Students at St. Domitilla School visited ancient Rome and Egypt, Medieval times, the Renaissance, the Russian Revolution, the space age and the 1960s during a Thursday open house marking Catholic Schools Week.

Seventh and eighth-graders, posing as costumed time-travelers, manned booths complete with replicas of period artifacts, timelines, pictures, maps and research papers. Students began working on the project last fall, said teachers Susan Weber and Robert Maas.

The whole idea behind the Era Fair was to have students spotlight "times past that have affected our lives today one way or another," Weber explained.

Robert Bavone, an eighth-grader, got the idea for his project on the Russian Revolution after reading George Orwell's "Animal Farm," an allegory of the Bolshevik takeover and how "the Communists lied to people to get them to follow them."

Alex Vessey, an eighth-grader, portrayed George Washington who led the American Revolution to victory by being able to pull surprises, like crossing the Delaware when the British least expected it.

"That's something all of us could learn from," Vessey said.

Kalyn Johnson, an eighth-grader, dressed as a Union Army officer as he explained his Civil War display, showed his own ability to think fast when asked what he was doing with a poster offering a $50 reward for the capture of "war criminal" Abe Lincoln.

"I took it off a Confederate prisoner," he said.

Michael Lestina, an eighth-grader, said he decided to portray a frontiersman in a coonskin cap.

"What really interested me was that the size of the United States almost tripled during that short period of time," he said.

Eddie Jacobo, an eighth-grader, said he got interested in the Renaissance not only because of artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, as well as "warrior Pope" Julius II, but the fact that "they ate a lot of different things and had the Black Death which wiped out half the population of Europe.

For Alexus Hayes, an eighth-grader, the most fascinating personality of Medieval times was Joan of Arc.

"(She was) one of the most important people of that era. She stood up to people when few women did," Hayes said. "They burned her."

Sydney Jackson, seventh-grader, said she decided to focus on ancient Rome at least partly because of her fascination with the architecture. Jackson said she wouldn't have wanted to live during the time she researched.

"If they were having battles, your farm might be burned down and you might not be able to get it back. And you'd be poor the rest of your life," she said.

Nor would Mayan princess Xochilt Lopes or Aztec warrior Brian Harvey have wanted to live in pre-Columbian times.

"They'd build pyramids and sacrifice people for no reason, just to feed the gods," said Lopez. "They ate dogs and tadpoles besides tamales," said Harvey, adding he was very fascinated by Aztec sports.

In one Aztec game, "they had to throw this big eight-by-10-pound ball into a stone ring," Harvey said.

The losers in Aztec athletic competition were sometimes sacrificed to the gods.

"There were some pretty high bettings in those games," Harvey said.

The Industrial Revolution also had its winners and losers, said Anthony Tapia, who portrayed a child laborer. Tapia's character started working in a factory at age six and typically worked 18 hours a day.

"They passed a law saying kids could only work 56 hours a week and eventually could only work half-a-day," Tapia said.

Michelle Burcihea, an eighth-grader, said she decided to showcase Victorian times, because she was fascinated by the way they dressed and all the guidelines about how people act, talk and walk.

Nina Delgado, an eighth-grader, explained she "likes how they had a lot of poetry and theater. She said she had a fascination with the way "Good Queen Bess" dealt with the not-so-loyal opposition.

"They'd have their bowels pulled out or might be dispatched by an axe-wielding headsman who could sometimes take two or three strokes to get the job done," Delgado, queen for the day, said.

Asked if she'd like to have lived back then, Delgado -- like a lot of her classmates -- said "not so much."

"She just likes to dress up like a queen," Weber laughed.

Indeed, most of the younger girls were captivated by the princesses. While the boys' favorite was classmate Tyler Caldwell, who made his own faux-fur costume, and replica Norse longboat that according to Caldwell's map plied trade routes as far south as Sicily and as far east as the Ukraine when they weren't spreading terror along the British and Irish coastlines.

"I love the Vikings. I like how they were. They looked pretty cool," he said.

And it was a way to get a little more balance in their story, he said. "Vikings always had a bad reputation."

Social science teacher Maas, himself a Revolutionary War buff, said that's what the Era Fair was all about.

"If they get interested enough to want to find out about things like the money or flags people used, we've done our job as teachers. We've gotten them to want to find out something on their own," Maas said.

Others students who participated were Matthew Knoll: Vietnam War, Darian James: Cold War, Nicholas Connors: Great Depression, Brandon Bacerra: Roaring 20's, Alonzo Houston: Aviation Era, Victoria Malagon: 80's.