The 2004 Iowa caucuses are garnering national headlines, but historically, caucuses have been a modest and low-key affair.

It was only in the past 30 years Iowa gained its “first in the nation” status and became the regular stomping grounds of all serious presidential candidates.

“The Iowa caucuses are unique because they’re the only opportunity for real people to have conversations with the candidates,” said Tina Hoffman, spokeswoman for the Iowa Caucus Project.

Iowa has held caucuses every two years since the early 19th century, before it was even a state. Iowa leaders chose to hold caucuses instead of primaries because of the active, grass-roots participation the caucus system embodies, said Peverill Squire, professor of political science at the University of Iowa.

Iowa briefly considered switching to a primary and actually held one in 1913 before returning to the caucuses in 1916.

From their beginnings until 1972, the caucuses were relatively obscure, serving mostly to discuss issues and build party platforms. The caucuses chose candidates to support, but these nominations were largely overlooked, as presidential candidates were usually chosen by party elites, Squire said.

The presidential election and surrounding events of 1968 changed the elites’ hold on the nomination process and vaulted Iowa to its “first in the nation” status.

In 1968, leading Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was assassinated at the California primary, sending the party into an uproar.

At the Democratic National Convention, amid violent protests by several student groups, the party selected Hubert H. Humphrey, who did not attend a single primary election, as their candidate against Republican Richard Nixon, said Steffen Schmidt, university professor of political science.

Humphrey’s controversial nomination led to reforms of the primary system, many of which were instigated by then-Iowa Sen. Harold E. Hughes, who served on a Democratic party committee to open the party to greater democracy.

“Hughes and the committee put reforms in place in the early ’70s that brought more people, including minorities and anti-Vietnam War activists, into the nomination process,” Schmidt said. “Iowa was the first place these early changes were tested.”

The rules put in place by Hughes and the committee put the power into the hands of regular voters who participated first in the primaries and caucuses, then in county, district, state and national conventions that followed throughout the spring and summer of an election year.

To accommodate this succession of gradually broadening conventions, primary and caucus dates had to be moved to January. In 1972, the first election year under the new rules, Iowa’s Democratic state convention was set for May 20, causing the caucuses to take place on Jan. 24. This made the Iowa Caucuses the first caucus or primary in the country, a spot it has held ever since. In 1976, Republicans moved their caucuses to take place on the same day as the Democrats.

Several factors make Iowa a good choice for the first candidate test in the nation.

“The state is a manageable size for candidates [to campaign in] ,and the voters are well-informed,” Hoffman said. “The population takes candidates based on issues, not television attack ads.”