New exhibit to open at Wright Brothers National Memorial today

In an effort to celebrate the centennial of the Wright brothers' flights during 1903-1908, seven graduate students and their professor will share their findings with the public today.

This semester, Larry Tise, Wilbur & Orville Wright distinguished professor of history, has focused his documentary editing and public history course on studying the Wright brothers' 1908 flights.

"The Wright brothers are fairly important to North Carolina; they've been on the license plate and they went onto the quarter for North Carolina. Everyone knows the 1903 story, but hardly anyone knows the 1908 story," Tise said.

"Even though the Wright brothers weren't from North Carolina, I'm glad they chose our state to be first in flight," said Cierra Craig, a junior who expressed interest in visiting the exhibit.

The information that Tise and his students gathered will be featured in a "Know Your Park" program that will open for public viewing at the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kill Devil Hills today.

The exhibit, "Seven Days in May: The Secret Flights of the Wright Brothers," will begin with a presentation at 7 p.m. in the Pavilion of the Wright Memorial Visitor Center Museum.

The exhibit displays 22 photomurals portraying 18 flights that the Wright brothers took in 1908 and is expected to run through December.

"We studied a map of the 1908 flights, which had never been deciphered. It was just like a doodle sketch map by Orville Wright, and the students deciphered the map so that we could do an overlay of the numbers and angles of that map," Tise said.

Tise and his students took a field trip to the site of the 1908 flights to make sense of major points on the map, which was written in a code created by the Wright brothers.

"I feel like this is a map that I've seen a thousand times and always said, 'Someday I'll figure that map out,' and fortunately the students took the time and interest to figure it out," Tise said.

"The second thing we studied was a table that has just been discovered at Kitty Hawk that is from the Wright brothers' 1902-1903 camp," Tise said.

"This class is about documentary editing, but in this class we consider three-dimensional objects as documents. The brothers clearly made it on site, which is what is so interesting."

Tise's students were required to complete four main tasks this semester. They learned how to decipher and interpret documents, helped to construct a Web site (worldaloft.org, which went online yesterday and houses the students projects and research), gave presentations on components of the Wright brothers' story and prepared for the Wright Brothers National Memorial exhibit.

The class filled in many components on the Web site and enhanced it to improve its ease of use, Tise said.

"I feel it represents North Carolina as a state where the unthinkable becomes reality, where if you believe that you can do something, it can be accomplished," said Nastassia Julian, apparel merchandising major.

"This seems to have been one of the most interesting exploratory courses my students have taken," Tise said.

This writer may be contacted at news@theeastcarolinian.com.