The students who delve into the past at Northfield Middle School have shown Earl Weinmann, time and again, that historians aren't just white-haired curmudgeons surrounded by dusty books.

Students at the school, where Weinmann teaches social science, have written a textbook on local history for third-graders. They have created a museum display to showcase the history of the town's old high school. And this fall, they released a book offering a fresh take on an event that has certainly become Northfield's greatest claim to fame: the failed 1876 bank robbery that sent Jesse James and his fellow gang members on the run.

For Weinmann, who oversaw the project, the book is proof positive "that middle-school students can make a meaningful contribution to history."

"Caught in the Storm" retells the story of the weeks-long manhunt from Northfield that led to the capture of several gang members, but it's no textbook. The students who wrote the book over four years made it a field guide, complete with maps and GPS coordinates, so readers could follow the outlaws' escape route through southern Minnesota.

The guide is the latest product of a longtime community outreach class that challenges a handful of Northfield eighth-graders each year to learn research and writing skills, then tackle a significant local history project. The students who wrote "Caught in the Storm" combed through books and old documents in an attempt to sort fact from fiction, and the result is a thoroughly researched history of the gang's pursuit, Weinmann said. But it's also a feat of teamwork, with 170 pages written by 26 authors who didn't assemble in the same room until they signed freshly printed copies this fall.

"It was almost like passing on the baton of research," said Weinmann, who said some students became so immersed in the project that they wrote detailed memos to their successors and helped recruit the next year's batch of historians.

The group of six students who worked on the book last year had the unenviable task of assembling all the raw material for the guide and making it sound as if it were written by one person. But the first group, back in the fall of 2004, had to chart a course for everyone who followed.

"We wanted to give them something that we thought was perfect," said Danyelle Fuhrmann, who is now a high school senior. The project involved a lot of late-night writing and a fair number of group debates about whose phrase or paragraph should go into the official draft, she said.

As highly as he regarded the students, Weinmann said he wasn't sure at first whether the book was too ambitious a project. But "once I saw them dig into it, I knew I was on the right track, and they've never disappointed me."

Sarah Lemagie • 952-882-9016