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Houghton, MI, Saturday 20 Feb, 2016 — The public is invited to Michigan History Day’s District 1 competition held at the Memorial Union Bldg. at Michigan Tech, Saturday, 20 February 2016 from 9am to 1pm.
Five secondary schools from the western UP will be sending nearly 100 of their top students with more than 40 History Day projects to Michigan Tech for a district competition. The top entries in each category — exhibits, documentaries, websites, papers, and performances — are offered the chance to represent District 1 at the State competition in April. Winning entries will be displayed in May at the Carnegie Museum in Houghton.
National History Day is a competition for middle and high school students who develop historical research projects based on an annual theme that highlight people, events, and ideas in history. This year’s national theme is “Exploration, Encounter, Exchange in History.” This year there are projects about local, state, national, and even world history. Michigan History Day is sponsored and coordinated by the Historical Society of Michigan, which coordinates 13 state districts. Each school in the district has initial competitions and sends up to three entries (individual or group) in each category to a district competition, which then sends on top projects in each category to state finals in May. The top two from each category at the state finals will represent Michigan at the National History Day Contest in June in Washington, DC.
ABOUT MHD-district 1: Assistant Professors Steven Walton and Jonathan Robins, both historians in the Dept. of Social Sciences, and Senior Archivist Lindsay Hiltunen of the Michigan Tech Archives are the coordinators for Michigan District 1 (Houghton, Keweenaw, Baraga, Ontonagan, Iron and Gogebic counties). The Department of Social Sciences offers a B.A. degree in history with particular strength in industrial and environmental history and archaeology. The Michigan Tech Archives holds unparalleled historical resources on the Copper Country and its mining history. Michigan Tech has been hosting the district conception each February or early March for nearly a decade.
About National History Day: NHD is a non-profit education organization in College Park, MD. Established in 1974, NHD offers year-long academic programs that engage over half a million middle- and high-school students around the world annually in conducting original research on historical topics of interest. These research-based projects are entered into contests at the local and affiliate levels, where the top student projects have the opportunity to advance to the National Contest at the University of Maryland at College Park. NHD also seeks to improve the quality of history education by providing professional development opportunities and curriculum materials for educators. NHD is sponsored in part by Kenneth E. Behring, Patricia Behring, HISTORY®, Jostens, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Park Service, Southwest Airlines, the Joe Weider Foundation, and the WEM 2000 Foundation of the Dorsey & Whitney Foundation.
For more information, visit nhd.org.
