Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of stories about Warsaw Community Schools students who advanced to National History Day national competition June 9-13 at the University of Maryland’s campus in College Park, Md.
For her return to the national contest of National History Day this year, Warsaw Community High School freshman Abby Rahn wrote a paper on William Wilberforce and the abolition of the slave trade in Great Britain.
Her 2018 project was on Alexander Hamilton and his plan to create a national bank.
NHD offers year-long academic programs that engage over half a million middle- and high-school students around the world annually in conducting original research on historical topics of interest. The largest NHD program is the NHD Contest that encourages more than half a million students around the world to conduct historical research on a topic of their choice. Students enter these projects at the local and state levels, with top students advancing to the national contest at the University of Maryland. The theme for this year’s competition is “Triumph and Tragedy in History.”
Rahn explained that Wilberforce (1759-1833) “was a member of Parliament for Hull and Yorkshire for a very long time. He started out in a kind-of-religious family, but they didn’t want to be super-religious, but his extended family had a big influence on him. When he was an adult he became a Christian and he wanted to do something for England, just make it a greater country, so he decided to fight against the slave trade.”
She said it took about 20 years to pass a bill that eradicated it in Great Britain.
“After that, he tried to fight for emancipation. He actually died like two days after they finally freed all the slaves in Great Britain,” Rahn said.
She said she really liked his story and likes to know why people would support slavery, not just in the U.S. but other countries as well.
“I just decided to look into that and what they had to do in order to eradicate it in other countries,” she said.
In doing her research on him, she said if she wanted to look up something very specific it was a bit challenging. She did find a lot of “broader” information, and Wilberforce also wrote “a lot” in his lifetime.
“So some of the sources I have are a book he wrote, his letters to his family and to the prime minister during his time. I found parliamentary debates, a list of what everybody said. So that stuff was easy, it was just trying to figure out what was happening because they were so large,” she said.
The biggest thing she learned from her project was not to give up.
“If you really believe something is wrong, and you’re trying to fight against it, and you feel like everything is against you, you can do it. It may take 20 years, but there is proof that it happened to other people and you can do anything if you work really hard,” Rahn said.
To help with her expenses to the national contest, her father has set up a GoFundMe page. It can be found under “Send Abby to Nationals” and as of Saturday has raised $510 of the $770 goal.
