Journey Through Hallowed Ground - High School Scholarship Winners for 2008

High School Scholarship Winners for 2008

Ride the Tide 2008—Video Competition

Winner, Alex Wilson

David McCullough and Alex Wilson

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VIDEO

Alex Wilson is the winner of the inaugural Ride the Tide 2008 original video contest, which explored the contribution of both historical and contemporary leaders along the Journey. This year, the historical text of Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough’s John Adams and 1776 were the centerpiece. The competition encouraged students to walk the ground and capture the stories of heritage sites—shining light, camera and action on this hallowed ground. Alex received a $1,000 cash prize and the exclusive opportunity to meet Mr. McCullough in person!

Extreme Journey High School Scholarship Winners

Emily Stuart
Rising 9th grader

Emily-winner Emily Stuart, a rising 9th grader, was one of two $1,000 academic scholarships awarded to 2008 Extreme participants. Emily’s initial reaction to the news was, “Wow! This means a better summer. I really wanted a challenge and I wanted to learn history by getting out and touching it.” With the Extreme Journey High School camp, that is exactly what she will do from June 22 to July 3rd as students leave their desks behind and travel to Where America Happened. Participants will venture along the 175 mile corridor from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to Charlottesville, Virginia while storming Harpers Ferry as one of John Brown’s raiders, lunching with re-enactor James Monroe, biking the Gettysburg Battlefield and examining peace keeping plans at Dodona Manor.

Emily already has a sense of the value of studying history to inform decisions today. Her essay and scrapbook entry focused on the contributions of a historical figure who was new to her, Clara Barton. She noted, “People can be influential…and I wish 2008 presidential candidates who are all saying that they are going to help us would look to leaders of the past who actually did it.”

Antarrah Crawley
Rising 10th grader

When Antarrah received word of his scholarship, his reaction was just as enthusiastic, but he expressed a different expectation for camp weeks. “This is great. I like to write and make movies and really use my artistic mind in the summer.” Fortunately, the program can meet his needs as well as rigorous field days along the Route 15 Corridor--which are followed by creative lab sessions where students produce original vodcasts, with an emphasis on original. Themes, music, photographs, video, sound and script are all student generated. In some cases, they capture the information while visiting the heritage sites with their iPods, and digital and video cameras. In other cases they are caught hovering in quiet places to think, write and edit. Their final product is a state of the art vodcast that explores the lessons of leadership learned along the Journey and how those lessons inform their decisions and apply to their contemporary world.

View vodcasts created by students in our middle school summer camp.

* Visit our website in October to see 2009 scholarship opportunities.

Extreme Journey HS
Anticipation built as paddles sliced through the cool waters of the Potomac. Instead of moving down the river in concentric circles, students cut a straight swath through the current to the bluff, Ball’s Bluff. Their mission: to shore up on the same bank that the Union troops treaded upon on the afternoon of October 21, 1861. Once docked, they loaded their backs with supplies and prepared for a march up the forbidding ridge to take the Confederates. . . by surprise.

This student simulation parallels the fateful Battle of Ball’s Bluff, an early and instructive skirmish in the Civil War, except howitzers and hard tack are replaced with iPods, watermelons, journals and water bottles. And desperate soldiers are now 32 curious high school students who have earned a place in the 2008 Extreme Journey High School program, co-sponsored by the Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership and the University of Virginia Summer Enrichment Program.

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