Students at the Idaho History Day competition looked to the past to discover their futures.

Why does history matter to teens today?

"It can tell us how we can prevent things from repeating, like wars and economic crises like we have now," said Cameron Harrison, a 10th-grader at Idaho Arts Charter School in Nampa. "It just tells who we are and how our future will be."

"We need to know the mistakes we've made in the past in order to correct the future," said Reyada Atanasio, an eighth-grader at Boise's Riverstone International School.

History mattered a lot Friday to the 295 elementary, middle and high school students from across the state who gathered at the College of Idaho in Caldwell to demonstrate what they've learned about their world through essays, displays, documentaries and interviews with judges.

Facts and faces leapt from the exhibits. Some featured sound effects, from the familiar '50s theme song wafting from a Lucille Ball tribute to the bursts of recorded gunfire that drew passersby's attention to the Battle of Stalingrad.

Many of the students followed their fascination with human rights struggles and the people and movements who have foisted intolerance and inhumanity on the world. Several displays studied Hitler and other Nazis.

Riverstone's Atanasio focused on a lesser-known figure, an American who helped lay the ideological foundation for the Holocaust. Her topic: "Charles Davenport and the American Eugenics Movement."

Eugenics, she said, sought to improve human evolution through selective breeding and forced sterilization and/or institutionalization of those deemed unsuitable, such as epileptics, criminals and the "feeble-minded." Twenty-three states, including Idaho, had eugenics programs, she said, but the movement lost its allure after Hitler's master-race delusions cast cold light on such thinking.

Another Riverstone eighth-grader, Elena Snow, researched another little-known name and his role in shaping international law against genocide.

Raphael Lemkin, Snow said, "actually coined the word genocide. I was really surprised people didn't know who he was."

Idaho Arts' Harrison chose a different type of hero, much better known but perhaps less likely to be categorized under history.

Harrison erected a colorful display to "Stan Lee - A Living Legend." Surrounded by samples of Lee's work from Spider-Man to the X-Men (Harrison's favorites), the 10th-grader noted that the comics master has a serious role in history.

"He gave us heroes we can look up to," he said.

Kristin Rodine: 377-6447