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National History Day December Meeting

12/2/2024

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How to Make Your Project Complex

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Thesis and Theme

  • Incredibly important
    • “Roadmap” of your project
    • No more than 4 sentences
  • Essentially states what your project is and how it relates to this year’s theme in a COMPLEX manner:
    • Talk about Revolutions, Reactions, Reforms

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Historical Context

  • What was happening before and during the time period you are researching
  • Include lots of visual and written primary sources for exhibits, documentaries, websites, papers and etc.
  • Focus on how these events shaped your topic. It’s important to show why your project was so significant in a certain time period and why it’s a good fit with the theme

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Significance in History: Impacts

  • Analyzing the significance of your historical topic directly after the event and even today
  • Make sure to include and distinguish between short-term impacts and long-term consequences (legacy)
  • Talking about how current issues relate to your historical topic can show viewers why your topic is relevant and important to learn about

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School Competition

  • Fill out this form
  • We want to know which category you are going to be competing in!
  • Do it right now!
  • http://bit.ly/4pLNmEc

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School Competition

  • For all categories with 3 or more entries
  • We will send an email with all of the categories that will be in the competition
  • What we’re looking for: Substance and analysis
  • The judges won’t be big on notes or anything similar, we want what you’ve written
  • Thesis, context, analysis, and significance (we don’t need all 4 yet)
  • This is a low-stress competition, we just want what you’ve done so far!

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How to make projects?

  • Exhibits/Website:
    • Write your thesis, maybe divide your exhibit/website spatially into different components (making an outline is really helpful), maybe show the extent of your resources
  • Documentaries
    • Don’t need to show actual videos, just maybe a script or show your research and/or sources
  • Historical Paper
    • Write thesis, maybe rough draft of your paper plus research/sources
  • Performance
    • Script/research/thesis/sources
  • Podcast
    • Don’t need full recording of audio, just an outline of what you’ll be discussing

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Example of an Exhibit School Submission

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Thank you!!

Email List

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Linktree

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Questions? Email uhsnhd@gmail.com or DM us @uhsnhd

School competition is approaching!

See you next time :)