare. Studying the photograph of my grandfather's great aunt, I asked my father about my grandfather's role in World War II. I knew he had landed on the shores of Normandy but little else. To my surprise, my father looked at me blankly. He could recite the battle sites of every war but knew little about his own father's part. Together we e-mailed my eighty year old grandfather, and he was happy to relate some of his experiences. He had landed on a Normandy beach three days after D-Day, June 6, 1944. As a mechanic, it was his official duty to make sure that the soldiers' vehicles were kept running. Unofficially, my grandfather was known as "the scrounger." If the men in his platoon needed anything, they would send him. He was expert at talking French farmers into contributing eggs to the war effort, for instance. That didn't surprise me, as my grandfather is very much a talker.

My grandfather was neither a general nor a fighter. His story was not the most dramatic of the war, but it was real and it belonged to my family. For what are we all but single points on the lines of our families' histories? History is important to me, to all of us, because without it our lifelines have no beginnings and no ends. History contains all that we are and will be, helping us to understand that what we must face today has probably, in some form or fashion, been faced before. History makes us aware of ourselves and the world around us, enabling us to accept what are sometimes difficult and painful truths.