MARY ELLEN WRIGHT | Staff Writer Jul 28, 2019

When Taylor Barton first learned about pioneering 19th-century nurse Clara Barton, she wondered whether their common last name might not be just a coincidence.

“I’ve always been interested in the Red Cross and Clara Barton, because when I was younger I thought everyone with the last name Barton was related to me,” says Barton, a rising senior at Donegal High School.

From left, Ella Warburton, Morgan Creek, and Taylor Barton are three Donegal High School students who have found success with their National History Day documentaries. They’re photographed at the computers were they edited their films.

Although they’re not kin, Barton was able to use her interest in the Red Cross founder’s relief work after the Johnstown flood of 1889 to win two national history awards.

She’ll also get to meet a famous filmmaker.

Barton’s 10-minute documentary, “Dam! Better Call Clara!” won her a national second-place award at the National History Day competition last month in College Park, Maryland.

And it also earned her the notice of documentarian Ken Burns, famous for his PBS documentaries on such topics as the Civil War, jazz and baseball.

Barton was named one of six recipients of the new Next Generation Angels awards, created by Burns’ Better Angels Foundation to encourage a new group of young documentarians.

Barton will meet Burns in October, when she and the other top winners in the National History Day documentary category travel to Washington for three days of touring such institutions as the American Film Institute and the Library of Congress.

Barton wasn’t the only Donegal student to gain recognition with a National History Day documentary this year.

National museum

Ella Warburton and Morgan Creek, both of whom graduated earlier this year and will be attending Gettysburg College in the fall, had their National History Day film about the 1930s Scottsboro Boys case shown in a national venue.

Because Warburton and Creek’s documentary, “Lonesome Jailhouse Blues,” advanced to the national competition, they were able to submit their project to a film festival. Their film was screened last month in the Oprah Winfrey Theater of the National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington.

“It was amazing,” Creek says, seeing their film on a big screen “in a theater that shows real documentaries. I just felt so accomplished.”

So what explains the National History Day success of the Donegal High School students?

“I give all the credit to the students,” says Sara Frazier, Donegal library media specialist. “They picked their own topics that they’re passionate about, and then they run with it.”

Frazier and Susan Heydt, a gifted-education teacher at the school, co-teach the year-long National History Day class at Donegal.

“Once we get an idea of what they’re interested in, what they’re passionate about, we help guide them,” Frazier says.

“We’re not teaching content,” Heydt says. They’re teaching the students research techniques and, for those making documentaries, how to use sophisticated film editing software, she adds.

History day

Founded in 1974, National History Day is a nationwide history education program for middle and high school students. It has regional, state and national competition levels.

Students can create a documentary, website, performance or exhibit, or write a paper about their chosen topic.

This year’s National History Day theme was “Triumph and Tragedy.”

The Donegal students wove together extensive research, narration, historical images and video to tell their documentary stories.

Barton, who eventually plans to go to medical school, is especially interested in medical topics in history.

“Last year … I made a documentary about the great plague of London of 1665,” Barton says.

She originally was interested in finding out how the Red Cross dealt with the diseases that broke out in Johnstown after the devastating flood.

But she wound up concentrating on Barton’s work in providing housing, food and other services to those who’d lost everything.

For Warburton and Creek, the genesis of their project came in English class, during a discussion of the Ralph Ellison novel “Invisible Man.”

Their teacher told them about the Scottsboro Boys, a group of African American men who had been unjustly charged with raping two white women in Alabama in 1931.

Their story involves complex legal battles that took their case to the U..S. Supreme Court, but left many of the men in jail for years, subject to the harsh conditions of the Southern prison system of the time.

The students’ documentary follows the case through the courts, and details the support the defendants received from Communist and labor groups.

“Last year (for National History Day), I wrote a paper on Russian feminism during the Russian Revolution,” Creek says. “This year, I wanted to do something different.”

Warburton had the documentary skills, having entered a History Day film every year since seventh grade.

By Emily Younker eyounker@joplinglobe.com

In his second year participating in National History Day, Josef Schuller has earned a special honor — the privilege of being able to meet famed filmmaker Ken Burns.

“It’s really exciting,” said Schuller from his Joplin home last week. “Wow, we actually get to meet Ken Burns. What they call ‘the Ken Burns effect,’ I used some of that in my own documentary.”

Schuller, a student at South Middle School who was a third-place winner last month at National History Day, is among the first six winners nationwide of the Next Generation Angels Awards, a new honor that recognizes middle school and high school students for excellence in historical filmmaking.

The awards were launched earlier this year as the youth component of the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film, a new initiative to support professional filmmakers exploring themes in American history. They are made possible through the support of the Better Angels Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to education Americans about their history through documentary film.

“These burgeoning documentary filmmakers have addressed compelling lessons of history,” said Cathy Gorn, executive director of National History Day, in a statement. “We are grateful to Ken Burns and the Better Angels Society for celebrating our students’ success and working to encourage them to cultivate their skills as future filmmakers.”

Meeting Ken Burns

Schuller’s documentary is titled “The Bridge Over Funchilin Pass: The Only Option for Retreat.” Detailing the dramatic and daring trek by U.S. Marines from North Korea’s Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, the film won him first place in the region in the category of junior individual documentary, second place at the state competition and third place at the national contest.

“At nationals, I was just happy to get in the top 10,” he said. “We saw some of the other documentaries, and they were really good.”

Schuller and the other five awardees — from California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Singapore — will travel to Washington, D.C., for a three-day excursion this fall, courtesy of Hilton Hotels. They will receive tours, special screenings and behind-the-scenes access to film archives at the Library of Congress, American Film Institute and other cultural agencies.

They also will be recognized at a special ceremony and dinner by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, who has won 16 Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Burns’ documentaries include “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “Jazz,” “The Statue of Liberty” and “The Mayo Clinic: Faith, Hope, Science.”

“We are so proud to partner with these young historians, writers, scholars and thinkers,” Burns said in a statement. “I’ve long admired National History Day and have enjoyed attending these national events. It is a tremendous honor to now have a small part in recognizing the extraordinary work this organization does and to acknowledge how young people throughout the country are bringing a new understanding and depth to our historical consciousness.”

Learning ‘cool facts’

Schuller chose this year’s History Day topic after talking with his grandfather, Warren Turner, commander of Joplin’s American Legion Post 13. The theme of the 2019 competition was “Tragedy and Triumph in History.”

Turner had suggested his grandson look into the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, an important conflict in the Korean War that took place during the last months of 1950. Schuller researched the topic and decided to narrow it specifically to the U.S. military force’s retreat through the Funchilin Pass, a daring mission that required portable bridge sections to be dropped into the area by parachute.

He drew the background information from books and websites and scoured firsthand-account letters and images to use as primary sources. He chose to create a documentary because he was familiar with the technology and program needed for filmmaking.

Schuller said his favorite part of History Day, for which he begins preparing every August, is learning “cool facts” about his chosen topics. This year, for example, he was particularly interested to learn that the troops had only 1 inch of clearance on either side of their makeshift bridge as they crossed through the Funchilin Pass, and that the aircraft that dropped the bridge parts in the area were so new that their safety features hadn’t been added to the manual yet.

The National History Day competition draws more than 600,000 participating students worldwide in at least the school level, said Heather Van Otterloo, Schuller’s teacher and History Day adviser at South Middle School. Schuller placed third at the national level out of 103 documentaries in his category, she said.

Allison Bushong, center, stands with California delegates during a luncheon in the U.S. Capitol. Bushong won first place in her division at the 2019 National History Day competition for her documentary, “Triumph of Representation and Tragedy of Repercussion: Silent Gesture of 1968.” (Courtesy of Leslie Bushong)

For these Inland high school and middle school students, history is more than a school subject.

Ken Burns reaches into his front-right jeans pocket to retrieve a small, burnished silver heart, then a coin awarded to learning-disabled students who memorize The Gettysburg Address. Next he pulls out a button from the uniform of a soldier who landed at Normandy on D-Day and, finally, a Minié ball fired from a musket at Gettysburg.

The Emmy Award-winning documentarian travels every day with these four mementos, gifts from fans of his more than 30 films. They represent a tiny fraction of the tokens he has received — reminders of the impact his documentaries, from 1981’s Brooklyn Bridge to 2017’s The Vietnam War, have had on generations of viewers. “The hardest part is [carrying] the abutment to the Brooklyn Bridge,” jokes Dayton Duncan, his longtime collaborator.

For nearly four decades, Burns has been telling the story of America one topic at a time. For the past eight years, he has focused on country music, resulting in — simply and definitively named, like so many of his films — Country Music, a sprawling 16-and-a-half-hour, eight-part, $30 million budget film airing on PBS’ 350 member stations starting Sept. 15. Burns’ team interviewed over 100 people, including Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, Garth Brooks, Willie Nelson, Reba McEntire, Rhiannon Giddens and, in one of his last sit-downs, Merle Haggard. (Nearly 20 of Burns’ subjects have since died, making his plan to donate 175 hours of interviews and transcripts to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum all the more resonant.) [READ MORE]

“The three students from the University of Cambridge, wearing black suits and clutching sheaves of papers, stepped onto the wooden auditorium stage under the warm yellow lights. As members of a storied debate team, they had competed the world over but never in a place like this — a stripped-down hall in a maximum-security prison in Upstate New York that looms among the Catskill Mountains like a medieval castle.” [READ MORE]

Vince Gill was having some trouble with the teleprompter during the taping of Ken Burns’ all-star “Country Music: Live at the Ryman” concert in Nashville on Wednesday night.

“That’s why I didn’t go to college — I suck at reading,” he joked with characteristic self-deprecating humor after flubbing one of his lines. The show was taped for broadcast on PBS stations at a later date.

Fortunately, the Oklahoma native was in peak form doing everything else during an evening that celebrated a type of music that routinely reconnects with its roots and, as Burns put it, “has never been one style.” Throughout an evening that interspersed brief clips of Burns’ upcoming eight-part historical documentary Country Music — premiering September 15th on PBS — with live performances of songs discussed in the documentary, Gill frequently sat in the background with his Telecaster, guiding a band of session pros through tunes that touched on many different styles and eras of country sounds. [READ MORE]

Ken Burns was in his element Wednesday night at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium.

When the filmmaker took the stage at country music’s mother church, he was greeted with a standing ovation — from a room filled, clearly, with fans of American history, public television, and “Country Music.” [READ MORE]