history 9 project

15 History Project Ideas for High School Students

Indigo Research Team

If you have a deep interest in past events and feel a connection to different periods, pursuing history projects might be for you. 

Studying history allows you to understand the reasons behind decisions made over time and gives you valuable skills that can contribute to shaping a better future. Not to mention, passion projects for high school students have become increasingly important to make your college application better. 

So, if you are interested in history, here is the list of 15 creative ideas that you can start now:

Creative Ideas for History Projects

1. comparative research studies: history vs present times.

Comparing history and present times through research could be a great history research project idea for high school students. This study offers a valuable opportunity to delve into the complexities of historical events and societies. By examining two or more instances, you can develop critical thinking and analytical skills while uncovering patterns and trends that may not be apparent at first glance. These studies provide an avenue for exploring the similarities and differences between different periods and places, shedding light on the factors that shape societies and influence historical outcomes. 

When engaging in a history research project, it is crucial to start by selecting specific historical events or societies to compare. This allows you to focus on research efforts effectively. In addition to investigating political, economic, social, and cultural aspects, it is equally important to dive into the causes and consequences of these events. If you need help to do research, you can always find research mentors who can guide you through the process. 

2. Israel-Palestine conflict

The war between Israel and Palestine is one of the trending history project topics , so high school students can get a lot of information online. Learn about the root cause of the conflict by researching the historical background, key events, religion, and cultural values.

3. Ancient Civilizations scrapbook

A virtual Scrapbook is another creative idea for a history project for students. You can choose your favorite ancient civilization and start collecting old images and maps. Join maps and images and write short descriptions for the readers. Do extensive research and learn about their daily life activities to showcase their lifestyle. This project will spark your creativity.

4. Historical Fashion Show

If you have a passion for trends and fashion, the evolution of style is a perfect history project idea. Choose a specific period to take a stroll through the history. Your historical fashion show project will be more interesting if you consider a large period. Conduct research and present how ancient people used to cover their bodies. If you have enough time, you can create simple costumes from ancient civilizations to represent different eras. The video below can also be your reference in creating your historical fashion project.

5. History Box

High school students can create a history project by transforming historical events into three-dimensional masterpieces. You can choose your favorite history projects, such as a big discovery, a famous battle, or any other historical event that inspires you.

Take a shoe box, colored paper, and pens to transform your history project idea into a 3D scene. Incorporate small details like landscapes, buildings, and figures to tell the whole story. Write captions on each item to help other students understand the history.

6. Historical Cooking Show

Calling all foodie students! If you are passionate about cooking, you can try this European history project ideas. Choose your European cuisine and dig deep into how ancient people used to prepare food. Prepare old European dishes and record your adventurous video. Explain the whole recipe and how it reflects the culture of that time.

7. Inventions show

Create a visual show of inventors and inventions. Conduct thorough research, pick a few big inventors, learn about their contributions, and present your knowledge through digital presentation. You can also mention how their inventions changed the lifestyle of that era. This visual showcase will motivate you and your classmates to do something big and create a better future.

8. Historical Comic Show

Create a comic strip by using historical events. Choose a particular era and gather drawings and captions to narrate the key moments. This history project idea will polish your storytelling skills and make history more accessible and entertaining.

9. Podcasts from the Past

Creating a podcast series of historical figures can take your creativity to the next level. Interview "guests" from the past, portraying their achievements, struggles, and impact on society. Use your creativity to make it informative and entertaining for your audience.

10. Timeline Wall

High school students can use a blank wall to showcase significant events of a specific region. Suppose you want to showcase US history, then conduct research and list down important events of the past. Using different colors and markers, you can illustrate events on the wall.

11. Presidential Time Capsule

This is one of the best US history final project ideas. Students can represent different presidents by exploring their political achievements, personal aspects, and societal influences. You can create artifacts to showcase the life of a specific president. This US History project idea will enhance your artistic skills.

12. Oil Board Game

Are you looking for Texas history project ideas? This educational oil board game will allow you to explore the oil industry of Texas. You need extensive research to learn about the boomtown era, economic fluctuations, and the impact of oil discoveries. Players will take on the roles of independent oil entrepreneurs, navigating the economic landscape to strike it rich or face financial pitfalls.

13. ABC Past Book

Students can create an E-book just like a dictionary where each letter represents a historical event of a specific era or region. For example, A stands for Arts & Crafts Movement Worksheet and B stands for Berlin. You can add small captions and illustrations to enhance readability.

14. Black Man Museum

Black Man Museum is one of the outstanding black history project ideas because it allows you to honor the achievements and struggles of people of color. Conduct research and find a few historical black figures, gather all the information about their achievements. You can also share stories of black people in your community. This project will spark your public speaking abilities and deepen your understanding of the diverse contributions to society.

Following are a few more black history project ideas:

• The Montgomery bus boycott
• The civil rights movement
• Black women’s history
• The black panthers
• Contribution of black teachers in Society

15. Documentary on the Freedom Movement

If you’re passionate about India’s history and looking for Indian history project ideas, you can create a Documentary on the Freedom Movement. Find elders from your family or your community who witnessed the freedom of India and record their interviews. Ask about their experiences, sacrifices, and contributions to the freedom movement. This could be a good history research idea because the diverse perspectives can help you make your project more interesting.

How to Create a Successful History Project for a High School Student?

Before choosing your history project, ask yourself a few questions what do you like the most about history? How much time do you have to complete the project and what are your educational goals? These questions will help you choose the right project that will stand out from the crowd.

Here are some more tips that will make your history project rewarding.

1. Identify Your Interest 

The common rule to start anything is your interest, the more you enjoy doing something, the more it will motivate you to finish the project. Start thinking about the historical events, periods, and figures that capture your attention.

2. Consider your Class Curriculum

To obtain history project ideas, you could also browse on school's history book to explore topics that you find interesting. You can also consider themes that haven’t been covered in your class yet. Choosing a topic from your class content will help you to understand better and perform well in final exams.

3. Explore Current Events

Consider current issues that have relevance to history. Connecting the dots of the present to the past can make your project more engaging and memorable.

4. Create an Engaging Documentation

Creating visually appealing documentation is not only aesthetically pleasing but also a powerful tool for exploring historical events. Start with providing a visual representation of the chronological order of key events, timelines help learners connect the dots and develop a deeper understanding of the subject matter. 

Visual cues capture people’s attention and spark their curiosity, encouraging them to dig deeper into the interconnectedness between historical events and notable figures. Ultimately, creating engaging documentation will always be beneficial for your college application or future careers.

5. Use Historical Books and Resources

When working on a history project, it is essential to utilize reliable historical books and resources. These sources provide accurate and credible information that can support your research and strengthen the credibility of your project.

Start by identifying reputable books written by historians or experts in the field. Look for well-researched, peer-reviewed, and widely recognized books within the academic community. These books often provide comprehensive coverage of knowledge that you can rely on.

There are endless creative ideas for history projects. You should choose something that you’re passionate about. We assume that this article has given you a project idea and by choosing the above tips, you can bring life to your history project.

History is no doubt one of the most interesting topics to explore in a research project. If you want to start your research journey, the Indigo Research Program is here to transform your idea into reality. We will pair you with mentors from top universities and turn your project into publishable research.

101+ Interesting History Project Ideas For Students

Finding a good history project idea can be tricky, but with some help, students of all ages can pick a fascinating, doable, and educational topic. From biographies of influential people to historical events or places, there are many exciting ways to learn about the past. 

This blog post will explore potential history project ideas from different periods, locations, and views. Whether you want to understand your family’s history better, focus on a topic that connects to current events, or satisfy your curiosity about the past, you will find inspiration. 

With the right history project idea, you can gain valuable research skills while diving into a subject you’re passionate about. From Native American culture to the Civil Rights Movement and more, read on for historical project suggestions that will teach and engage you.

Are you struggling with History Assignment Help ? Do you need assistance in getting the best and A+ Quality human-generated solutions? Hire our tutors to get unique assignment solutions before the assignment deadline.

What Are History Projects?

Table of Contents

History projects are assignments, often given in school, where students research and present information about a particular topic or period from history. They typically require students to investigate using libraries, museums, interviews, online sources, and other methods to find useful facts and materials. 

Students then synthesize what they learned into a project that demonstrates their knowledge. Common types of history projects include research papers, exhibits, documentaries, posters, presentations, websites, and more. 

The format allows students to understand history through hands-on learning and exploration. Here are some key reasons history projects are essential:

• Develop research and critical thinking skills
• Gain perspective on how past events shape the present
• Make history come alive through creativity and engagement
• Learn to evaluate and analyze historical sources
• Practice presentation and communication abilities
• Promote an appreciation for the study of history

Here are 103 history project ideas for students, categorized to help you find a topic that suits your interests.

Ancient Civilizations

• The Rise & Fall of the Roman Empire
• Life in Ancient Egypt: Pharaohs, Pyramids, and Daily Life
• Contributions of Ancient Greece to Modern Civilization
• Mesopotamia: The Cradle of Civilization
• Indus Valley Civilization: Mystery of the Lost Civilization
• Ancient Chinese Dynasties: Han, Qin, and Tang

Medieval Times

• Knights and Chivalry: Code of Honor in Medieval Europe
• The Black Death: Impact on Europe in the 14th Century
• Feudalism: Structure of Medieval Society
• Crusades: Holy Wars and Their Consequences
• Vikings: Raiders of the North Sea

Renaissance and Enlightenment

• Renaissance Art and its Influences
• The Scientific Revolution: Changing the Paradigm
• Enlightenment Thinkers: Ideas That Shaped Modern Society
• The Age of Exploration: Discoveries and Consequences
• The Printing Press: Revolutionizing Communication

Also Read:- STEM Project Ideas For Middle School

Colonial America

• 17. Jamestown vs. Plymouth: Contrasting Early American Colonies
• Salem Witch Trials: Hysteria in Colonial Massachusetts
• Founding Fathers: Architects of the United States
• The Triangle Trade: Economic Forces in Colonial America
• Indigenous Peoples and European Contact

American Revolution

• Causes and Effects of the American Revolution
• Revolutionary War Battles: Turning Points and Strategies
• Declaration of Independence: Crafting a Nation’s Identity
• The Role of Women in the Revolutionary Era
• African Americans in the Revolutionary War

19th Century

• Industrial Revolution: Impact on Society and Economy
• Manifest Destiny: Expansion Westward in the United States
• Abolitionist Movement: Struggle for the End of Slavery
• Immigration Waves: Contributions of Immigrants in the 1800s
• California Gold Rush: Boomtowns and Prospecting

Civil War and Reconstruction

• Causes of the Civil War: Sectionalism and Tensions
• Battle of Gettysburg: Explore the Turning Point in the Civil War
• Emancipation Proclamation: Lincoln’s Bold Move
• Reconstruction Era: Rebuilding the United States
• Freedmen’s Bureau: Aid to Former Slaves
• World War I: Causes, Events, and Consequences
• Trench Warfare: Life on the Front Lines
• Treaty of Versailles: Impact on the Interwar Period
• Rise of Adolf Hitler: Factors Leading to World War II
• Holocaust: Remembering the Atrocities

Cold War Era

• The Cuban Missile Crisis: Tensions between the U.S. and Soviet Union
• Space Race: Race for Supremacy in Space Exploration
• McCarthyism: Anti-Communist Hysteria in the United States
• Vietnam War: Causes, Events, and Legacy
• Civil Rights Movement: Struggle for Equality

Post-Cold War

• 47. Fall of the Berlin Wall: Symbol of the End of the Cold War
• Apartheid in South Africa: Nelson Mandela’s Fight for Equality
• The collapse of the Soviet Union: End of the Superpower Era
• Gulf War: Operation Desert Storm
• Rwandan Genocide: Tragedy and International Response

Also Read:- Statistics Project Ideas

Recent History

• 9/11 Attacks: Impact on Global Politics
• War on Terror: U.S. Military Interventions in the Middle East
• Arab Spring: Protests and Political Change in the Middle East
• Brexit: The United Kingdom’s Decision to Leave the EU
• COVID-19 Pandemic: Global Responses and Lessons Learned

Historical Figures

• Alexander the Great: Explore Conqueror of the Ancient World
• Joan of Arc: Explore Heroine of the Hundred Years’ War
• Martin Luther King Jr.: Explore Leader of the Civil Rights Movement
• Winston Churchill: Explore Prime Minister during World War II
• Cleopatra: Queen of Ancient Egypt

Women in History

• Suffragette Movement: Struggle for Women’s Right to Vote
• Eleanor Roosevelt: Explore First Lady and Human Rights Advocate
• Marie Curie: Pioneering Scientist in Radiology
• Rosa Parks: Explore Catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement
• Malala Yousafzai: Advocate for Girls’ Education

Cultural History

• Harlem Renaissance: Cultural and Artistic Flourishing
• Beat Generation: Literary and Cultural Rebellion
• Woodstock Festival: Music and Counterculture in the 1960s
• Mayan Civilization: Art, Architecture, and Culture
• Japanese Tea Ceremony: Tradition and Ritual

Economic History

• Great Depression: Causes and Effects on Global Economies
• 1929 Stock Market Crash: Precursor to the Great Depression
• Keynesian Economics vs. Supply-side Economics
• Gold Rushes: Economic Booms and Busts
• Silicon Valley: Technological Innovation Hub

Social Movements

• LGBTQ+ Rights Movement: Struggles and Achievements
• Environmentalism: Origins and Impact on Policy
• Anti-Apartheid Protests: Global Solidarity
• Occupy Movement: Protests Against Economic Inequality
• #MeToo Movement: Addressing Sexual Harassment and Assault

Military History

• Sun Tzu and the Art of War: Ancient Military Strategy
• Battle of Thermopylae: Spartan Stand Against the Persians
• D-Day Invasion: Allied Assault on Normandy
• Code Talkers: Navajo Language in World War II
• Military Technology Advancements: From Swords to Drones

Historical Artifacts

• Rosetta Stone: Decoding Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs
• The Dead Sea Scrolls: Unearthing Ancient Texts
• The Shroud of Turin: Controversy Surrounding the Relic
• The Rosetta Disk: A Modern-Day Rosetta Stone
• The Declaration of Independence: Preserving a National Treasure

Also Read:- Social Studies Fair Project Ideas

Historical Places

• Machu Picchu: Inca Civilization’s Hidden Citadel
• The Acropolis: Symbol of Ancient Greek Civilization
• The Great Wall of China: Construction and Purpose
• The Louvre: Home to Priceless Art and Artifacts
• Auschwitz Concentration Camp: Remembering the Holocaust

Historical Events

• The Great Fire of London: Investigate Destruction and Rebuilding
• The Boston Tea Party: Investigate Prelude to the American Revolution
• The Cuban Revolution: Investigate Fidel Castro and the Rise of Communism
• The Moon Landing: Apollo 11’s Historic Achievement
• The Treaty of Westphalia: Shaping Modern Diplomacy

Historical Science and Medicine

• Hippocrates and the Hippocratic Oath: Foundations of Medicine
• Darwin’s Theory of Evolution: Impact on Biology and Society

These History Project Ideas cover a wide range of historical topics, allowing students to delve into different periods, regions, and themes within history. Students can select projects based on their interests and explore various aspects of human history.

How Do You Plan A History Project?

Here are some tips for planning a successful history project:

• Choose a history topic that interests you and fits the scope of the assignment. Consider a critical event, period, location, historical figure, or cultural phenomenon you want to explore further.
• Research general background information on your topic to help refine and focus your project idea. Determine what’s most important to convey or what questions you want to answer.
• Determine the type of project – will it be a research paper, documentary, website, exhibit, reenactment, or something else? Choose a format that aligns with your topic and allows you to convey what you learned creatively.
• Create a work timeline accounting for research, creating a rough draft, gathering materials, fact-checking, and finalizing the project. Leave time for revisions and editing.
• Locate primary and secondary sources to conduct your research. Use libraries, academic databases, museums, interviews, archives, credible online sources, etc. Evaluate each source for accuracy and credibility.
• Take careful notes and document all sources used, tracking which information comes from each source. This will be important for citations/bibliography later.
• Outline your project and draft a structure before beginning. Use your research to shape the narrative or argument you’ll present.
• Stick to your timeline as you move through the drafting and production process. Review the project requirements and rubric to ensure you meet all expectations.
• Double-check your facts, polish the final product, and practice presenting/explaining your work if required. Revise as needed to create an informative, engaging history project!

How Do You Write A History Project?

Here are some tips for writing a successful history project:

• Craft an introduction that presents your topic and establishes its significance in history. State your central thesis, argument, or purpose for your analysis.
• Provide background context so your reader understands your topic’s setting and circumstances. Give relevant details about time, place, politics, culture, etc.
• Present your research and findings in a logical structure with clear organization. Use sections and headings to divide details and make connections.
• Blend narrative explanation and evidence from sources. Paraphrase, summarize, and directly quote relevant research information to support your points.
• Analyze and interpret your findings to make arguments, draw conclusions, and explain historical significance. Move beyond just restating facts.
• Consider different perspectives and causes when analyzing historical events and figures. Provide context for their motivations and obstacles.
• Use transitions to connect ideas and paragraphs so your writing flows smoothly.
• Define key terms, events, and concepts so readers understand their meaning and historical significance.
• Summarize your main points, emphasize your central argument, and explain why your topic matters.
• Correctly note all sources within the text and in a bibliography using the required citation style.
• Revise your writing to check for clarity, organization, grammar, and spelling before finalizing. Make sure your writing is clear, concise, and compelling.

Final Remarks

In summary, working on a history project gives students an excellent chance to explore the exciting stories of the past. They can build essential skills while exploring different topics that they find exciting. Students can get creative by picking a topic they like, whether it’s for a research paper, a documentary, or a presentation. Being organized, doing careful research, and sticking to deadlines are super important for doing well.

As students learn about ancient civilizations, essential events, incredible people from history, and significant social changes, they understand history better and get better at thinking critically, doing research, and talking to others. History projects make the past feel alive and help us appreciate how history significantly impacts how things are now and what might happen in the future.

Similar Articles

How To Do Homework Fast – 11 Tips To Do Homework Fast

Homework is one of the most important parts that have to be done by students. It has been around for…

How to Write an Assignment Introduction – 6 Best Tips

In essence, the writing tasks in academic tenure students are an integral part of any curriculum. Whether in high school,…

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

• Find A Local Contest
• Get Started
• Contest Rules & Evaluation
• Find Your Local Contest (Affiliate)
• National Contest
• Classroom Tools
• Teaching Research Skills
• Advising NHD Students
• News & Events
• Why NHD Works
• People of NHD
• Find Your Local Affiliate
• 50 Years of NHD
• Sponsors and Supporters
• Volunteer to Judge
• Alumni Network

Get Started on Your Project

A National History Day ® (NHD) project is your way of presenting your historical argument, research, and interpretation of your topic’s significance in history. NHD projects can be created individually or as part of a group. There are two entry divisions: Junior (grades 6–8) or Senior (grades 9–12). After reading the Contest Rule Book and learning about the annual theme , you’re ready to dig in!

Your Guide to Getting Started

Choose your topic .

A topic is the part of history you want to study. Choose a topic that is interesting to you, that fits the annual theme , and that is not too big and not too small. Studying the entire American Revolution is probably too big. At the same time, studying one decision made by General George Washington on one day in the Revolutionary War might be too small. Just like Goldilocks, find a topic that is “just right.”

Can I select any topic I want?

Absolutely! NHD encourages you to explore historical topics ( local , regional, national, or global ) from any time period. Start by checking with your teacher. Teachers might have certain guidelines specific to their classrooms. All topics also need to be approved by your parent or guardian.

How old should my topic be?

Your topic must be old enough that historians are writing about it. Historians tend to wait until enough time has passed that the topic feels complete and they can answer the “So What?” question about the topic; i.e., why is the topic important to know about? You will answer the same question about your topic. 

If you are interested in something that is happening currently or very recently, consider exploring that topic in history. For example, you might be interested in how people today are coping with a dwindling water supply. Look back to struggles over access to water in the past. You might find a great topic that way!

Start Your Research

Once you select a topic, you are ready to begin your research by finding out what was going on before and during the time that your topic occurred. This is called historical context and it’s where historians begin.

Historians use these and other terms when talking about the study of history. Refer to the Student Glossary as you come across historical terms and concepts.

Historical context sets the stage for your topic. To learn about historical context, historians use two key types of resources: primary and secondary sources. Remember to keep track of your research sources so you can create your bibliography.

Secondary Sources

Secondary sources tell, analyze, or interpret events. Historians create secondary sources based on their reading of primary sources. Secondary sources are usually written decades, if not centuries, after the event occurred by people who did not live through or participate in the event. 

Begin your research with secondary sources to help you build your knowledge of the big picture surrounding your topic. To understand the connections between your topic and the time period, ask yourself:

• Why did my topic happen at this particular time and in this particular place?
• What were the events that came before my topic?
• How was my topic influenced by the economic, social, political, and cultural climate of the time period? 

Primary Sources

Primary sources are the most exciting part of history. These are the sources created during the time that the event took place. Be sure to look at primary materials created by as many people as you can. Looking at various viewpoints will help you develop multiple perspectives.

Examples of primary sources include: documents, artifacts, historic sites, songs, or other written and tangible items created during the historical period you are studying.

While it can be tempting to jump right to the primary sources, the historical context of your topic that you learn from secondary sources will help you make sense of the primary sources that you find.

Conducting Interviews

Interviews are not required for an NHD project. Requests to interview historians or other secondary sources are inappropriate. Historians do not interview each other. Instead, you might conduct oral history interviews of those who were eyewitnesses to the events. Oral histories are primary sources. Learn more about g uidelines for conducting interviews and the difference between oral histories and interviews with experts.

Develop a Historical Argument

NHD projects must do more than just tell a story. Historians create a historical argument to state what they will prove through their writing. The historical argument is a clear and specific two or three-sentence statement that contains the how and why of what historians found in their research.

After you do your research and analyze your sources, your ideas about the significance of your topic in history will take shape. Then it is time for you to develop your historical argument.

Your research provides the evidence to support the argument you wish to make.

Example Topic: Battle of Gettysburg

Historical Argument: The Battle of Gettysburg was a major turning point in the U.S. Civil War. It turned the tide of the war from the South to the North. After the battle, Lee’s army would never fight again on Northern soil and the Union army gained confidence.

Select a Contest Category

NHD offers five creative categories in each division (Junior: grades 6–8, or Senior: grades 9–12). The documentary, exhibit, performance, and website categories offer both individual and group participation options. The paper category allows individual participation only. Groups may include two to five students.

Documentary

A documentary is a ten-minute film that uses media (images, video, and sound) to communicate your historical argument, research evidence, and interpretation of your topic’s significance in history. 

A documentary should reflect your ability to use audiovisual equipment to communicate your topic’s significance. The documentary category will help you develop skills in using photographs, film, video, audio, computers, and graphic presentations. Your presentation should include primary source materials and also must be an original production. To produce a documentary, you must have access to equipment and be able to operate it.

Documentary Resources

Documentary project checklist, documentary evaluation form, documentary project example 1: baseball diplomacy, documentary project example 2: aiming for a diplomatic future.

An exhibit is a three-dimensional physical and visual representation of your historical argument, research evidence, and interpretation of your topic’s significance in history.

Exhibits use color, images, documents, objects, graphics, and design, as well as words, to tell your story. Exhibits can be interactive experiences by asking viewers to play music, look at a video, or open a door or window to see more documents or photos.

Exhibit Resources

Exhibit project checklist, exhibit evaluation form, exhibit project example 1: black studies now, exhibit project example 2: the radium girls.

A paper is a written format for presenting your historical argument, research evidence, and interpretation of your topic’s significance in history.

A paper is a highly personal and individual effort, and if you prefer to work alone this may be the category for you. Papers depend almost entirely on words to tell the story, and you can usually include more information in a paper than in some of the other categories. Various types of creative writing (for example, fictional diaries, poems, etc.) are permitted but must conform to all general and category rules.

Paper Resources

Paper project checklist, paper evaluation form, paper project example 1: women strike for peace, paper project example 2: soil conservation service, performance.

A performance is a dramatic portrayal of your historical argument, research evidence, and interpretation of your topic’s significance in history.

The performance category is the only one that is presented live. Developing a strong narrative that allows your subject to unfold in a dramatic and visually interesting way is important. Memorizing, rehearsing, and refining your script is essential, so you should schedule time for this in addition to research, writing, costuming, and prop gathering.

Performance Resources

Performance project checklist, performance evaluation form, performance project example 1: caroline chisholm, performance project example 2: debate over the bill of rights.

A website is a collection of interconnected web pages that uses multimedia to communicate your historical argument, research evidence, and interpretation of your topic’s significance in history.

A website should reflect your ability to use website design software and computer technology to communicate your topic’s significance in history. To create an NHD website project, you must use NHDWebCentral ® .

Website Resources

Nhdwebcentral ® instructions, website project checklist, website evaluation form, write your process paper & annotated bibliography.

All NHD projects have two required elements in common—a process paper and an annotated bibliography.

Process Paper

A process paper is a description of how you conducted your research, developed your topic idea, and created your entry. The process paper must also explain the relationship of your topic to the contest theme. You’ll find these and further information about writing your Process Paper in the Contest Rule Book .

Annotated Bibliography

An annotated bibliography is a formatted list of the sources that you used in your research. The main goals of an annotated bibliography are to:

• Give credit to the original authors, avoiding plagiarism
• Show the value of a source to the research
• Reflect varied perspectives with different types of sources
• Provide the source information so that readers can explore those sources on their own

An annotated bibliography is required for all categories. Read the Contest Rule Book to learn about the detailed requirements.

NoodleTools: NHD and NoodleTools partner together to help you organize your research sources. NoodleTools can help you track your sources, take notes, organize your ideas, and create your annotated bibliography. Your teachers can sign up and receive account access for all of their students for one year. The program allows teachers to see the progress their students have made and offer direct electronic feedback.

Find Your Local Contest

National History Day competition begins at the local level. Registration, contest dates, submission deadlines, and further supporting materials are available through each affiliate’s local contest website.

Project Examples

Get inspired by NHD projects submitted in previous years’ contests.

Create an Entry

Resources to help you start and complete your NHD entry

National History Day ®

Influencing the future through discovery of the past

• Job Openings

Read our newsletter for the latest resources, events, and training.

We use cookies to analyze how visitors use our website so we can provide the best possible experience. By clicking “Accept All Cookies”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device. For more information, please view our Privacy Policy.

• Skip to primary navigation
• Skip to main content
• Skip to primary sidebar
• Skip to footer

Study Mumbai

ICSE, CBSE study notes & home schooling, management notes, solved assignments

History Project for Class 9 Students: Topics and Sample Projects

March 18, 2024 by studymumbai

Here’s how to make History Projects for Class 9 students. Find sample projects and the best structure to incorporate while making History projects.

General Instructions

Your written work must be complemented with relevant pictures/ photographs. It’s a good practice to use a caption for all the pictures /photographs that you use.

GET INSTANT HELP FROM EXPERTS!

Hire us as project guide/assistant . Contact us for more information

If possible, try and use maps and time-lines where appropriate.

Students are expected to submit the History project in hand-written format in Spiral interleaved book.

Project Structure

You can keep the following structure for the History project, in case the structure is not provided by the school.

Index page – Introduction – Content – Conclusion – Bibliography – Acknowledgements (optional)

The number of pages to be written will be provided by the school. In case, it is not provided, you may write around 4 pages for the main content and about 1 page for each of the remaining sections.

History Project Topics for Class 9

History of Mysore

The objective of this project is to research and present a comprehensive study on the history of Mysore, covering various aspects such as its origins, rulers, cultural evolution, significant events, and contributions to the region and beyond.

You may use the following structure:

1) Index on page- 1

2) Introduction (1 to 2 pages):

Significance of Architecture in the reconstruction of the past. Create a chronological timeline highlighting rulers, and developments in Mysore’s history.

3) Content: (3-4 pages)

Part I: Cultural Heritage: Explore the rich cultural heritage of Mysore, including art, architecture, music, and dance. Part II: Economic and Trade History: Investigate Mysore’s historical economic activities, trade routes, and economic prosperity. Part III: Architectural Heritage: Write about the architectural features of the Mysore palace and the temple you have visited.

4) Conclusion: Write your experience about the Sound and Light Show. (1 page)

Bibliography: (1 page)

List all reference material used: first print (books, magazines etc.) then web sites. If you visited web sites state the exact site/link (not just Google.com!)

6)Acknowledgements (optional): A brief acknowledgement of the people who made this project possible.

StudyMumbai.com is an educational resource for students, parents, and teachers, with special focus on Mumbai. Our staff includes educators with several years of experience. Our mission is to simplify learning and to provide free education. Read more about us .

Related Posts:

• EVS Project for Class 9 Students: Topics and Sample Projects
• Geography Project for Class 9 Students: Topics and…
• History and Civics (Class - IX): Projects / Assignments
• Engaging Class 11 (XI) English Project Topics and Ideas
• How to choose a Research Topic (also find sample topics)

ICSE CLASS NOTES

• ICSE Class 10 . ICSE Class 9
• ICSE Class 8 . ICSE Class 7
• ICSE Class 6 . ICSE Class 5
• ICSE Class 4 . ICSE Class 2
• ICSE Class 2 . ICSE Class 1

ACADEMIC HELP

• Essay Writing
• Assignment Writing
• Dissertation Writing
• Thesis Writing
• Homework Help for Parents
• M.Com Project
• BMM Projects
• Engineering Writing
• Capstone Projects
• BBA Projects
• MBA Projects / Assignments
• Writing Services
• Book Review
• Ghost Writing
• Make Resume/CV
• Create Website
• Digital Marketing

STUDY GUIDES

Useful links.

• Referencing Guides
• Best Academic Websites
• FREE Public Domain Books

• How to Use this Site
• Lessons & Activities
• Interactives & Media
• Museum Artifacts
• Teacher Resources

Lessons & Activities

Search history explorer.

Young People Shake Up Elections (History Proves It) Educator Guide

Becoming US

Head to Head: History Makers

What Will You Stand For? Video Discussion Guide

What Will You Stand For? Video

Educator Guide for World War I: Lesson and Legacies

The Suffragist Educators' Guide for the Classroom Videos

The Suffragist

World War I: Lessons and Legacies

Japanese American Incarceration: The Diary of Stanley Hayami

...If You Traveled On The Underground Railroad

A Boy at War: A Novel of Pearl Harbor

A Boy No More

A Bus of Our Own

A Carp for Kimiko

A Christmas Tree in the White House

A Different Mirror for Young People: A History of Multicultural America

A Fence Away From Freedom: Japanese Americans and World War II

A Multicultural Portrait of Immigration

A Picture Book of Eleanor Roosevelt

Filter resources by:, featured artifact.

As COVID-19 deaths spiked in 2020, Suzanne Firstenberg’s public art installation "In America: How could this happen…"

Support for Smithsonian's History Explorer is provided by the Verizon Foundation

• Interactives/Media
• Museum/Artifacts

• About History Explorer
• Terms of Use
• Plan Your Visit

• Topical and themed
• Early years
• Special needs
• Schools directory
• Resources Jobs Schools directory News Search

Thought-provoking historical projects

Australia and new zealand, international schools, tes resources team.

Inspire inquisitive minds to investigate a variety of historical periods with these captivating project ideas

With the end of term almost in sight, projects are a great way to keep your classes engaged while acquiring new knowledge and developing important skills. Whether they are used to introduce unfamiliar historical periods, explore one in more detail or discover local history, this collection of imaginative project ideas has the power to get students of all ages and abilities thinking more deeply.

Industrial Cities: Research Project.

World War I Research and Project Based Task Cards

History Homework Project for KS3 double pack

History homework projects - Years 7 to 9

History Themed project work for KS3/KS2

Fun Castle Project

Henry VIII - Full Homework Project

World War One Homework Project - a Trench Diary

Local history resources.

22 practical ideas on how to weave Local History into your History lessons

Local History: Culture on Your Doorstep

Discover the Dissolution Local History Project

Language selector

Don't have an account? Create an account today and support the 9/11 Memorial & Museum.

Log in with Google , Facebook or Twitter .

• Create new account
• Forgot your password?

• Oral Histories

The 9/11 Memorial Museum’s oral history collection documents the history of 9/11 through recorded interviews with responders, survivors, 9/11 family members, and others deeply affected by the attacks at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Stories of those killed aboard the hijacked aircraft and those killed in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center are also reflected in the collection. The edited segments below are drawn from a collection of more than 1,000 recorded interviews. The Museum continues to collect and record oral histories.

Ester DiNardo, Family Member

On September 11, 2001, Ester DiNardo lost her daughter, Marisa. Ester remembers how on her last night, Marisa brought her to Windows on the World on the top of the World Trade Center to celebrate Ester's birthday.

Oral History Transcript: Ester DiNardo

Ester DiNardo – Mother of Marisa DiNardo

Adrienne Walsh, First Responder

Off duty on the morning of 9/11, firefighter Adrienne Walsh responded to the World Trade Center with the second wave of firefighters to leave FDNY Ladder Company 20 on Lafayette Street in Soho. In this interview, Lt. Walsh recalls the fall of the North Tower.

Oral History Transcript: Adrienne Walsh

Adrienne Walsh – New York City Fire Department

Adrienne Walsh – New York City Fire Department  

Robert Gray, First Responder

An expert in rescuing survivors in collapsed buildings and other high-risk situations, Arlington County Virginia Captain Robert Gray led the department’s Technical Rescue Team in its search for survivors and the recovery of victims at the Pentagon. In this interview, Gray, who was later promoted to battalion chief, describes working the 12-hour night shift at the Pentagon.

Oral Transcript History: Robert Gray

Chief Robert Gray – Arlington Country Fire Department

Frank Razzano, Survivor

A guest at the Marriott Hotel at 3 World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Washington, D.C.–based attorney Frank Razzano was roused from sleep by a series of loud bangs. Confident that the FDNY would handle the situation, and unaware that a hijacked airplane had struck the North Tower, Razzano delayed his departure until after the collapse of the South Tower. In this segment, Razzano describes his evacuation experience.

Oral History Transcript: Frank Razzano

Frank Razzano – Survivor 

Frank Razzano – Survivor   

Dianne DeFontes, Survivor

The first person to arrive at her job in a law firm on the 89th floor of the North Tower, Dianne DeFontes felt the impact of hijacked Flight 11 strike the building a few floors above her desk. Within a short while, Frank De Martini , a long-time employee of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, found DeFontes and a group of people from a nearby office and ushered them into a stairwell, where he and a coworker, Pablo Ortiz , had broken through a jammed door. In this part of her oral history, DeFontes recalls her evacuation and the vital assistance provided by De Martini and Ortiz, who lost their lives helping others that day.

Oral History Transcript: Dianne DeFontes

Dianne DeFontes – Survivor

Dianne DeFontes – Survivor  

Bruno Dellinger, Survivor 

From an office on the 47th floor of the North Tower, Bruno Dellinger owned and managed a small company providing art consultation services and developing cultural and commercial ties between New York and various regions in his home country of France. In an oral history recorded with the Museum, Dellinger recalls the first stages of his journey to safety, describing fellow survivors making way for injured civilians in the stairwell and the collapse of the South Tower moments after he arrived at street level.

Oral History Transcript: Bruno Dellinger

Bruno Dellinger – Survivor 

Bruno Dellinger – Survivor   

Arturo Ressi, World Trade Center Engineer

As a young engineer, Arturo Ressi oversaw construction of the World Trade Center slurry wall, built to prevent the Hudson River from leaking into the lowest levels of the Twin Towers. Ressi was shocked by the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11, yet also gratified to learn that the wall remained intact. In an oral history recorded for the Museum a few years before his death, Ressi said he felt that the slurry wall “wanted to stay up.” He also noted his concern that had the wall been breached, the loss of life would have grown exponentially worse. Ressi also described the strength of the 450-million-year-old Manhattan schist bedrock that makes the soaring skyline of New York City possible.

Oral History Transcript: Arturo Ressi

Arturo Ressi – World Trade Center Engineer

Arturo Ressi – World Trade Center Engineer  

Rita Calvo, Survivor

A lower Manhattan resident going to high school on the Upper West Side, Rita Calvo was in class when the students learned that the World Trade Center had been attacked. In an oral history recorded for the Museum, she recalled anxiously trying to phone her parents to see if their home had been damaged. She also described how she got home that day and her father’s efforts to maintain a sense of normalcy in the midst of unprecedented terror.

Oral History Transcript: Rita Calvo

Rita Calvo – Survivor 

Harry Ong Jr., Family Member

Harry Ong Jr. remembers his sister, Betty Ong , a flight attendant aboard hijacked Flight 11. He describes his family’s reaction to learning about the event and that Betty, also called Bee, had been killed in the attack.

Oral History Transcript: Harry Ong Jr.

Harry Ong Jr. – Family Member

Carl Selinger, Former Port Authority Employee

Carl Selinger was at work for the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey at the World Trade Center when a bomb was detonated there on February 26, 1993. Having left his office to pick up some lunch, he was trapped in an elevator for hours. As conditions worsened in the enclosed space, Selinger feared for his life and wrote a letter to his family before the lights went out completely. In this segment of his oral history, Selinger shares his thoughts and feelings as he waited to be rescued.

Oral History Transcript: Carl Selinger

Carl Selinger – Former Port Authority Employee

• Exhibitions

The Museum tells the story of 9/11 through interactive technology, personal narratives, and both monumental and intimate artifacts.

• The Collection

Explore a permanent collection of 60,000 artifacts consisting of material evidence, first-person testimony, and historical records of response to February 26, 1993 and 9/11.

• Group Visits
• Museum Admission Discounts
• Health and Safety
• Visitor Guidelines
• Getting Here
• Accessibility
• Programs and Events
• Find a Name
• Outdoor Memorial Audio Guide
• 9/11 Memorial Glade
• The Survivor Tree
• Past Public Programs
• School Programs
• Lesson Plans
• Anniversary Digital Learning Experience
• Digital Learning Experience Archives
• Teacher Professional Development
• Activities at Home
• Youth and Family Tours
• Talking to Children about Terrorism
• Digital Exhibitions
• Interactive Timelines
• 9/11 Primer
• Visiting Information
• Rescue and Recovery Workers
• Witnesses and Survivors
• Service Members and Veterans
• September 11, 2001
• Remember the Sky
• February 26, 1993
• May 30, 2002
• The MEMO Blog
• Sponsor a Cobblestone
• Other Ways to Give
• Member Login
• 5K Run/Walk
• Benefit Dinner
• Summit on Security
• Corporate Membership
• The Never Forget Fund
• Visionary Network
• Give to the Collection

• Share full article

The 1619 Project and the Long Battle Over U.S. History

Fights over how we tell our national story go back more than a century — and have a great deal to teach us about our current divisions.

Credit... Illustration by Derek Brahney

Supported by

By Jake Silverstein

• Published Nov. 9, 2021 Updated Nov. 12, 2021

Listen to This Article

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android .

On Jan. 28, 2019, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has been a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine since 2015, came to one of our weekly ideas meetings with a very big idea. My notes from the meeting simply say, “NIKOLE: special issue on the 400th anniversary of African slaves coming to U.S.,” a milestone that was approaching that August. This wasn’t the first time Nikole had brought up 1619. As an investigative journalist who often focuses on racial inequalities in education, Nikole has frequently turned to history to explain the present. Sometimes, reading a draft of one of her articles, I’d ask if she might include even more history, to which she would remark that if I gave her more space, she would be happy to take it all the way back to 1619. This was a running joke, but it was also a reflection of how Nikole had been cultivating the idea for what became the 1619 Project for many years. Following that January meeting, she led an editorial process that over the next six months developed the idea into a special issue of the magazine, a special section of the newspaper and a multiepisode podcast series. Next week we are publishing a book that expands on the magazine issue and represents the fullest expression of her idea to date.

This book, which is called “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story,” arrives amid a prolonged debate over the version of the project we published two years ago. That project made a bold claim, which remains the central idea of the book: that the moment in August 1619 when the first enslaved Africans arrived in the English colonies that would become the United States could, in a sense, be considered the country’s origin.

The reasoning behind this is simple: Enslavement is not marginal to the history of the United States; it is inextricable. So many of our traditions and institutions were shaped by slavery, and so many of our persistent racial inequalities stem from its enduring legacy. Identifying the start of such a vast and complex system is a somewhat symbolic act. It was not until the late 1600s that slavery became codified with new laws in various colonies that firmly established the institution’s racial basis and dehumanizing structure. But 1619 marks the earliest beginnings of what would become this system. (It also could be said to mark the earliest beginnings of what would become American democracy: In July of that year, just weeks before the White Lion arrived in Point Comfort with its human cargo, the Virginia General Assembly was called to order, the first elected legislative body in English America.)

But the argument for 1619 as our origin point goes beyond the centrality of slavery; 1619 was also the year that a heroic and generative process commenced, one by which enslaved Africans and their free descendants would profoundly alter the direction and character of the country, having an impact on everything from politics to popular culture. “Around us the history of the land has centered for thrice a hundred years,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903, and it is difficult to argue against extending his point through the century to follow, one that featured a Black civil rights struggle that transformed American democracy and the birth of numerous Black art forms that have profoundly influenced global culture. The 1619 Project made the provocative case that the start of the African presence in the English North American colonies could be considered the moment of inception of the United States of America. This argument was supported by 10 works of nonfiction — an opening essay by Nikole , followed by works from the journalists Jamelle Bouie , Jeneen Interlandi , Trymaine Lee , Wesley Morris and Linda Villarosa and the scholars Matthew Desmond , Kevin M. Kruse , Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Bryan Stevenson , all focused on the enduring impacts of slavery and racism and the contributions of Black Americans to our society.

Initially, the magazine issue was greeted with an enthusiastic response unlike any we had seen before. The weekend it was available in print, Aug. 18 and 19, readers all over the country complained of having to visit multiple newsstands before they could find a copy. A week later, when The Times made tens of thousands of copies available for sale online, they sold out in hours. Copies of the issue began to appear on eBay at ridiculous markups. Portions of Nikole’s opening essay from the project, which would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, were cited in the halls of Congress; candidates in what was then a large field of potential Democratic nominees for president referred to it on the stump and the debate stage; 1619 Project book clubs seemed to materialize overnight. All of this happened in the first month.

Criticisms of the project arrived, too, including those from the World Socialist Web Site, which published numerous articles about the project and interviewed historians with objections to its conclusions. In December, four of these historians, led by a fifth, the Princeton scholar Sean Wilentz, sent a letter that asked The Times to issue “prominent corrections” for what they claimed were the project’s “errors and distortions.” We took this letter very seriously. The criticism focused mostly on Nikole’s introductory essay and within that essay zeroed in on her argument about the role of slavery in the American Revolution: “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology,” Nikole wrote, “is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

Though we recognized that the role of slavery is a matter of ongoing debate among historians of the revolution, we did not agree that this line or the other passages in question required “prominent corrections,” as I explained in a letter of response. Ultimately, however, we issued a clarification, accompanied by a lengthy editors’ note: By saying that protecting slavery was “one of the primary reasons,” Nikole did not mean to imply that it was a primary reason for every one of the colonists, who were, after all, a geographically and culturally diverse lot with varying interests; rather, she meant that one of the primary reasons driving some of them, particularly those from the Southern colonies, was the protection of slavery from British meddling. We clarified this by adding “some of” to Nikole’s original sentence so that it read: “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

We published the letter from the five historians, along with my response, a few days before Christmas. Dozens of media outlets covered the exchange, and the coverage set certain corners of social media ablaze — which fueled more stories, which led others to weigh in. The editor of The American Historical Review, the journal of the American Historical Association, the nation’s oldest professional association of historians, noted in an editor’s letter that the controversy was “all anyone asked me about at the A.H.A.’s annual meeting during the first week of January.” The debate was still raging two months later, when everyone’s world changed abruptly.

Almost immediately, present and past converged: 2020 seemed to be offering a demonstration of the 1619 Project’s themes. The racial disparities in Covid infections and deaths made painfully apparent the ongoing inequalities that the project had highlighted. Then, in May, a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, and decades of pent-up frustration erupted in what is believed to be the largest protest movement in American history. In demonstrations around the country, we saw the language and ideas of the 1619 Project on cardboard signs amid huge crowds of mostly peaceful protesters gathering in cities and small towns.

It was around this time that Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas introduced a bill called the Saving American History Act, which would “prohibit federal funds from being made available to teach the 1619 Project curriculum in elementary schools and secondary schools, and for other purposes.” Cotton, who just weeks earlier published a column in The New York Times’s Opinion section calling for federal troops to subdue demonstrations, stated that the project “threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles on which it was founded.” (The “curriculum” Cotton’s legislation referred to was a set of educational materials put together not by The Times but by the Pulitzer Center , a nonprofit organization that supports global journalism and, in certain instances, helps teachers bring that work into classrooms. Since 2007, the Pulitzer Center, which has no relationship to the Pulitzer Prizes, has created lesson plans around dozens of works of journalism, including three different projects from The Times Magazine. To date, thousands of educators in all 50 states have made use of the Pulitzer Center’s educational materials based on the 1619 Project to supplement — not replace — their standard social studies and history curriculums.)

As our country has moved forward from its imperfect beginnings, our history has transformed behind us.

Cotton’s bill did not move forward, but it inspired many similar efforts, perhaps most prominently the 1776 Commission, an advisory committee formed by President Donald Trump to respond to the 1619 Project and other attempts to advance a more complicated narrative of the American past. Referring to an academic framework that seeks to locate the ways racism affects the law and other institutions, Trump said, “Critical race theory, the 1619 Project and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together.” Instead, Trump’s commission would promote “patriotic education” focused on “the legacy of 1776.” This never got very far. The committee’s members issued a report on Jan. 18, just weeks after the failed insurrection in Trump’s name at the U.S. Capitol, but it was widely criticized by historians, and one of Joe Biden’s first acts as president was to disband the 1776 Commission altogether.

This barely mattered. In the United States, the real decisions over education are left to local governments and state legislatures, and the Republican Party has been steadily gaining control of legislatures in the last decade. Today the party holds full power in 30 state houses, and as the 2021 sessions got underway, Republican lawmakers from South Carolina to Idaho proposed laws echoing the language and intent of Cotton’s bill and Trump’s commission. By the end of the summer, 27 states had introduced strikingly similar versions of a “divisive concepts” bill, which swirled together misrepresentations of critical race theory and the 1619 Project with extreme examples of the diversity training that had proliferated since the previous summer. The list of these divisive concepts, which the laws would prohibit from being discussed in classrooms, included such ideas as “one race, ethnic group or sex is inherently morally or intellectually superior to another race, ethnic group or sex” and “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race, ethnicity or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed by other members of the same race, ethnic group or sex,” as Arizona House Bill 2898 put it. To be clear, these notions aren’t found in the 1619 Project or in any but the most fringe writings by adherents of critical race theory, but the legislation aimed at something broader. “The clear goal of these efforts is to suppress teaching and learning about the role of racism in the history of the United States,” the A.H.A. and three other associations declared in a statement in June. “But the ideal of informed citizenship necessitates an educated public.” Eventually, more than 150 professional organizations would sign this letter, including the Society of Civil War Historians, the National Education Association, the Midwestern History Association and the Organization of American Historians.

Nevertheless, by late August, the two-year anniversary of the 1619 Project, 12 states had enacted some form of these bans. In Florida, the State Board of Education voted unanimously to prohibit the teaching of the project at a meeting in June, following a brief address from Gov. Ron DeSantis, in which he explained his opposition (mischaracterizing, as was so often the case, the claim from Nikole’s essay that the original five historians seized on):

This 1619 Project that came out a couple years ago, the folks who created that said that the American Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery. Now, that is factually false. That is something that you can look at the historical record. You want to know why they revolted against Britain? They told us. They wrote pamphlets, they did committees of correspondence, they did a Declaration of Independence. ... I think it’s really important that when we’re doing history, when we’re doing things like civics, that it is grounded in actual fact, and I think we’ve got to have an education system that is preferring fact over narratives.

A curious feature of this argument on behalf of the historical record is how ahistorical it is. In privileging “actual fact” over “narrative,” the governor, and many others, seem to proceed from the premise that history is a fixed thing; that somehow, long ago, the nation’s historians identified the relevant set of facts about our past, and it is the job of subsequent generations to simply protect and disseminate them. This conception denies history its own history — the dynamic, contested and frankly pretty thrilling process by which an understanding of the past is formed and reformed. The study of this is known as historiography, and a knowledge of American historiography, in particular the way our historical profession evolved to take fuller account of the role of slavery and racism in our past, is critical to understanding the debates of the past two years.

The earliest attempts to record the nation’s history took the form of accounts of military campaigns, summaries of state and federal legislative activity, dispatches from the frontier and other narrowly focused reports. In the 19th century, these were replaced by a master narrative of the colonial and founding era, best exemplified by “the father of American history,” George Bancroft, in his “History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent.” Published in 10 volumes from the 1830s through the 1870s, Bancroft’s opus is generally seen as the first comprehensive history of the country, and its influence was incalculable. Bancroft’s ambition was to synthesize American history into a grand and glorious epic. He viewed the European colonists who settled the continent as acting out a divine plan and the revolution as an almost purely philosophical act, undertaken to model self-government for all the world.

The scholarly effort to revise this narrative began in the early 20th century with the work of the “Progressive historians,” most notably Charles A. Beard, who tried to show that the founders were motivated not exclusively by idealism and virtue but also by their pocketbooks. “Suppose,” Beard asked in 1913, “our fundamental law was not the product of an abstraction known as ‘the whole people,’ but of a group of economic interests which must have expected beneficial results from its adoption?” Though the Progressives’ work was influential, they were bitterly attacked for their theories, which shocked many Americans. “SCAVENGERS, HYENA-LIKE, DESECRATE THE GRAVES OF THE DEAD PATRIOTS WE REVERE,” blared one headline in an Ohio newspaper.

As the Cold War dawned, it became clear that this school could not provide the necessary inspiration for an America that envisioned itself a defender of global freedom and democracy. The Beardian approach was beaten back by the counter-Progressive or “Consensus” school, which emphasized the founders’ shared values and played down class conflict. Among Consensus historians, a keen sense of national purpose was evident, as well as an eagerness to disavow the whiff of Marxism in the progressive narrative and re-establish the founders’ idealism. In 1950, the Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison lamented that the Progressives were “robbing the people of their heroes” and “insulting their folk-memory of the great figures whom they admired.” Seven years later, one of his former students, Edmund S. Morgan, published “The Birth of the Republic, 1763-1789,” a key text of this era (described by one reviewer at the time as having the “brilliant hue of the era of Eisenhower prosperity”). Morgan stressed the revolution as a “search for principles” that led to a nation committed to liberty and equality.

By the 1960s, the pendulum was ready to swing the other way. A group of scholars identified variously as Neo-Progressive historians, New Left historians or social historians challenged the old paradigm, turning their focus to the lives of common people in colonial society and U.S. history more broadly. Earlier generations primarily studied elites, who left a copious archive of written material. Because the subjects of the new history — laborers, seamen, enslaved people, women, Indigenous people — produced relatively little writing of their own, many of these scholars turned instead to large data sets like tax lists, real estate inventories and other public records to illuminate the lives of what were sometimes called the “inarticulate masses.” This novel approach set aside “the central assumption of traditional history, what might be called the doctrine of implicit importance,” wrote the historian Jack P. Greene in a 1975 article in The Times. “From the perspective supplied by the new history, it has become clear that the experience of women, children, servants, slaves and other neglected groups are quite as integral to a comprehensive understanding of the past as that of lawyers, lords and ministers of state.”

An explosion of new research resulted, transforming the field of American history. One of the most significant developments was an increased attention to Black history and the role of slavery. For more than a century, a profession dominated by white men had mostly consigned these subjects to the sidelines. Bancroft had seen slavery as problematic — “an anomaly in a democratic country” — but mostly because it empowered a Southern planter elite he considered corrupt, lazy and aristocratic. Beard and the other Progressives hadn’t focused much on slavery, either. Until the 1950s, the institution was treated in canonical works of American history as an aberration best addressed minimally if at all. When it was taken up for close study, as in Ulrich B. Phillips’s 1918 book, “American Negro Slavery,” it was seen as an inefficient enterprise sustained by benevolent masters to whom enslaved people felt mostly gratitude. That began to change in the 1950s and 1960s, as works by Herbert Aptheker, Stanley Elkins, Philip S. Foner, John Hope Franklin, Eugene D. Genovese, Benjamin Quarles, Kenneth M. Stampp, C. Vann Woodward and many others transformed the mainstream view of slavery.

Among the converts was Edmund Morgan himself, who noted in a 1972 address that “American historians interested in tracing the rise of liberty, democracy and the common man have been challenged in the past two decades by other historians, interested in tracing the history of oppression, exploitation and racism. The challenge has been salutary, because it has made us examine more directly than historians have hitherto been willing to do the role of slavery in our early history. Colonial historians, in particular, when writing about the origin and development of American institutions, have found it possible until recently to deal with slavery as an exception to everything they had to say. I am speaking about myself but also about most of my generation.”

To be more precise, Morgan might have said that white historians had “found it possible” to hold slavery and the creation of American democracy entirely apart. Black historians, working outside the mainstream for a hundred years, tended to see the matter more clearly. For during this whole evolution in American history, from Bancroft through the 1960s, there was another scholarly tradition unfolding, one that only rarely gained entry into white-dominated academic spaces.

It began, like all historiographies, with the work of non-historians, the sermons, poems, speeches and memoirs by Black writers of the revolutionary period and beyond. The antebellum historians William C. Nell and William Wells Brown wrote scholarly accounts of Black participation in the American Revolution. But the first work by a Black author generally considered part of what was then the emerging field of professional history was George Washington Williams’s “History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880: Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers and as Citizens,” published in 1882.

Williams was an innovator. He had to be. In writing his landmark book, he pioneered several research methodologies that would later re-emerge among the social historians — the use of oral history, the aggregation of statistical data, even the use of newspapers as primary sources. His view of the centrality of slavery was also far ahead of its time:

No event in the history of North America has carried with it to its last analysis such terrible forces. It touched the brightest features of social life, and they faded under the contact of its poisonous breath. It affected legislation, local and national; it made and destroyed statesmen; it prostrated and bullied honest public sentiment; it strangled the voice of the press, and awed the pulpit into silent acquiescence; it organized the judiciary of States, and wrote decisions for judges; it gave States their political being, and afterwards dragged them by the fore-hair through the stormy sea of civil war; laid the parricidal fingers of Treason against the fair throat of Liberty, — and through all time to come no event will be more sincerely deplored than the introduction of slavery into the colony of Virginia during the last days of the month of August in the year 1619!

Like so many Black historians, Williams was writing against the grain, not only in his insistence on the influence of slavery in shaping American institutions but in something even more basic: his assumption of Black humanity. This challenge he faced is made clear from the first chapter of Volume I: “It is proposed, in the first place, to call the attention to the absurd charge that the Negro does not belong to the human family.” In a nation backtracking on the promise of Reconstruction, this was an inherently political statement. Just one year after “History of the Negro Race” was published, the U.S. Supreme Court would invalidate as unconstitutional the protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which barred racial discrimination in public accommodations and transportation. A country that denied Black people the rights of citizens could not also see them as significant historical actors.

“History is a science, a social science, but it’s also politics,” the historian Martha S. Jones, who contributed a chapter in the new 1619 book, told me. “And Black historians have always known that. They always know the stakes. In a world that would brand Africans as people without a history, Williams understood the political consequence of the assertion that Black people have history and might even be driving it.”

We can see evidence of this in the decades of Jim Crow that followed Reconstruction, when Black people were not only prevented from voting and denied access to a wide array of public accommodations but also, for the most part, kept out of the mainstream history profession. Nevertheless, a rich Black scholarly tradition continued to unfold in publications like The Journal of Negro History, founded by Carter G. Woodson in 1916, and in the work of scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois, Helen G. Edmonds, Lorenzo Greene, Luther P. Jackson, Rayford Logan, Benjamin Quarles and Charles H. Wesley. Quarles’s book “The Negro in the American Revolution,” published in 1961, was an important part of that decade’s historiographical reassessments. It was the first to thoroughly explore an often-overlooked feature of that war: that substantially more Black people were drawn to the British side than the Patriot cause, believing this the better path to freedom. Quarles’s work posed profound questions about the traditional narrative of the founding era. While acknowledging that for some white people the ideals of the Revolution had “exposed the inconsistencies” of chattel slavery in a nation founded on equality, he also observed a deeply uncomfortable fact: “They were far outnumbered by those who detected no ideological inconsistency. These white Americans, not considering themselves counterrevolutionary, would never have dreamed of repudiating the theory of natural rights. Instead they skirted the dilemma by maintaining that blacks were an outgroup rather than members of the body politic.”

The story told by Quarles and his predecessors amounted to a counternarrative of American history, one in which, contrary to what many white historians had argued, slavery was essential to the development of the colonies; Black soldiers played an important role on both sides of the American Revolution and in the Union victory in the Civil War; and Reconstruction was an idealistic attempt to make the United States an interracial democracy, not a failed experiment that served only to demonstrate the folly of giving Black people the right to vote.

It is no coincidence that this counternarrative began to break through in the 1960s, at the same time as Black Americans finally won that right, one that the 15th Amendment to the Constitution sought to guarantee in 1870 (for men), only to see it abrogated in all the Southern states by the turn of the century. As Bancroft demonstrated and Jones noted, history is not simply an academic exercise — it is inherently political. Those without political standing in the present are generally discounted as historical actors in the past. In the 1960s, after hundreds of years, American democracy had been made to include Black people; now American history would, too.

It’s one thing for scholars to face the “salutary” challenge that Morgan spoke of and quite another for the nation as a whole to reckon with a new history that acknowledges oppression, exploitation and racism. For generations, Hollywood movies, museum exhibits and, most of all, standard K-12 social-studies school curriculums had told a relatively simple, mostly stable and basically uplifting story about the American past. Two decades or so downstream from the political and historical paradigm shift of the 1960s, that began to change.

One driver of this change, curiously enough, was a conservative-led national anxiety about the competitiveness of the American work force in a globalized world. This gnawing fear was crystallized in breathless reports like 1983’s “A Nation at Risk,” commissioned by President Ronald Reagan’s Department of Education, which declared that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future.” This led to an unprecedented federal effort to raise the standard of instruction in public schools. In 1991, the administration of President George H.W. Bush announced an ambitious plan “to move every community in America toward the national education goals.” A cornerstone of this plan was the creation of voluntary educational guidelines in all the main subject areas that would bring the most up-to-date scholarly perspectives and pedagogical practices into the pre-collegiate classroom.

The National Endowment for the Humanities, then under the direction of Lynne Cheney, was responsible for helping to initiate the standards in history. Several years earlier, the N.E.H. created the National Center for History in Schools, an organization intended, in Cheney’s words, to “reinvigorate the study of history at all levels of elementary and secondary education.” The N.C.H.S. was located at U.C.L.A. and directed by Charlotte Crabtree, a scholar of education. Now Crabtree and Gary B. Nash, a historian of early America, were tapped to direct the country’s first-ever national standards for what schoolchildren should be taught about the American past.

This was a daunting challenge. To begin with, the paradigm shift of the 1960s resulted in a vast increase in the number of new histories. “Historical inquiries are ramifying in a hundred directions at once, and there is no coordination among them,” Bernard Bailyn, one of the nation’s most esteemed historians, wrote a few years earlier. The sheer volume of new history fractured what had been a simple story and fostered a sense of anxiety that the days of a single master narrative were over. Among academics, this collapse of “synthesis” was fretted over throughout the 1980s. And yet, as the scholar Nell Irvin Painter pointed out at the time, “The new histories expose the sad fact that the purported syntheses of the 1950s ... claimed to encompass all the American people but spoke only of a small segment.”

In this environment, channeling new research into national educational standards required delicate, methodical work. Over the next two and a half years, the N.C.H.S. undertook what its assistant director at the time, Linda Symcox, described as “a vast collaboration among public schoolteachers, state social-studies specialists, school superintendents, university historians and a broad range of professional and scholarly organizations, public interest groups, parents’ and teachers’ organizations and individual citizens nationwide.” As Nash described it later, “At no time in the previous century had so many different history educators from so many different sectors of the world of education worked collaboratively on a project of this magnitude.”

There were three separate volumes of the standards, one for U.S. history, one for world history and one for grades K through 4. The U.S. history standards were divided into 10 chronological eras, beginning with “Era 1: Three Worlds Meet,” in which students would learn “the characteristics of societies in the Americas, Western Europe and West Africa that increasingly interacted after 1450.” In “Era 2: Colonization and Settlement,” they would understand, among other things, “how the values and institutions of European economic life took root in the colonies” and “how slavery reshaped European and African life in the Americas.” And in “Era 3: Revolution and the New Nation,” they would come to see how “the American Revolution involved multiple movements among the new nation’s many groups to reform American society.”

In a sense, this was precisely what President Bush and Lynne Cheney had ordered up: a fresh set of educational guidelines that reflected the most up-to-date research. The problem, as Symcox shrewdly notes in her 2002 book, “Whose History? The Struggle for National Standards in American Classrooms,” was that “the standards were the product of recent historical scholarship that challenged traditional conceptions of the nation’s history.” The most up-to-date research had increasingly come to focus on the “formerly excluded,” whose “anonymous lives,” once recovered, “could not easily be incorporated into the traditional patriotic narrative of a shared and glorious past whose onward march had been determined solely by the actions of great leaders and generals.”

In October 1994, about a week before the standards were scheduled to be released to the public, Cheney — who had by then resigned from her position as head of the N.E.H. — published a column in The Wall Street Journal titled “The End of History.” Though she had helped start the process that led to the standards, she now professed to being appalled at how they had turned out, describing them in an interview as “grim and gloomy” and calling on readers to fight their certification. Many of her criticisms relied on misrepresentations, like the claim that the standards barely mentioned the Constitution (which was in fact mentioned often in the chapters explaining the relevant standards and in the sample activities for teachers); others evinced skepticism toward the increased inclusivity that marked the previous decades’ scholarship, such as her complaint that Harriet Tubman was mentioned more times than Ulysses S. Grant. Standing in the way of this agenda would be a challenge, she warned, because “those wishing to do so will have to go up against an academic establishment that revels in the kind of politicized history that characterizes much of the national standards. But the battle is worth taking on. We are a better people than the national standards indicate, and our children deserve to know it.”

Cheney’s column stunned Crabtree, with whom she had worked closely for years. (Ross E. Dunn, a professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University and associate director of the N.C.H.S., told me that this ended their relationship.) Rush Limbaugh followed Cheney’s lead, weighing in just days after her column to lambaste the standards as a “bastardization of American history” and complaining that the United States “does not deserve the reputation it’s getting in multicultural classrooms.” A headline in The Times noted that the “Plan to Teach U.S. History Is Said to Slight White Males.” Charles Krauthammer’s Washington Post column “History Hijacked” inveighed against the standards for trying “to promote the achievements and highlight the victimization of the country’s preferred minorities, while straining equally to degrade the achievements and highlight the flaws of the white males who ran the country for its first two centuries.”

Though Cheney had distorted the standards, she had effectively “dictated the script that others would follow,” as Symcox put it. A letter to the editor in response to her column commended Cheney for revealing that the work of Nash and the others was “nothing more than a cynical ploy to indoctrinate children with their own hatred of America; to steal the American birthright from the children of our country; to teach our children to feel guilt over their own heritage.” It continued, “Are we prepared to allow the haters of America to dictate how American history will be taught to our children?”

As soon as they were released, the country’s first national guidelines for teaching American history were torpedoed, but not by serious scholars. By the mid-1990s, there was no longer much dispute among academic historians about the importance of social history; Black history and Black studies had gained a foothold in the history departments of many American universities, which themselves had changed significantly — for the first time, many now included female and African American professors. The dispute over the standards was brought not by academics but by politicians, pundits and lay historians.

“Controversies about the teaching and writing of history had occurred at a number of times in the past, but these had mostly taken place within the historical profession,” the historian Eric Foner told me. “But the direct politicization of history during the standards debate was something new. Once history became a political football, the conversation was taken over by demagoguery and misrepresentation.”

Timing played a role. The controversy erupted just weeks before the 1994 midterm elections. Rallying behind Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, Republican congressional candidates across the country were in the homestretch of a campaign that would result in their party’s regaining control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Attacking the standards was a way to reaffirm commitment to an idealized view of the past portrayed as being under attack from “political correctness” and “multiculturalism.” This perspective is perhaps best laid out in the analysis found in the first chapter of Gingrich’s 1995 book, “To Renew America” :

From the arrival of English-speaking colonists in 1607 until 1965, there was one continuous civilization built around a set of commonly accepted legal and cultural principles. From the Jamestown colony and the Pilgrims, through Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” up to the Norman Rockwell paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, there was a clear sense of what it meant to be an American. Our civilization is based on a spiritual and moral dimension. It emphasizes personal responsibility as much as individual rights. Since 1965, however, there has been a calculated effort by cultural elites to discredit this civilization.

By the time his book was published, Gingrich and the other members of his Republican Revolution had been sworn in, the first session of Congress since 1954 in which the G.O.P. controlled both houses. One of the first acts of the Senate was to pass a nonbinding resolution repudiating the national history standards and affirming that any recipient of federal funds for developing standards “should have a decent respect for the contributions of Western civilization, and United States history, ideas and institutions, to the increase of freedom and prosperity around the world.”

Much has changed in the past 25 years, as new research has transformed and expanded the field of American history yet again. Among other subjects, the role of Black women in the nation’s story has increasingly been an area of focus. It was only in the 1980s that the Library of Congress, trying to classify Deborah Gray White’s “Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South,” approved a new heading in its classification system for “women slaves.” Since then, a huge amount of scholarship has been published about the experience of enslaved women, including pathbreaking research like Annette Gordon-Reed’s work on the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a woman who was one of the hundreds of people the third president enslaved. For many generations, some historians denied that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Hemings or that she bore some of his children. Gordon-Reed’s work, along with DNA testing published in 1998 that confirmed Jefferson’s paternity, established the relationship beyond a doubt.

And yet today we find ourselves back in the midst of another battle over the teaching of American history. Though it differs in some respects from the debate over the national history standards, the two episodes have enough in common that the conclusions drawn by Nash and Crabtree in their 1997 book, “History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past,” written with Ross E. Dunn, offer some insight into our present struggles. For them, the culture war of the 1990s was clearly connected to the upheaval in American historiography. In their view, the standards’ opponents believed that “history that dwells on unsavory or even horrific episodes in our past is unpatriotic and likely to alienate young students from their own country.” Their own perspective was that “exposing students to grim chapters of our past is essential to the creation of informed, responsible citizens.”

This dispute about the use and potential misuse of history, it seems to me, is what we have been arguing about for the past two years. (Indeed, Dunn told me that about a month before his death, in July 2021, Nash proposed an updated edition of “History on Trial” that would address the wave of “divisive concepts” legislation.) You hear it in Trump’s warning that the 1619 Project would “dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together”; it’s there in the explanation given by State Representative Danny Crawford of Alabama, for the bill he sponsored to ban the teaching of critical race theory: “To start teaching something like that just inflames and throws salt on the wound”; and in the comment by Glenn Youngkin, the governor-elect of Virginia, to a radio host in June that “Slavery was abhorrent, but it doesn’t mean that we have to actually drive division into our schools.”

It also appears in more scholarly form in a review of the historian Alan Taylor’s 2016 book, “American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804,” by Gordon Wood, one of the five historians who wrote the letter to the editor protesting the 1619 Project. The version of the revolution narrated by Taylor, who holds the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair in American History at the University of Virginia and has twice won the Pulitzer Prize, is raucous, complicated, unheroic and based on extremely rigorous scholarship. It also asserts that among the motivations of the colonists who broke away from Britain was the protection of slavery: “In the Southern mainland colonies, Patriots fought to preserve slavery for Blacks as well as the liberty of whites. Indeed, they regarded slave labor as an essential economic foundation for sustaining the freedom of white men.” Astute readers will note the similarities between this line and the sentence in Nikole’s essay that was at the center of the five historians’ complaints. In his review, Wood raises no direct objection to this interpretation, but he concludes with concern : “The question raised by Taylor’s book is this: Can a revolution conceived mainly as sordid, racist and divisive be the inspiration for a nation?”

Instilling civic pride, of course, has always been one of the purposes of national history. The political goals of Bancroft’s narrative are self-evident, as are those of George Washington Williams’s “History of the Negro Race.” But it is only in the past few decades, since the historiographical paradigm shift of the 1960s finally trickled into the public consciousness, that we have had to face down the question of how to square this purpose with an increasingly problematic story line. Another way to pose the dilemma is to invert Wood’s question: What if a revolution conceived as sordid, racist and divisive cannot be the inspiration for a nation? What then? Should we set aside the best scholarship in favor of a unifying myth? Is history a science or a patriotic art?

And what are its responsibilities? Democracy, we are often told, requires a free press, one that will hold power to account. Does it also require a robust historical profession, free to ramify in a hundred directions at once, not all of them inspiring? Or in this regard do journalism and history differ, with journalism providing democracy its greatest service when most unshackled and critical, while history operates best with the sense of decorum and tradition that foments civic pride?

The answer may lie in another of history’s purposes, one that draws it closer to a core mission of journalism: to explain how we have arrived at the world we inhabit. “History is worth writing and studying primarily because of its power to shape our thinking about our present and future,” Gary Nash wrote. With this purpose in mind, the upheaval in American history seems less like a destabilizing force and more like a movement toward transparency, a clearing away of spin. With any luck, our descendants will see the past from a more propitious perspective than our own. But we can perceive it only from our present reality: a nation plagued by rampant inequality and racial injustice, bitterly divided in its politics and incapable of achieving unity on public-health goals or the existential demands of climate change.

Over the years, many scholars have pointed out the need for a story that better explains how we got here. “Our times seem to call for new myths and a revised master narrative that better inspire and reflect upon our true condition,” observed the historian Nathan Irvin Huggins in 1989. Standing in what he called “the backwash of the so-called Second Reconstruction,” Huggins, who was the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of History and of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, envisioned a narrative that might take shape out of the fragmentation of the new history, one that would be more chastened but also, in a sense, more heroic: “Such a new narrative would find inspiration,” he wrote, “in an oppressed people who defied social death as slaves and freedmen, insisting on their humanity and creating a culture despite a social consensus that they were ‘a brutish sort of people.’ Such a new narrative would bring slavery and the persistent oppression of race from the margins to the center, to define the limits and boundaries of the American Dream. Such a new narrative would oblige us to face the deforming mirror of truth.”

This is, in a sense, what the 1619 Project set out to do. As an issue of a magazine, produced from start to finish in six months, it could only partly achieve that goal. Whether the book has drawn closer is for others to say, but our hope in publishing it is to realize Nikole’s original idea as fully as we can. To that end, “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story” represents a significant enlargement of the version of the project we produced two years ago. That version was not perfect, as few first efforts are, and the enormous amount of feedback we’ve received — both praise and criticism — has helped us deepen and improve it. We revised and expanded the 10 original essays and added seven new essays from the historians and scholars Leslie Alexander, Michelle Alexander, Carol Anderson, Anthea Butler, Martha S. Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, Tiya Miles and Dorothy Roberts.

The original project also featured 17 works of fiction and poetry about specific moments in the past 400 years; for the book, this timeline has been expanded to include 36 pieces of original imaginative writing, beginning with a 1619 poem by Claudia Rankine and ending with a 2020 poem by Sonia Sanchez. This literary element nods to the role of creative writing in the Black historiographical tradition (as in many others, from the Greeks to the Elizabethans to the Ashanti). “For those of us whose history has been erased,” the poet, novelist and scholar Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, who wrote a poem for the book, told me, “it is important for us to be able to imagine what our ancestors went through.” All told, the book contains the essays, poetry and fiction of more than 50 writers, all of which was submitted to a peer-review process involving more than 25 other scholars. Their names are listed in the book, which also contains footnotes to relevant documents and works of historical scholarship.

I am aware that no matter how diligent the work has been, the book will kick up a new round of debates. After all, years of careful consensus-building around the national history standards did nothing to forestall that eruption. But in a sense, these arguments themselves may represent the apotheosis of our historiography. “Increasingly, I understand U.S. history as the history of debate, and our style of democracy as one that moves only through contest and challenge,” Martha Jones told me. “We lament conflict and strife, but I think the lesson is that that’s exactly how we do and must do democracy.”

Perhaps, as Jones suggests, we are a nation of argument that has been fooled all these years, through the exclusionary mythmaking of an elite few, into thinking we were a nation of consensus. Our present turmoil suggests as much. The story of a country designed by Providence and set marching on the righteous path by leaders of pure and noble purpose fails to make sense of this moment, which requires a deeper examination of our founding paradox.

It’s a particularly American irony that the effort to do so has been deemed a “divisive concept” and banned from the classroom in 12 states. We may need, instead, legislation that requires us to study divisive concepts, beginning with the most basic one of all: All men are created equal. As Quarles and others have explained, our founding concept of universal equality, in a country where one-fifth of the population was enslaved, led to an increase in racial prejudice by creating a cognitive dissonance — one that could be resolved only by the white citizenry’s assumption of Black inferiority and inhumanity. It’s an unsettling idea, that the most revered ideal of the Declaration of Independence might be considered our original divisive concept.

Devotion to the traditional origin story of the United States, and the hostile reaction that has greeted nearly every attempt to revise it, have prevented generations of Americans from learning how to accept this fundamental contradiction at our core — the painful twinning of slavery and democracy that began as far back as the summer of 1619. But as we have seen, in a democratic nation, history does not stand still. As our country has moved forward from its imperfect beginnings, haltingly expanding its audacious promise to enfranchise more and more of us, our history has transformed behind us, rearranging itself as the advance of our founding principles enables us to see more of our American ancestors as having had a legitimate, recoverable perspective on the events of their own day.

We reached this stage only recently (and should not consider our progress secure). As Nikole pointed out in her prizewinning essay, an essay that has done so much to stimulate public engagement with American history over the past two years, we Americans have precious little experience of true, sustained multiracial democracy. Our great experiment in self-governance, deferred by nearly a century of slavery after our founding and by another century of Jim Crow voter suppression after emancipation, really got underway only in 1965. You could see the pitched battles over public memory that have occurred since then as a product of the new history’s corrosive effect on national unity; or you could conclude that a republic founded on an irresolvable contradiction — freedom and slavery — was always going to wind up in an irresolvable argument over how to tell its story, that this contentiousness is American democracy, that the loss of consensus means we’ve finally arrived.

Photography credits: Du Bois: Getty Images. Bancroft: via Library of Congress. Beard: Library of Congress. Morgan: Bob Child/Associated Press. Quarles: via Beulah M. Davis Special Collections, Morgan State University. Woodson: Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Nash: Ann Johansson. Gordon-Reed: Tony Rinaldo. Huggins: via Harvard University Archives.

An earlier version of this article referred incompletely to early critics of the 1619 Project. The World Socialist Web Site, which published numerous articles about the project and interviewed historians with objections to its conclusions, was among them. 

How we handle corrections

Advertisement

History Project Ideas for Class 9 Students

Check out our comprehensive list of history project topics for class 9 with simple explanations and guided steps to help you get started. Get free pdf’s.

• History Project On Colonial Cities For Class 9
• Project On The Cold War For Class 9th
• History Project Idea For Class 9th
• Project On Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan For Class 9
• Project On Democracy For Class 9th
• History Project On Chandrashekhar Azad For Class 9th & 10th
• History Project On The Mauryan Empire For Class 9 & 10

In order to download the PDF, You must follow on Youtube. Once done, Click on Submit

Subscribed? Click on Confirm

Download History Project Ideas for Class 9 Students PDF

Related articles.

Social Science Project Topics For Class 10 CBSE

Solar Vacuum Cleaner & Floor Cleaner Robot Project

Cam Shaft Mechanism DIY Ventilator Project

Android Hostel Management System

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Please Enable JavaScript in your Browser to Visit this Site.

• Skip to main content
• Skip to primary sidebar
• Skip to footer

Additional menu

Khan Academy Blog

Start your 13.8 billion-year journey with the Big History Project

posted on September 10, 2014

The Big History Project is now available on Khan Academy. Whether you’re a solo learner or a classroom teacher, get ready to take a self-paced journey through nearly 14 billion years of history in just 10 tutorials!

Big History asks the big questions about our universe, our planet, life and humanity. From the Big Bang to our still-expanding universe, this course, created and maintained by the Big History Project, will lead students on a journey of astounding connections and exciting discoveries. 

The lessons also draw upon the insights of history, chemistry, biology, anthropology, physics, and a variety of other disciplines. Teacher-created lessons include downloadable activities, engaging videos, animations, and articles that bring the voices of leading scholars from around the world to you…and bring history to life.

Today, there’s more information available to us on our phones than was available in all the great libraries of Alexandria, so how do we decide what claims we can trust? Big History guides learners through examining their intuition, looking at the authority, evidence, and logic of claims.

Big History also looks beyond the timeline of human history to explore the connections between distant events billions of years ago and our lives today.

From the massive expanse of the universe to the smallest of atoms, Big History guides you to think across temporal and physical scales.

Both in articles and at the end of each tutorial, students and teachers can access downloadable and printable classroom resources such as lesson transcripts, video transcripts, worksheets and answer keys. Quizzes and glossary challenges allow teachers to assess student comprehension.

Start your journey now!

Get Khanmigo

The best way to learn and teach with AI is here. Ace the school year with our AI-powered guide, Khanmigo. 

For learners     For teachers     For parents

National Council on Public History

This directory is a free guide to history-focused digital projects for students, faculty, public history professionals, and anyone interested in learning about history through digital media.

It is designed to help connect researchers and learners with resources that can help them explore their interests, and to promote and share the wide range of digital projects in existence. This directory does not include all digital projects, but is vetted by the Digital Media Group for projects that are focused on the study or interpretation of historical subject matter, are open access, and are built with the intention of engaging a wide audience.

NCPH also intends for this to be a resource for those interested in developing their own digital projects by including information on costs, funding, labor, software, etc. for each entry.

The directory includes various filters to help you navigate to projects of interest and is keyword searchable.

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

If you would like to create an entry for your project, please complete the online form here. (It takes about 10-15 mins. to complete the online form. We recommend that you first consult some of the existing entries so that you know what information is expected about your project.)

Submit a Project

Yesterqueers

LGBTQ+, Queer Culture, Queer People, Queer Studies, Transgender Archives, Two-Spirit People

Software Used

• Squarespace, Power Director

Full Details

Coding The Past

Modern History, European History

IFPH Explorers

Global Public History

Armenians of Whitinsville

Armenian Immigrant History

Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective

Picturing black history.

African American, Modern American History

Chinese Students at Andover, 1878-2000

Chinese students, International relations, Phillips Academy, United States. Chinese Exclusion Act

Cartoon Asheville

World War I, African American, Women's Suffrage, Prohibition

The Capra Bailey Project

United States, Popular Culture. 1917---

Better Craftsmen, Not Gods: An Online Exhibit on the Editing of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”

Literature, Modernism, Art, Editing

• Craft and custom CMS

Sign Up to Receive News and Announcements Emails from NCPH

• Only members receive our weekly e-newsletter, but on occasion we send news and announcements to broader audiences. This includes information about our annual meeting and other events, advocacy alerts, and opportunities in the public history field.
• Name * First Last
• Annual Meeting Information
• NCPH News and Announcements
• NCPH Advocacy Efforts
• News and opportunities from NCPH Affiliates
• I have read and understood the Privacy Statement
• Name This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

You may unsubscribe or change your preferences at anytime by emailing [email protected] Cavanaugh Hall 127, 425 University Blvd., Indianapolis, IN 46202-5140 (317) 274-2716 [email protected]

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

NPR's history podcast 'Throughline': Nikole Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project

Ramtin Arablouei

Rund Abdelfatah

The book associated with The New York Times Magazine initiative, The 1619 Project, has been a best seller. The project aims to reframe the scope of American history through the lens of slavery.

Copyright © 2021 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Fun History Project Ideas & Hands-On Activities

• Posted by by Maddie
• October 27, 2020

History lessons can be dry and boring if you rely completely on a dry and boring textbook. But there is a better way!

It’s so easy to make history come alive with the right books and resources. One of the best ways to make your history lessons fun and interesting is with well-planned hands-on history projects.

Want to save this recipe? Enter your email below and we’ll send the recipe straight to your inbox!

NOTE: By saving this recipe, you agree to join our weekly recipes newsletter.

No matter the time period you’re studying, there are some activity ideas you can easily include. Hands-on history projects are a wonderful way to make history lessons come alive for your kids. Now, you don’t need to do a hands-on project every day – but a few well-planned projects can make all the difference.

Hands-on history activities and projects can: 

• Give you a better understanding of the time and culture.
• Can help you see historical context and how events and people are related.
• Engage kids in their learning.

It’s so easy to become passive learners – read this, fill out that worksheet… blah… blah… blah… However, when we find ways to engage our kids in their learning, it makes such a difference. You can do this will read aloud, interesting assignments, and of course, hands-on projects and activities.

Engaging the minds (and hands) of our kids makes all the difference in their educational experience. Now that you’re convinced to add some hands-on fun to your homeschool day, how should you do it?

Don’t fill your days with meaningless activities. One well-planned and executed activity each week will go much further than a day filled with boring and mindless activities. Best of all, you don’t need a pile of activity books or resources. With just a handful of ideas that can be applied to any time period or culture will be just as useful.

I’ve put together my favourite ways in which we create hands-on learning experiences for History lessons, but as always I’d love to know yours too – so, if there’s one I’ve missed be sure to leave me a comment.

Learn About The Artists Of The Time

When you’re immersing yourself in the culture or time period, take a look at the art from that era or geographical area. Artists, their lives and artwork give us a glimpse of life during that time – how the people dressed and what was important to them.

• Create art using the same mediums as artists from that time period
• Use artwork as inspiration for your own creations
• Read biographies about the artist

Create A Lap Book

Lapbooks and notebooks are a great way to create a capsule of all the things your kids are learning.

They can create little mini-books and interactive booklets filled with details about the time period, the people, the culture… really, anything that interests them. They are a great choice for research assignments.

Kids can research a specific topic and include the information they find in their lap book or notebook. Best of all, a completed notebook or lap book becomes a great addition to your year-end portfolio – displaying everything your kids have studied and learned that year.

Immerse Yourself In The Time Period & Culture

Well-thought-out activities can really immerse you and your kids in the culture and time period of a certain people.

Confession: I know so much about ancient Egyptian history ( believe me, I knocked it out of the park watching a recent episode of Jeopardy and knew the answer to every question for that category! ).

Why did that happen? Because of how we’ve immersed ourselves in our lessons during that subject – researching maps, making our own fruity mummy, reciting a list of important pharaohs, reading the myths and stories of the people.

No matter the time period or country you’re studying you can apply this in a few different ways:

• Researching and creating costumes
• Making a meal using recipes from that country
• Reading the myths or legends of the country

Play A Game

I love to include games whenever I can – they are such a great learning resource – and who wouldn’t rather play a game than fill out a worksheet?

It can get expensive buying games for every time period you study. Instead, you can opt to find online games or purchase downloadable plans for games that you put together yourself (the bonus being it’s a great craft too!)

Tip: we love to listen to audiobooks while we color, cut out, and assemble our game boards.

Some of my favourite history games available include;

• BBC Interactive Games
• KS3 History Games
• Homeschool Giveaways
• Education.com
• Wonderfilled Days

Of course, this is just the beginning, a quick Google will help you find hidden gems specifically related to the person or time period your studying. For example, we did some work on Rosa Parks recently and simply googled ‘Rosa Parks Games’ you can add on a specific age or grade if you’re looking for something specific.

We had thousands of results and the top ten were more than sufficient to keep us going for a couple of weeks! I also found a whole host of new websites to bookmark and use as resources for the future which was a huge bonus.

Create A Map

Understanding how one country fits into the geography of an area brings a whole new level of understanding about that place. Taking time to study that country – its hills, borders, mountains, and other details – can help you see their culture and life in a new way.

You can look at historical atlases or maps. Alternatively, if you’re looking to incorporate crafts then download and print, then color in or even draw your own map of the area.

Consider taking it to the next level and making it even more hands-on by incorporating salt-dough, cookie dough or play dough. We recently covered the Olympics and how they are incorporated into our history both as a nation and worldwide, to make the learning experience more hands-on we followed this incredible salt dough DIY to make some super fun Olympic medals.

Build A 3D Model

Does the country or historical era you’re currently studying have any interesting buildings or inventions? These could be perfect 3D construction models. Either from pre-made kits available online or as a craft.

For example, the 1930s was the decade in which the Empire State Building was built in New York City. The 102-story Art Deco skyscraper is a fantastic demonstration of the architecture in the 1930s and leads onto a discussion surrounding building materials and skyscrapers / high rise building structures.

This free printable allows you to print off a model of the Empire State Building which can be made into a 3D model. Alternatively, consider using construction blocks such as Lego or Duplo .

Create A Timeline

A history timeline is a wonderful project that every middle school child should create. Seeing how historical events and people fit together gives them a better understanding of historical context and how all those events and people are interrelated.

You can create one large timeline for the whole period you are studying or, if that feels a bit overwhelming, smaller topic-based timelines can be just as useful.

Consider displaying this timeline in your homeschooling room, in a bedroom or storing it safely so you can get it out and reference/add to it as your knowledge of historical events improves. These free history timelines are perfect for getting you started .

You can look to take this to the next level with a family tree or family timeline too. This is a great way to discuss important dates such as the years grandparents were born and what special events happened during that year. Get the children to interview the member of the family about what life was like back then – they could even write a report on what life was like which leads us nicely onto our final history project idea.

Do Some Creative Writing

For those kids who love journaling and creative writing, history is a great place to let their creativity run wild. They can journal as if they lived during that time period, ‘interview’ a famous figure of the time, or create their own writing assignment ideas.

This is a great way for children to also improve on their spelling, grammar, research and more…

For a more long-term creative writing project, consider a newspaper. Publish a report once a week as you move through the years week by week. With 52 weeks in a year, you could cover 52 years and of course, this doesn’t have to start when newspapers started. Instead, you could report as though you’re living in Aztec times if you wanted.

Alternatively, you could adapt the reports depending on the time of year. For example, New Year’s eve in the 1930s, Halloween in the 1970s or Christmas in the 1870s.

If your kids are fond of being in front of the camera, consider getting them to record the report on a video camera instead of writing it down. They could even dress the part too.

Like this recipe? Save it to your Pinterest board now!

Post navigation

Timberdoodle Homeschool Review

Leonardo da Vinci Art Projects For School Kids

Everything you wrote here is so inspiring! From my experience I know that using games is way more fun than flashcards or worksheets! And, as a bonus, most games require at least the skills of strategy and/or speed, too. Each parent should carefully watch their child and adjust the number of tasks to their abilities. It is better to do less practice than force your child to solve tasks which they no longer want to do and which can. We want our children to develop through play. Chess is the perfect example for this matter. Don’t try to play entire game from the very begining of your chess adventure. Use diagrams like those – net-bossorg/chess-puzzles-for-kids-by-maksim-aksanov. Perfect diagrams for the perfect start 🙂

Thank you for making this.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

• Message from the Directors
• Our Mission and Philosophy
• Community and Center of Excellence
• Our Services
• Events Calendar
• Wellness Support
• Newsletter Archives
• Nutrition Resources

Remembering 9/11

• Roots in the Responder Community
• For Educators
• Previous Events
• Research at a Glance
• Featured Videos
• The World Trade Center
• Our Research Projects in the WTC Responder Population

The Remembering 9/11 Oral History Project is an endeavor with deep roots. Treating responders at the Stony Brook WTC Health and Wellness Program in the years after September 11th, director Dr. Benjamin Luft and his colleagues continue to feel profoundly about their responsibility not only to offer medical care, but to act as stewards for their program members’ unique memories of that day and their work at the WTC sites. Coverage for their 9/11 healthcare was the hard-won result of much advocacy and work by responders and supporters; during their clinic visits, countless responders worried aloud that the benefits would disappear as the years passed. And so, as a way to preserve history recorded from a personal perspective and keep the conversation about 9/11 alive, the project was founded in 2009. A volunteer effort, it began with five willing responders; a handful of faculty, staff, and students from Stony Brook and Hofstra University; a video camera; and scant other resources.

The Project collection was donated in its entirety to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, where it remains available to the public; housed into perpetuity. The public can search the archive by information provided by the responders (e.g. name, hometown), occupations, and extensive metadata collected by the project staff. We are continuously working to expand the reach of this project, creating partnerships with various other organizations and founding additional ventures.

Remembering 9/11 has allowed for the establishment of other creative endeavors, including the documentary, 9/11: An American Requiem, and a companion book, We’re Not Leaving. They were produced in 2011 for the tenth anniversary of September 11th, and now serve as the basis for our educational and outreach programming.

9/11: An American Requiem- Abbreviated version

9/11: Hero Stories

220+ Captivating History Project Topics For Students In 2023

History projects are a fascinating gateway to the past, allowing students to delve into the annals of time, discover intriguing stories, and gain a deeper understanding of our world’s evolution. But what exactly are history projects? These are comprehensive assignments that engage students in researching, analyzing, and presenting historical events, figures, or themes.

In today’s world, the importance of history projects in a student’s life cannot be overstated. They foster critical thinking, research skills, and a sense of connection to the past, making them valuable learning tools. However, the key to a successful history project lies in understanding the essential elements it should encompass.

In this blog, we will explore the world of history project topics, providing a list of over 220 captivating ideas for students in 2023. We’ll also share tips for selecting the best topics and highlight common mistakes to avoid. Stay tuned with us to uncover the exciting realm of history project topics.

What Are History Projects?

Table of Contents

History projects are educational assignments where students explore and investigate events, people, or themes from the past. These projects typically require students to conduct research, gather information, and present their findings in various formats. 

In a history project, students might choose a specific historical topic that interests them, such as a famous historical figure, an important event, or a particular time period. They then gather information from sources like books, articles, and websites, and sometimes even conduct interviews or surveys. Once they have collected their data, they organize it and create a presentation, report, or other creative work to share their discoveries with their classmates and teachers. This process helps students gain a deeper understanding of history and strengthens their research, critical thinking, and communication skills.

Importance Of History Projects In Student’s Life

Here are some importance of history projects in student’s life: 

1. Clear Topic and Question

A good history project should have a clear and focused topic or question. This helps students stay on track and ensures the project’s purpose is evident.

2. Research and Sources

Thorough research is crucial. Students should use a variety of reliable sources, like books, articles, and interviews, to gather information and support their project.

3. Organization and Structure

A well-organized project is essential. Students should structure their work with a clear introduction, body, and conclusion to make it easy for others to follow.

4. Visuals and Creativity

Visual elements and creativity enhance a history project. Using images, charts, and creative presentation methods can make the project more engaging and informative.

5. Proper Citations

To maintain academic integrity, students should include proper citations for all sources used. This shows respect for others’ work and helps avoid plagiarism issues.

Elements Must Be Present In A Good History Project

Here are some elements that must be present in a good history project:

In this section we provide 220+ captivating history project topics for students in 2023:

Ancient Civilizations

• The Rise & Fall of the Roman Empire.
• Ancient Greece: Democracy and Philosophy.
• The Pyramids of Giza: Engineering Marvels of Ancient Egypt.
• Mesopotamia: Cradle of Civilization.
• The Indus Valley Civilization: Uncovering an Enigmatic Society.
• Mayan Civilization: Astronomy and Mathematics.
• Inca Empire: Engineering and Road Systems.
• Ancient China: The Great Wall and the Silk Road.
• The Olmec Civilization: Mesoamerica’s First Great Culture.
• Carthage and Rome: Punic Wars and Mediterranean Dominance.
• Ancient India: Maurya and Gupta Empires.
• The Hittites: Masters of Iron and Diplomacy.
• The Persian Empire: Darius and Xerxes.
• The Hellenistic Era: Alexander the Great’s Legacy.
• The Sumerians: Early Urbanization and Writing Systems.
• The Causes of World War I.
• The Treaty of Versailles: Seeds of World War II.
• The Battle of Stalingrad: Turning Point in World War II.
• The Holocaust: Nazi Atrocities and Genocide.
• D-Day and the Normandy Invasion.
• The race to build the first nuclear weapon is known as the Manhattan Project.
• The Nuremberg Trials: Accountability for War Crimes.
• The Pacific Theater in World War II: Island Hopping and the Atomic Bomb.
• The Cold War: The United States and the Soviet Union.
• The Cuban Missile Crisis: Brinkmanship and Diplomacy.
• The Armenian Genocide: A Forgotten Tragedy.
• The African Front in World War I and II.
• The Home Front: Civilian Experiences During World War II.
• The Treaty of Tordesillas: Impact on Colonial Expansion.
• The Russian Revolution: Bolsheviks and the Fall of the Tsar.

Civil Rights Movements

• The United States Civil Right Movement: Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.
• Apartheid in South Africa: Nelson Mandela’s Struggle.
• Women’s Suffrage: The Fight for Women’s Voting Rights.
• The LGBTQ+ Rights Movement: Stonewall Riots and Beyond.
• Indigenous Rights Movements: Native American and Aboriginal Struggles.
• Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers’ Movement.
• The Anti-Apartheid Movement Worldwide.
• Disability Rights Advocacy: Americans with Disabilities Act.
• The Black Lives Matter Movement.
• LGBTQ+ Rights in Modern Europe.
• Environmental Justice: The Intersection of Civil Rights and Ecology.
• Disability Rights: International Perspectives.
• The Arab Spring: Protests and Uprisings in the Middle East.
• Human Rights in the 20th Century: Key Milestones.
• The 1960s and 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement.

Industrial Revolution

• The Impact of the Steam Engine on Industry.
• Child Labor in the Industrial Revolution.
• Urbanization and the Industrial Revolution.
• The Cotton Gin: Revolutionizing Agriculture.
• Innovations in Transportation: Trains and Steamships.
• The Factory System: Labor Conditions and Organizing.
• Technological Advancements in Textile Manufacturing.
• Urban Planning and the Industrial City.
• The Luddites: Workers’ Resistance to Machinery.
• Economic Impact of the Industrial Revolution.
• The Role of Women in the Industrial Workforce.
• The Spread of Industrialization to Europe and Beyond.
• Industrial Revolution in Japan: Meiji Restoration.
• Iron and Steel Industry: Building the Modern World.
• Environmental Consequences of Industrialization.

Medieval History

• The Crusades: Holy Wars and Their Impact.
• Feudalism in Medieval Europe: Lords, Vassals, and Serfs.
• The Black Death: Plague and Its Consequences.
• The Round Table Legends and King Arthur.
• The Viking Age: Raiders and Explorers.
• Charlemagne: Carolingian Empire and the Holy Roman Empire.
• Byzantine Empire: The Eastern Roman Legacy.
• Medieval Castles: Fortifications and Siege Warfare.
• The Hundred Years’ War: England and France.
• Medieval Chivalry and Knights.
• Islamic Golden Age: Science, Medicine, and Philosophy.
• The Inquisition: Heresy and Religious Persecution.
• Joan of Arc: The Maid of Orleans.
• Medieval Monasticism: Monks and Monasteries.
• Gothic Architecture: Cathedrals and Church Building.

Ancient Egypt

• Pharaohs of Egypt: Power and Religion.
• Hieroglyphics and the Rosetta Stone.
• Tutankhamun’s Tomb: Discovery and Treasures.
• Ancient Egyptian Medicine and Healing Practices.
• The Nile River: Lifeblood of Ancient Egypt.
• Ancient Egyptian Art and Architecture.
• The Great Sphinx: Symbolism and Mystery.
• Akhenaten and the Amarna Period.
• Cleopatra: The Last Pharaoh of Egypt.
• Nubia: The Land of Ancient Kush.
• Ancient Egyptian Mummies and Burial Practices.
• Ancient Egyptian Mathematics and Geometry.
• The Book of the Dead: A Guide to the Afterlife.
• Ancient Egyptian Trade and Commerce.
• The Pyramid of Khufu (Great Pyramid): Construction and Purpose.

American Revolution

• The Boston Tea Party: Prelude to Revolution.
• The Declaration of Independence: Birth of a Nation.
• George Washington: Leadership in the Revolutionary War.
• The Battles of Lexington and Concord.
• The Loyalists: British Sympathizers in America.
• Women in the American Revolution.
• The Revolution’s Impact on Native Americans.
• The Continental Congress: Shaping the United States.
• African Americans in the Revolutionary Era.
• The Enlightenment and its Influence on American Revolution.
• The Siege of Yorktown: Final Battle of Independence.
• The Articles of Confederation: Early Government Challenges.
• The Marquis de Lafayette: A French Hero of the Revolution.
• The Constitutional Convention: Crafting the U.S. Constitution.

Colonial History

• Jamestown: The First Permanent English Settlement.
• The Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony.
• The Mayflower Compact: Early American Governance.
• Roanoke Colony: The Lost Colony Mystery.
• New Amsterdam and Dutch Colonialism.
• The Salem Witch Trials: Hysteria and Accusations.
• The Spanish Colonization of the Americas.
• French and Indian War: Impact on North America.
• The Proprietors of Carolina: Origins of Southern Colonies.
• The New England Colonies: Puritans and Religious Freedom.
• Slavery in the Colonial Era.
• The Navigation Acts and Colonial Trade.
• The Albany Plan of Union: A Step Toward Independence.
• Indentured Servitude: Labor in the Colonies.
• The Triangular Trade: Commerce and the Slave Trade.

Women in History

• Susan B. Anthony: Pioneering Women’s Suffrage Activist.
• Hatshepsut: Ancient Egypt’s Female Pharaoh.
• Marie Curie: Breakthroughs in Science and Gender Barriers.
• Sojourner Truth: Advocate for Abolition and Women’s Rights.
• Queen Victoria: The Longest-Reigning British Monarch.
• Rosa Parks and Ella Baker were two women involved in the Civil Rights Movement.
• Hypatia of Alexandria: Scholar and Mathematician.
• Margaret Thatcher: The Iron Lady of British Politics.
• Women in World War II: Rosie the Riveter and Beyond.
• Malala Yousafzai: Advocating for Girls’ Education.
• Harriet Tubman: Leading the Underground Railroad.
• Queen Isabella I of Castile: Patron of Columbus and Spanish Expansion.
• The Brontë Sisters: Literary Contributions in the 19th Century.
• Hatsune Miku: The Virtual Pop Star and Technological Impact.
• Empress Matilda: A Heir’s Quest for the English Throne.

Environmental History

• The Dust Bowl: Environmental Disaster in the Great Plains.
• Silent Spring: Rachel Carson and the Environmental Movement.
• The Green Revolution: Agricultural Innovation and Challenges.
• Deforestation and its Global Impact.
• The Kyoto Protocol: International Climate Agreements.
• The Clean Water Act: Protecting Water Resources.
• Extinction Events in Earth’s History.
• National Parks System: Preserving Natural Wonders.
• The Love Canal Disaster: Environmental Contamination.
• Ecofeminism: Women’s Rights and Environmentalism.
• Ocean Pollution and Marine Conservation.
• Earth Day: Origins and Environmental Activism.
• Chernobyl Disaster: Nuclear Energy and Environmental Catastrophe.
• The Cuyahoga River Fire: Sparking Environmental Regulation.
• Solar Power Revolution: Sustainable Energy Solutions.

History of Science and Technology

• The Copernican Revolution: Heliocentrism and its Impact.
• The Gutenberg Printing Press: Spreading Knowledge.
• The Space Race: Cold War Competition and Exploration.
• The Internet: Birth and Evolution of the World Wide Web.
• The Steam Locomotive: Transforming Transportation.
• The Theory of Evolution: Charles Darwin and Natural Selection.
• The Manhattan Project: Science and the Atomic Bomb.
• The Wright Brothers: Pioneers of Powered Flight.
• The Human Genome Project: Decoding Life’s Blueprint.
• The Smartphone Revolution: Changing Modern Society.
• The Electron Microscope: Revealing the Microscopic World.
• The History of Medicine: Advancements in Health Care.
• The Transistor: The Foundation of Modern Electronics.
• The Green Revolution: Agricultural Innovation and Food Security.
• The History of Cryptography: From Caesar Ciphers to Cybersecurity.

Native American History

• The Trail of Tears: Forced Removal of Native American Tribes.
• Native American Tribes of the Great Plains: Nomadic Cultures.
• The Iroquois Confederacy: Political Structure and Diplomacy.
• Wounded Knee Massacre: The End of the Indian Wars.
• The Navajo Code Talkers: Native American Contributions in World War II.
• The Pueblo Revolt: Indigenous Resistance in Spanish America.
• Cahokia Mounds: Ancient Native American City in North America.
• Totem Poles of the Pacific Northwest: Cultural Symbols.
• The Apache Wars: Conflicts in the Southwest.
• The Ghost Dance Movement: Spiritual Renewal and Resistance.
• Native American Treaties and Broken Promises.
• The Mound Builders: Pre-Columbian Indigenous Civilizations.
• Native American Art and Pottery.
• The Cherokee Nation: Removal and Rebuilding.
• Native American Languages: Preservation and Revival Efforts.

Cultural and Artistic Movements

• The Harlem Renaissance: African American Cultural Revival.
• Surrealism: Artistic Exploration of the Unconscious.
• The Beat Generation: Literary Rebellion and Counterculture.
• Renaissance Art: Masters like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.
• The Bauhaus School: Influences on Modern Design and Architecture.
• Impressionism: Capturing Light and Atmosphere in Art.
• Romanticism in Music: Beethoven and the Expressive Symphony.
• Abstract Expressionism: Artistic Freedom and Expression.
• Dadaism: Anti-Art and the Avant-Garde.
• Baroque Music: Bach, Handel, and the Ornate Style.
• Pop Art: Consumer Culture and Mass Media.
• Chinese Cultural Revolution: Art, Politics, and Propaganda.
• Art Nouveau: Nature and Ornamental Design.
• Neo-Classicism: Reviving Ancient Styles in Art and Architecture.
• Expressionist Cinema: Silent Film and German Expressionism.

Modern Political History

• The Cold War: Ideological Conflict and Superpower Rivalry.
• Decolonization in Africa: Nationalism and Independence Movements.
• The European Union: Integration and Cooperation.
• Germany was once again united with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
• The Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History of Tensions.
• The Vietnam War: Controversies and Consequences.
• The Korean War: Division and Stalemate.
• The Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and Communism in the Americas.
• Apartheid in South Africa: Racial Segregation and Resistance.
• The Rwandan Genocide: Ethnic Conflict and International Response.
• The Islamic Republic’s ascent during the Iranian Revolution.
• The Falklands War: Sovereignty Dispute in the South Atlantic.
• The European Refugee Crisis: Migration and Global Impact.
• The Arab Spring: Protests and Political Change in the Middle East.

The Renaissance Era

• Leonardo da Vinci: Renaissance Man and Polymath.
• Michelangelo: Sculptor of the Renaissance.
• The Medici Family: Patrons of the Arts and Politics.
• Humanism and Renaissance Literature: Petrarch and Boccaccio.
• The Invention of the Printing Press: Gutenberg’s Impact on Knowledge.
• The Italian Wars: Conflicts of the Renaissance.
• The Sistine Chapel Ceiling: Michelangelo’s Masterpiece.
• Renaissance Architecture: The Beauty of Florence and Venice.
• Copernicus and the Heliocentric Model: Revolutionizing Astronomy.
• Raphael and His Artistic Legacy.
• The Reformation: Martin Luther and the Challenge to the Catholic Church.
• The Age of Exploration: Vasco da Gama and Columbus.
• The Scientific Revolution: Galileo, Kepler, and Newton.
• The Enlightenment: Rationalism and Philosophical Change.
• The Baroque Period: Transition from the Renaissance to the Modern Era.
• Podcast Topic Ideas 
• MBA HR Project Topics

Tips For Choosing The Best History Project Topics

Here are some tips for choosing the best history project topics:

Tip 1: Personal Interest

Select a history project topic that genuinely interests you. When you are passionate about the subject, it makes the research and presentation more enjoyable and compelling.

Tip 2: Relevance

Ensure your topic is relevant to the course or historical period you’re studying. A well-matched topic will align with your curriculum and help you gain a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

Tip 3: Availability of Resources

Check if there are enough resources available for your chosen topic. Adequate books, articles, and online sources will make your research process smoother.

Tip 4: Scope and Manageability

Pick a topic that is manageable within your project’s timeframe. A topic that is too broad may result in a superficial presentation, while one that is too narrow might lack sufficient information for a comprehensive project.

Tip 5: Unique Perspective

Consider approaching your topic from a unique angle or perspective. This can make your project stand out and offer a fresh insight into a well-studied historical subject.

Common Mistakes That Must Be Avoid In History Project

In history projects, several common mistakes can hinder the overall quality and impact of your work. These mistakes should be avoided to ensure that your project is informative, well-researched, and effectively presented. Here are some common pitfalls to steer clear of:

• Lack of Clear Structure: If your project isn’t structured with a distinct introduction, body, and conclusion, it might be challenging for readers to follow your story.
• Inadequate Research: Relying on a limited number of sources or not thoroughly investigating the topic can lead to incomplete or inaccurate information.
• Plagiarism: Failing to properly attribute sources and ideas can result in plagiarism , a serious academic offense.
• Overcomplicated Language: Using overly complex language or terminology can make your project less accessible and harder to understand.
• Lack of Visuals: Neglecting to include relevant images, charts, or visuals can make your project less engaging and informative.
• Ignoring Citations: Failing to provide proper citations for your sources can lead to a loss of credibility and academic integrity.
• Procrastination: Waiting until the last minute to work on your project can result in rushed, subpar work that doesn’t reflect your true capabilities.

In conclusion, history projects are a valuable educational tool that enhances learning, critical thinking, research, and communication skills for students. To create a successful history project, it’s important to have a clear topic, comprehensive research, effective organization, and creativity with visuals. Proper citations are essential, and avoiding common mistakes like plagiarism and procrastination is crucial. We’ve also provided an extensive list of captivating history project topics to spark students’ interest. By following these guidelines and embracing the opportunities history projects offer, students can develop a deeper connection to the past, fostering a lifelong appreciation for the complexities and richness of history.

Related Posts

Step by Step Guide on The Best Way to Finance Car

The Best Way on How to Get Fund For Business to Grow it Efficiently

Cookie Policy

Our website uses cookies to understand content and feature usage to drive site improvements over time. To learn more, review our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy .

World History Project 1750 to the Present

Ideal for states where high-school world history begins with the Industrial Revolution and continues through today.

How We’re Different

The World History Project (WHP) course isn’t a typical march through time. Rather than teach history as a disconnected series of people and events, we strive to create a context through which students understand the past, orient themselves to the present ,and prepare for the future.

Aligned: We’ve worked with many states and educators to ensure our world-history course is aligned to the vast majority of state standards for world history.

Grounded in research and best practices: OER Project works with teachers, scholars, and learning scientists to incorporate and share the latest learning insights and approaches.

Adaptable: Our built-in scaffolding tools allow you to meet a range of learning contexts and abilities in your classroom.

Skills-forward: Our course connects fundamental reading, writing, and critical-thinking skills to the content.

Professional development: OER Project teacher training is aligned to the curriculum and includes self-paced and real-time opportunities to advance your practice whenever works best for you.

Community: the OER Project Online Teacher Community is a supportive and helpful place for educators to get and share support, ideas, and inspiration.

Compatible: All course materials are downloadable, printable, and compatible for integration with the LMS of your choice. We also support Clever single sign-on and Google Classroom integration.

Testimonials from Our Teaching Community

Nineteen years into my career, I retooled my history class to the World History Project materials. With the help of WHP’s narrative frames, my kids have been able to put themselves into our historical inquiries and relate their experiences, communities, and surroundings to our studies. With the ability to choose articles that match their individual Lexile abilities, I can be sure that all my students can develop as readers and writers.

Thanks to World History Project, my first year teaching (in a pandemic!) was a success. The site is easy to navigate and put rigorous, relevant, standards-aligned lessons and resources at my fingertips. The materials are engaging and easily scaffolded for all students. I especially loved the scaffolding of skill-building throughout the course, which allowed me to monitor and measure student growth. I made it through the year confident that I was covering all the standards despite many remote and hybrid learning obstacles.

I expected a random collection of assets but was pleasantly surprised to find a well-organized, comprehensive, and cohesive curriculum. Through the online teacher community and professional development course I discovered a pacing guide, how to use the leveled and audio readings, and experienced WHP teachers who were happy to help. This course is different in how it examines history through various lenses that connect, compare, and contrast the periods, people, and places of our past and present. We learned how to put our learning into context and look at causation as we used critical reasoning to draw conclusions about the past to apply to our future.

Take a Closer Look

Preview a selection of essential course materials and resources to help you decide if this course is a good fit for your teaching needs.

NEED TO BEGIN YOUR WORLD HISTORY COURSE WITH THE EARLIEST HUMANS OR AT THE TIME OF THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE?

We’ve got courses for that too .

Boost Skills Development with Supplemental Units

These short courses are the perfect way to extend an existing history or language arts curriculum.

Climate Project Extension

A supplemental unit that starts with evidence and ends with student-developed plans to reach net carbon zero by 2050.

Project X: Teach Data Exploration and Analysis

Help students understand and use data to confront urgent world topics such as poverty, democracy, and climate. This 2-week supplement is designed for high-school students and includes 10 data-exploration exercises that lead up to a final class presentation.

Project Score: Includes Automated Essay Scoring

Help students gain historical writing and literacy skills. Project Score includes lessons, tools, prompts, and automated essay scoring—an ideal supplement to extend your existing high school social studies course.

Access this course

Join OER Project to get instant access to the World History Project: 1750 to the Present course for FREE with no hidden catches.

An official website of the United States government Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock ( Lock A locked padlock ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Tribal HPP Program

The Tribal High Priority Projects (Tribal HPP) Program , as established under 23 U.S.C. 202, is a nationwide priority program for:

• An Indian Tribe or governmental subdivision of an Indian Tribe whose annual allocation of funding under the Tribal Transportation Program is insufficient to complete the highest priority project of the Indian Tribe or governmental subdivision of an Indian Tribe; or
• Any Indian Tribe that has an emergency or disaster with respect to a transportation facility included on the national inventory of Tribal transportation facilities under section 202(b)(1) of Title 23, United States Code.

To receive updates about the Tribal HPP Program, subscribe to the Office of Tribal Transportation Mailing List .

Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL)

On November 15, 2021, President Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) (Public Law 117-58, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law ) into law. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is the largest long-term investment in our infrastructure and economy in our Nation s history.  Each year BIL provides $9,000,000 of the available TTP funds are set aside for the Tribal HPP Program.  In addition to the $9,000,000 set aside, there is authorized to be appropriated $30,000,000 out of the general fund of the Treasury for each fiscal years 2022 through 2026, if Congress passes this funding in their legislation.

Resources for Preparing a Tribal HPP Program Application

Any time during the year, the Tribe can submit an application package for Tribal HPP Program funding.  On January 31, the applications received will be reviewed for eligibility, evaluated, and ranked for funding.  Applications submitted after January 31 will be collected for the next fiscal year funding cycle.

The application form shall be completed and submitted to your FHWA or BIA Point of Contact.  The following documents may be used by the Tribe to assemble the application package:

Priority Projects

• Tribal HPP Program Priority Project (Checklist for Tribe).pdf (163.54 KB)
• Application Form  
• Application Form Instructions 

Emergency or Disaster Projects

• Checklist for Tribe  
• Application Form Instructions

A webinar for prospective applicants was held on October 11, 2023 to review the funding opportunity and application process.  Access to the webinar can be found here .

Tribal HPP Program Frequently Asked Questions

Link to FAQs

Funded Projects

A webinar for awardees was held to review the post-award requirements, roles, and responsibilities. A recording of the webinar can be found  here . 

Prior Year Tribal HPP Program Funding Priority List:

• FY 2022-2023  
• Final Funding Priority List FY 2024

Tribal HPP Program History

Prior to bil.

The Indian Reservation Roads High Priority Projects Program (IRRHPP) was created through negotiated rulemaking and documented at 25 CFR 170 (July 19, 2004).  Under these regulations, the IRRHPP was a set-aside from the Indian Reservation Roads Program (IRR) and was funded from 2005 through 2012.  Applications were ranked by a committee comprised of BIA, FHWA and tribal participants using the scoring matrix specified in the regulations.  In 2012, $28,533,502 was awarded to Tribes through the IRRHPP.  

The Tribal HPP Program was enacted and codified in 23 U.S.C. 202, through Public Law 112-141 (MAP-21 §1123 dated July 6, 2012) and a fact sheet was developed ( https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/map21/factsheets/thpp.cfm ).  The Tribal HPP Program was modeled after the former IRRHPP in 25 CFR 170 (July 19, 2004) but MAP-21 changed the funding from a TTP set-aside to an authorized appropriation of $30 million per year from the General Fund.  Although MAP-21 authorized the program, there were no appropriations for the program under MAP-21 or the FAST Act.

2010 IRRPCC Recommendations to BIA High Priority Project Team for Eligibility Requirements click here .

Contact Information

Please contact the Tribal HPP Program Manager, Blane Kunihisa at [email protected] or 360-619-7814 if you have any program questions.  Others on the Tribal HPP Program Administration team include:

• Miles Brookes, FHWA
• Robert Frazier, BIADOT
• Jeff Harman, BIA Alaska Region
• Demery Bill, BIA Pacific Region

National Archives and Ancestry team up to digitize millions of records

More military and Native American records are to go online over five years.

The National Archives and the genealogy company Ancestry are teaming up to digitize and put online tens of millions of records from the Archives’ vast holdings.

The project, announced Thursday, will take place over five years. In the first phase, about 65.5 million records that had previously not been available online will appear on Ancestry’s website, the organizations said in a statement.

The newly available records will include military documents from World War II and the Korean War era, as well as immigration and naturalization reports, their statement said.

The data is expected to begin appearing in about two years, Pamela Wright, the Archives’ chief innovation officer, said in a video interview Tuesday.

“Not everybody can drive to a National Archives facility,” Wright said. “It’s a geographic barrier for a lot of people, and making it digital, we like to say, democratizes access to the records.”

The process involves the conservation, preparation and copying of documents with scanning machines or digital cameras. Descriptive information is then added, and the documents will eventually be posted on the websites of the Archives, Ancestry and, in certain instances, Ancestry’s military website, Fold3.

Ancestry will cover much of the cost for labor, equipment and other expenses, Wright said. In some cases, the new data will be available only on Ancestry’s websites for three years “so that they can make some of that money back,” she said.

An Ancestry spokesperson said in an email that the arrangement “allows Ancestry to provide value to its user base before the images become available to the public on [the Archives’] platform.”

Quinton Atkinson, senior director of global content at Ancestry, said his organization expects to spend about $10 million on the project.

“We are unlocking access to millions of documents and records that we can publish and make available more broadly than we ever have before,” he said in a video interview Wednesday.

“This is the largest public-private archival partnership we’ve ever entered into,” he said.

Ancestry, which is based in Lehi, Utah, charges a subscription fee for use of its website, although it allows free access to records like those from the Freedman’s Bureau, the Chinese Exclusion Act period, and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, Ancestry said.

The Archives website, although more cumbersome to use, is free. Wright said the website is being redesigned next year. “So we’ve got plans to make it better,” she said.

The two institutions have agreed, based on user interest, which topics to prioritize for scanning, Chris Naylor, the Archives’ executive for research services, said in a video interview Tuesday.

“There’s a lot of interest getting our Native American records digitized as much as we can,” Wright said. Preparation for work on those records is underway at the Archives facility in Denver.

Among the first records to be processed this month will be petitions for naturalization from 1918 to 1947 filed by immigrants who had served in the U.S. military. The petitions, a few of which were scanned and posted years ago, are held in the Archives office in San Bruno, Calif.

Beyond people’s names and dates and places of birth, the petitions “also captured additional information about the petitioner’s military service, including their military serial number, rank, unit, duty station, date and place of entry into the military,” Wright said. “They’re really valuable resources.”

At the Archives facility in St. Louis, the team plans to digitize draft cards from 1948 to 1959. “It’s the first selective service registration post-World War II,” Naylor said, and it includes data for men who served in the Korean War.

The project will help reconstruct military service records, many of which were lost in a catastrophic fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis in 1973, he said. More than 15 million military personnel files were destroyed, including 80 percent of the files of soldiers discharged between roughly 1912 and 1960.

Many of the records to be digitized are “name rich,” said Naylor. “They’ll support historical and genealogical research ... and will really help tell these countless stories of Americans that are held in our records.”

Ancestry says it has 60 billion records and 3 million subscribers to its online research service.

The National Archives and Records Administration encompasses the landmark headquarters building in downtown Washington, a large research facility in College Park, Md., 13 presidential libraries and 14 regional archives.

The institution houses the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation, and more than 13 billion other paper records. It also has photographs, films and other records.

“The National Archives is the nation’s record keeper,” Colleen J. Shogan, archivist of the United States, said in the statement. “Our mission is to preserve, protect, and share those stories with all Americans.”

The agreement will include enhanced training for the Archives’ digitization staff, as well as the development of further projects in the future, the statement said.

The announcement comes after the Archives unveiled a new state-of-the-art digitization center at its facility in College Park last month.

The center includes high-speed scanners and overhead camera systems that can handle a variety of record types and formats and will enable the Archives to digitize up to 10 times as many records per year.

History | July 18, 2023

The Real History Behind Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’

The “father of the atomic bomb” has long been misunderstood. Will the new film finally get J. Robert Oppenheimer right?

Since the end of World War II, historians and artists alike have been fascinated by the brilliant, enigmatic J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project laboratory that developed the atomic bomb. Beginning as early as 1946, d ocumentaries , television miniseries , plays , books , graphic novels , f eature f ilms and even an opera have explored the scientist’s life, work and legacy. In recent years, however, much of that complexity has been reduced to a single popular image: the broken genius, haunted by his own invention, reciting a line from the Bhagavad Gita in a 1965 NBC News documentary . “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” Oppenheimer intones.

But Oppenheimer’s life was about far more than regret. “[He] was interesting as the father of the bomb,” says Kai Bird , co-author of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer . “But the real arc in the story is the tragedy.”

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer , which opens in theaters on July 21, will be the first feature-length film to tackle the scientist’s life in its entirety, and it promises to be spectacular . Starring Cillian Murphy of “ Peaky Blinders ” fame in the title role alongside an ensemble A-list cast, the film (which uses American Prometheus as its main source material ) will reintroduce the scientist and the top-secret bomb project he helmed to a new generation of Americans. Oppenheimer provides an opportunity to revisit this charismatic, contradictory man and reconsider how previous attempts to tell his story have succeeded—and failed—at fathoming one of the 20th century’s most fascinating public figures.

Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project

Born into a secular Jewish family in New York City in 1904 and educated at Manhattan’s Ethical Culture School, Oppenheimer graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in just three years. If Harvard was easy, growing out of his awkward adolescence was harder. He struggled with mental health issues while pursuing a graduate degree at the University of Cambridge—“I was on the point of bumping myself off,” he later recalled —and ended up on probation after lacing an apple with chemicals and leaving it on his tutor’s desk. But by the time World War II broke out in 1939, Oppenheimer had transformed himself into a respected physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. “He was sort of a caricature of the eccentric professor,” Bird says, an intellectual omnivore who read Sanskrit, loved Elizabethan poetry , rode horses and made a great martini.

He had also fallen in love with Jean Tatlock (played by Florence Pugh in Nolan’s film), a dues-paying member of the Communist Party who awakened his interest in politics. Oppenheimer was “likely sympathetic to … communist goals,” according to the nonprofit Atomic Heritage Foundation , but he never officially joined the party. (“Any attempt to label Robert Oppenheimer a party member is a futile exercise—as the FBI learned to its frustration over many years,” wrote Bird and co-author Martin J. Sherwin , who died in October 2021 at age 84, in American Prometheus .) But many of his closest friends and family were party members at one point or another: his brother, Frank Oppenheimer ; his friend Haakon Chevalier ; and his future wife, Kitty Oppenheimer . These associations would cast suspicion on the physicist himself later in his life.

Oppenheimer’s political leanings didn’t prevent him from being recruited, in early 1942, for a secret project authorized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that was drawing scientists from all over the country. Three years earlier, Albert Einstein had written a letter to Roosevelt warning that breakthroughs in nuclear fission promised “extremely powerful bombs of a new type.” Now, the race was on to figure out how to build one of these bombs before Germany did.

In the summer of 1942, Oppenheimer organized a series of secret seminars at Berkeley, where the United States’ top physicists roughed out the outlines of a possible bomb. As it turned out, Oppenheimer was a natural manager. “I don’t know how he had acquired this facility for handling people,” said Edward Teller , a colleague who would later testify against him. “Those who knew him well were really surprised.”

That September, General Leslie Groves (played by Matt Damon in the new film), an Army engineer who’d previously overseen construction of the Pentagon, took over as head of what was by then called the Manhattan Project, after its inaugural offices in lower Manhattan. Groves knew construction but not physics, so the charming Berkeley physicist caught his eye. “Oppenheimer was the first scientist Groves had met on his tour who grasped that building an atomic bomb required finding practical solutions to a variety of cross-disciplinary problems,” wrote Bird and Sherwin. He wasn’t an obvious choice—“He couldn’t run a hamburger stand,” said a Berkeley colleague—but in October 1942, Groves named Oppenheimer the project’s scientific director.

The government operation brought hundreds, and eventually thousands, of scientists, civilians and Army personnel to a mesa in Los Alamos, New Mexico . Their ranks eventually included Teller, Hans Bethe , Richard Feynman , Seth Neddermeyer , Robert Serber , Kenneth Bainbridge , Enrico Fermi and many others. (Nolan’s film portrays each of these figures and, judging by the full cast list , more or less recreates the entire field of theoretical physics in the 1930s and ’40s, including Kenneth Branagh as Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr .) The scientists reported directly to Oppenheimer, who, at 38, was learning on the job how to run a lab.

Oppenheimer’s lab was only one part of the Manhattan Project. Built on the site of a former boys’ school, Los Alamos was one of three “ secret cities ” seized and transformed by the U.S. government in late 1942 and early 1943. The other two— Oak Ridge, Tennessee , and Hanford, Washington —accounted for the vast majority of the manpower, expense and industrial scale of the project, which employed an estimated half a million people between 1942 and 1945. At Oak Ridge, uranium was refined at the largest factory in the world , newly built for that purpose. In Hanford, an area half the size of Rhode Island was cleared of residents , their houses bulldozed to make way for reactors to produce plutonium . “I told you it couldn’t be done without turning the whole country into a factory,” Bohr said to Teller in 1944. “You have done just that.”

At Los Alamos, Oppenheimer came into his own as a gifted leader. “[He] had a very distinctive voice that was very soft,” says Bird. “You had to listen very carefully, but he was magnetic.” That magnetism kept the lab productive even after an initial design for the bomb, known as Thin Man , had to be scrapped in July 1944. Ultimately, the scientists settled on two workable designs for a bomb, which they called Fat Man and Little Boy. At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, almost three years of work culminated in the first nuclear detonation in history. Known as the Trinity test, it lit the hills of the New Mexico desert.

Oppenheimer, already famously thin, had lost weight during the project, and during the countdown, he reportedly barely breathed. Later dramatizations had the scientist reciting the line from the Bhagavad Gita during the moment of detonation (Oppenheimer himself later claimed the line had come to him then), but he reportedly said something closer to “It worked.”

After the test, Oppenheimer was transformed by relief. “I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car,” fellow Manhattan Project scientist Isidor Isaac Rabi later said. “His walk was like High Noon … this kind of strut. He had done it.”

On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped Little Boy on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, Bockscar dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki. Estimates of deaths from the two bombings vary widely , from a contemporary figure of around 110,000 to a later estimate of closer to 210,000. On August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender.

The battle over the bomb

In the years immediately following the war, public opinion about the use of the atomic bomb hadn’t yet solidified. The first time Oppenheimer appeared on the big screen was in August 1946, when he starred in the 18-minute documentary “Atomic Power,” which was part of Time ’s “ The March of Time ” series. Onscreen, Oppenheimer (one of several figures who participated in the film, including Einstein, Groves and Rabi) re-enacts waiting anxiously for the detonation at Trinity with Rabi, who gives a stilted performance as he reassures his boss, “It’s going to work all right, Robert. And I’m sure we’ll never be sorry for it.”

In fact, Oppenheimer was already sorry. In October 1945, he told President Harry S. Truman (played by Gary Oldman in Nolan’s film), “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.” The tide of public opinion was also beginning to turn. Three weeks after “Atomic Power” was released, John Hersey’s searing, book-length article “ Hiroshima ” appeared in the New Yorker , awakening many Americans for the first time to the horrors of the bomb .

Fearing they were losing the battle for the history books, Truman and other officials sprang into action, compelling former Secretary of War Henry Stimson to defend the use of the bomb in a Harper’s magazine article published in February 1947. The story, which reads as a simple recitation of the facts, portrays the decision to use the bomb as one made with sagacious care. It introduced the argument—repeated often since —that the bomb prevented an Allied land invasion of Japan that would have cost “over a million casualties, to American forces alone.”

“That article really set the history for most Americans for the next generation,” Bird says. “And the narrative was, ‘Oh, it was a difficult decision. It was terrible. But it was necessary, and it saved perhaps a million American lives.’”

The first major Hollywood film about the bomb, The Beginning or the End , debuted the month after Stimson’s article. Initially conceived by atomic scientists as a way to educate the public about the dangers of nuclear warfare, the movie went through script approvals and retakes ordered by Groves and Truman that turned it into a “pro-bomb celebration—dictated by the Pentagon and White House,” wrote Greg Mitchell in his 2020 book, The Beginning or the End : How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb .

Directed by Norman Taurog, the film “is so instructive because it is the earliest, and one of the most complete, reassertions of the pro-bomb narrative just when doubts were being raised,” Mitchell tells Smithsonian magazine. “Even Truman got involved, to the extent of ordering a costly retake and getting the actor playing him fired. The studio voluntarily handed over control of the film to the Pentagon, via Groves, and the White House. Oppenheimer himself caved to pressure.”

The Beginning or the End claimed the American military dropped warning leaflets about the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and that the Enola Gay came under attack from Japanese antiaircraft missile fire on its bombing run. Like Stimson’s article, it depicted Truman carefully working through the decision to drop the bomb before arriving at a pivotal moment.

In fact, the U.S. did not drop leaflets warning of the atomic bomb specifically, though pilots may have dropped more general notices of impending attacks on Hiroshima, and the Enola Gay did not come under antiaircraft fire . Many historians disagree that there was a single moment of “ decision ” on Truman’s part . In an essay included in the 2020 anthology The Age of Hiroshima , Alex Wellerstein , a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, wrote that Truman “was actually quite peripheral to most of the decisions that led to the use of the weapons.” Wellerstein argued that Truman may have even mistakenly believed that Hiroshima was a military target rather than a city made up largely of civilians. As for that figure of one million projected American casualties , Bird later asked Stimson’s ghostwriter, Mac Bundy , where he got it. “He looked at me,” Bird recalls, “and he says, ‘Oh, we pulled it out of thin air.’”

Oppenheimer described the script of The Beginning or the End as “without purpose or insight.” Another physicist, Leo Szilard , put it even more bluntly: “If our sin as scientists was to make and use the atomic bomb, then our punishment was to watch The Beginning or the End .”

The Oppenheimer security hearing

Almost immediately, Oppenheimer began speaking out publicly about the dangers of atomic warfare, even as he continued to act as a nuclear weapons consultant for the U.S. government. In November 1945, he told an audience in Philadelphia that the bomb was “by all the standards of the world we grew up in … an evil thing.” He gave television interviews starkly elucidating the risk of nuclear war. In 1949, as the head of an advisory committee for the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), he delivered a report warning against developing a hydrogen bomb—a fusion weapon more powerful than the Trinity, Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs—that had been conceived by fellow Manhattan Project scientist Teller. “A super bomb might become a weapon of genocide,” Oppenheimer wrote . “A super bomb should never be produced.” In 1953, he gave a speech likening the nuclear-capable United States and Soviet Union to “two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”

Oppenheimer’s outspoken warnings made him a target, and in December 1953, amid McCarthy-era paranoia about Soviet spies in the highest levels of government, AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss (played by Robert Downey Jr. in Nolan’s film), who harbored a dislike for Oppenheimer, called the scientist into his office and told him his top-secret security clearance had been revoked. Oppenheimer insisted on defending himself, leading the AEC to call what became a highly publicized security hearing to resolve the matter.

The monthlong hearing, which began on April 12, 1954, amounted to an X-ray of Oppenheimer’s adult life. Transgressions large and small were dragged into the open and held up to exacting scrutiny. Key pieces of the case against Oppenheimer included his close friendship with Chevalier , a scholar of French literature at Berkeley and a card-carrying Communist whom the physicist had once protected from incrimination, as well as Oppenheimer’s opposition to Teller’s hydrogen bomb. The usually persuasive scientist panicked under questioning by AEC lawyer Roger Robb; at one point, caught in a contradiction, Oppenheimer accounted for his defense of Chevalier by admitting bluntly , “I was an idiot.” But he also had to defend personal matters, such as his decision to spend a night with his communist ex-fiancée, Tatlock, in the summer of 1943, while he was working at Los Alamos, six months before she died by suicide in 1944. Why did he have to see her? The committee asked. “Because she was still in love with me,” Oppenheimer responded.

On May 27, the board overseeing the hearings voted 2 to 1 not to reinstate Oppenheimer’s security clearance. “I personally think that our failure to clear Dr. Oppenheimer will be a black mark on the escutcheon of our country,” wrote lone dissenter Ward V. Evans. Either way, Oppenheimer’s relationship with the U.S. government was now officially over. He returned to Princeton, New Jersey, where he’d been the director of the Institute for Advanced Study since 1947. The hearings “destroyed him,” Rabi later said. Another friend, diplomat George Kennan, remembered trying to comfort Oppenheimer by telling him he’d surely be welcome abroad. “His answer, given to me with tears in his eyes: ‘Damn it, I happen to love this country.’”

Oppenheimer tried to minimize the importance of the hearings. “I think of this as a major accident, much like a train wreck or the collapse of a building,” he told a reporter. “It has no relation or connection to my life. I just happened to be there.” As much as he might have wished that to be true, Oppenheimer’s downfall during the hearings came to define him in the public eye. In 1964, the German playwright Heinar Kipphardt drew directly on the published transcripts of the security hearings for his In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer . Discussing the play with the Washington Post , perhaps still trying to prevent his downfall from defining him, Oppenheimer said, “The whole damn thing was a farce, and these people are trying to make a tragedy out of it.”

In an attempt at public rehabilitation, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented Oppenheimer with the Enrico Fermi Award, the AEC’s highest honor, in 1963. Nonetheless, the physicist never fully recovered from the blow to his reputation. He lived out the rest of his days in Princeton, where he kept his job at the Institute for Advanced Study until 1966, and died of cancer there in February 1967. As the New York Times wrote in his obituary, “This bafflingly complex man nonetheless never fully succeeded in dispelling doubts about his conduct.”

Oppenheimer’s security clearance remained revoked until December 2022, when the Department of Energy vacated the commission’s 1954 decision. “Oppenheimer occupies a central role in our history for leading the nation’s atomic efforts during World War II and planting the seeds for the Department of Energy’s national laboratories,” said Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm in a statement . “As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to, while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country [has] only been further affirmed.”

The myth of Oppenheimer

In the more than 50 years since Oppenheimer’s death, popular culture has taken varied approaches to exploring his life. The Peabody Award-winning 1981 documentary The Day After Trinity focused on his regret over his role in building the bomb. The 1980 BBC TV miniseries “ Oppenheimer ,” by contrast, starred a thin, quietly charismatic Sam Waterston and was more interested in the question of Oppenheimer’s communist ties and his downfall.

Later fictional depictions of Oppenheimer grew less interested in complex readings of his psychology and often flattened him into a character who sometimes bordered on the ridiculous. In 1989, director Roland Joffé made a big-budget bet on the story of the Manhattan Project in Fat Man and Little Boy . Despite an A-list cast —Paul Newman as Groves, John Cusack as a fictional Manhattan Project scientist, Laura Dern as that scientist’s girlfriend—the film flopped. The script was simplistic, the dialogue groan-inducing (“Naked. Isn’t that a beautiful word?” Dern says to Cusack when propositioning him) and veracity an afterthought. But the film suffered most from the performance of Dwight Schultz , best known to viewers from “The A-Team” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” as Oppenheimer. Schultz brought a blankness to his portrayal of a man who famously had charisma to spare. “Schultz is stiff and actorly,” wrote the Washington Post . “Like an irredeemably tone-deaf singer, he hits only false notes.”

In the otherwise excellent TV show “ Manhattan ,” which ran for two seasons in 2014 and 2015, Daniel London played Oppenheimer as an already broken man, as though the actor’s only reference for the character was the famous “I am become death” interview. His Oppenheimer was more interested in self-preservation than the success of the project, whereas the real Oppenheimer of the Los Alamos years was a nimble ball of energy, guiding the complex endeavor toward completion thanks to his keen feeling for the challenges his fellow scientists faced.

No list would be complete without one other fictional depiction of Oppenheimer: Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams’ 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic . If Oppenheimer objected to Kipphardt’s play, he surely would have found Doctor Atomic ’s elevation of his life into an operatic Faustian tragedy ridiculous. But the opera, which centers around the days leading up to the Trinity test and culminates in the detonation of the first atomic bomb, was rapturously received by critics and has been restaged several times since its debut. In the New York Times , science writer Dennis Overbye wrote that the opera had disabused him of his preconceptions about the bomb: “I long ago concluded that there was not much new to say about the atomic bomb. But I was wrong. As I was watching … I began to wonder if anything had yet been said that counted.”

Nolan’s Oppenheimer

Before Sherwin’s death in 2021, he and Bird read several scripts based on American Prometheus . One, Bird says, was boring. Another was just weird: “It had dream sequences, a ghost speaking Oppenheimer’s poetry. It had a scene in which [Oppenheimer] is at a cocktail party in Berkeley and imagines himself dropping a cyanide pill into Edward Teller’s drink and watching him collapse on the floor and die in agony.” Bird and Sherwin sent back a long memo detailing the script’s many historical errors.

So Bird was relieved when, in fall 2021, he became one of a handful of people outside the film’s production to read Nolan’s take on Oppenheimer. “I think it’s a fabulous script,” Bird says. Unlike other recent depictions, it covers scenes from Oppenheimer’s entire life and doesn’t shy away from the moral questions of the bomb. “Nolan covers in a very deft way the argument among the physicists over whether the bomb was necessary or not and has Oppenheimer after Hiroshima saying the bomb was used on a virtually already defeated enemy,” Bird adds. “People who know nothing about Oppenheimer will go thinking they’re going to see a movie about the father of the atomic bomb.” Instead, “they’re going to see this mysterious figure and a deeply mysterious biographical story.”

Regardless of whether subject matter experts believe there is nothing new to say, the general public’s understanding of Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project hasn’t changed significantly since Stimson’s 1947 Harper’s article. After all, most people’s sense of history doesn’t come by way of the academy or densely researched biographies. Visiting Los Alamos myself a few years ago, I asked a docent what they thought might renew public interest in the history of the Manhattan Project.

The answer? “A movie.”

“Oppenheimer himself couldn’t make up his mind how he felt about making and helping to use the bomb, right to the end of his life,” says Mitchell. Until now, “filmmakers also couldn’t seem to get a handle on his conflicting emotions and statements. In that sense, he is a valuable audience surrogate, severely divided or conflicted on these questions.”

Nolan’s film arrives at a precarious moment in which optimism about nuclear disarmament is giving way to talk of a new nuclear age . F ew world leaders today have direct experience with the horrors of nuclear bombs, and some younger people are ignorant of even basic facts about World War II. But perhaps our distance from Oppenheimer’s era also presents an opportunity.

“Today, almost 80 years have passed since the end of World War II,” says Cynthia C. Kelly , president of the Atomic Heritage Foundation . Now, she adds, “the public can more openly consider different interpretations of atomic history.”

Why did it take so long for a director of Nolan’s caliber to take on Oppenheimer’s story? Perhaps it’s because we’re only now far enough away from those world-changing events to be open to seeing them—and him—with fresh eyes.

That’s no easy task. As Oppenheimer himself told an interviewer in 1948, “If you’ve lived a life that isn’t free and open with people, it’s almost impossible to unsnarl it, to unravel the ball of twine.”

Get the latest History stories in your inbox?

Click to visit our Privacy Statement .

Andy Kifer | READ MORE

Andy Kifer is an ex-New York City literary agent who works as an independent book editor and freelance writer.

All of our museums are currently closed. Go to  Hard at Work!  for the latest information.

• Museums & Sites
• Accessibility
• Field Trips
• Educator Resources
• Hands-On History
• We Are Colorado
• Bridging Borders
• The Collection
• Research Center
• History in the Making
• Museum of Memory
• Event Calendar
• Plan Your Event
• Speaker Series
• Tours & Treks
• The Colorado Magazine
• The Weekly Digest
• About the State Historic Preservation Office
• Events & Education
• Grants & Incentives
• Office of Archaeology & Historic Preservation
• Review & Compliance
• Survey & Designation
• Internships & Fellowships
• Affiliate Network
• Nuestro museos y exposiciones
• Membresía gratis para juventud
• La historia en desarrollo

Press Release

History Colorado Awards an Additional $62,000 to County- and Municipal-led Preservation Projects

DENVER — May 9, 2024 — History Colorado’s Certified Local Government (CLG) program has awarded an additional $62,941 to three county and municipal government-led historic preservation projects. This funding is in addition to CLG grants awarded in March and brings the total funding for 2024 to $143,811.

PRESS CONTACT: Luke Perkins, Manager of Communications and Public Relations 303.866.3670 | [email protected] 

All six projects funded in this grant round either help with the identification and study of historic resources or provide guidelines for meeting the needs of growing communities while minimizing the impacts on the character-defining features of those communities.

“Surveys and design guidelines like the ones funded in these grants are vital building blocks for historic preservation efforts across the state,” said Patrick Eidman, chief preservation officer and deputy state historic preservation officer. “These projects build awareness of historic resources within our diverse communities and create frameworks for how we can protect those resources while still meeting the needs of our growing communities.”

The Certified Local Government program is part of the State Historic Preservation Office and is one of the many ways that History Colorado invests in the prosperity of rural communities and preserves the rich history of the Centennial State. 

Currently 67 of Colorado’s 127 local governments have been certified by the State Historic Preservation Office and the National Park Service as CLGs. This distinction makes them eligible for grants and shows the community's commitment to maintaining standards consistent with federal archaeology and historic preservation requirements.

Highlighted Projects: City of Aurora | Arapahoe, Adams, and Douglas Counties, CO The City of Aurora was awarded $25,000 to hire a qualified preservation consultant to update its Historic Resources Survey Plan. The existing plan is due for an update as it does not reflect properties or neighborhoods significant to underrepresented and historically marginalized communities in Aurora, which is the most diverse city in the state with roughly 21% of its population reporting a birthplace outside the United States.

The need for this updated survey plan was recognized at a recent Historic Preservation Commission (HPC) meeting where the Commissioners presented a number of different potential local preservation opportunities connected with the diverse ethnic groups of Aurora.

“Each idea discussed by the Historic Preservation Commissioners and me resulted in the realization that we need a survey first to know where these potential districts and landmarks are located,” said Chris Geddes , historic preservation specialist for the City of Aurora. “Even locally landmarking properties associated with the various ethnic groups requires additional context and knowing where different communities settled in Aurora.”

The proposed survey plan will extensively cover the historic resources in the city by identifying historical themes and property types to be researched and preserved, with a particular focus on the role the city’s diverse cultural groups have played in the history of Aurora.

The survey process will include multiple public meetings to receive guidance from Aurorans, and the final product will provide both a prioritization of properties to be preserved and a list of potential funding sources for preservation projects.

“This updated plan will reflect the current state of preservation in the city; especially in relation to cultural diversity and underrepresented groups in the community,” Geddes said. “Additionally, the plan will provide a clear-cut methodology for recording the voluminous number of historic properties through historical and architectural survey as well as a timeline for the execution of this important undertaking.”

Town of Minturn | Eagle County, CO The Town of Minturn was awarded $25,000 for a resource survey which will identify historic assets in the town and guide historic context studies for properties that are eligible for historic designation. This survey will build off of recent efforts by Minturn to recognize and preserve historic structures in the township, such as the inclusion of a historic preservation ordinance into the town’s municipal code.

“Although we have had this code in place for about 18 months now, the Town has only had three properties nominated and designated to be local landmarks,” said Madison Harris , planner 1 for the Town of Minturn. “This survey would provide data for staff, HPC, and the Town Council to more confidently nominate and designate properties in Town that meet the 75-year-old threshold and at least one other eligibility criteria.”

The project will include an architectural survey of the town to establish future preservation priorities and identify a list of 10 priority properties for deeper research. These priority properties will receive an intensive-level survey and archival research to establish a detailed record of the history of the property as well as its owners.

Town officials hope this survey will promote designation and rehabilitation of historic buildings in Minturn, give them tools to determine “what is actually historic vs. what looks old,” and educate locals of the funding opportunities available for historic preservation projects.

“It is my hope that with the results of the survey to point to, the evidence will be there for people to understand why it is often more sustainable to reuse existing buildings as well as to support the HPC if they make a determination that demolition or alteration is not appropriate,” Harris said.

City of Cortez | Montezuma County, CO The City of Cortez was awarded $12,941 to hire a cultural resource consulting firm to conduct an intensive archaeological survey at several city-owned open spaces. This survey will document any prehistoric and historic resources contained within the natural areas and expand earlier surveys which largely focused on the natural resources present.

With more than 20,000 identified archaeological sites – the majority of which are associated with ancestral Puebloan occupation of the region – Montezuma county has one of the densest concentrations of archaeological sites in North America and it is expected that more may be found through this survey work. 

This project will allow for a more comprehensive management plan of these public open spaces and the location of any sites identified through this survey work will remain confidential to protect them from vandalism.

“The City of Cortez needs to develop a more comprehensive management plan for our natural areas,” said Linda Towle , author of the grant application and Chair of the Cortez Historic Preservation Board, authorized by the City of Cortez. “The staff needs to know where archaeological sites are located on open space property so that these sites can be properly managed, primarily through avoidance during trail work, invasive species mitigation, and other low impact projects.”

About The Certified Local Government Program Through the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO), History Colorado administers the U.S. Department of Interior’s Historic Preservation Fund (HPF) Program in cooperation with the National Park Service (NPS). Under this program, NPS has specified that at least 10% of Colorado’s annual program funds must be subgranted to Certified Local Governments (CLGs). Grants are awarded on a competitive basis to eligible applicants for projects that range from preservation planning, context studies and surveys, outreach, connecting with underrepresented communities, as well as scholarship funding for educational opportunities by historic preservation commissioners in CLGs.

Currently 67 local governments are certified by History Colorado, and since the initiation of the program in 1985, more than $4 million has been awarded to counties and municipalities in Colorado by the CLG program. In 2000, History Colorado began providing matching funds for CLG grants through the State Historical Fund, which removed the barrier of matching funding for governments applying for grants. Additional information about the CLG program is available here.

About History Colorado History Colorado is a division of the Colorado Department of Higher Education and a 501(c)3 non-profit that has served more than 75,000 students and 500,000 people in Colorado each year. It is a 144-year-old institution that operates eleven museums and historic sites, a free public research center, the Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation which provides technical assistance, educational opportunities, and other access to archaeology and historic preservation, and the History Colorado State Historical Fund (SHF), which is one of the nation’s largest state funded preservation programs of its kind. More than 70% of SHF grants are allocated in rural areas of the state. Additionally, the offices of the State Archaeologist and the State Historic Preservation Officer are part of History Colorado. 

History Colorado’s mission is to create a better future for Colorado by inspiring wonder in our past. We serve as the state’s memory, preserving and sharing the places, stories, and material culture of Colorado through educational programs, historic preservation grants, collecting, outreach to Colorado communities, the History Colorado Center and Stephen H. Hart Research Center in Denver, and 10 other museums and historic attractions statewide. History Colorado is one of only six Smithsonian Affiliates in Colorado. Visit HistoryColorado.org, or call 303-HISTORY, for more information. #HistoryColorado  

The history of baseball in Richmond is full of curveballs

RICHMOND, Va. -- With Richmond City Council passing a funding plan to build a new baseball stadium to replaced the aging Diamond, longtime CBS 6 sports reporter Lane Casadonte said he cannot remember a moment where a new ballpark project got this close to home plate.

With more than 30 years covering sports in the Richmond market, the debate over a new ballpark has been nearly a constant, and he's covered games at the Diamond long enough that he has stories that are older than his own son.

“I have a copy of the Richmond Times-Dispatch from the day our son was born, and the day before a giant chunk of the overhang at the Diamond crashed down into, thankfully, some empty seats. My son will turn 21 in August," Casadonte said. "It’s not shovels in the ground yet, but everybody agreeing on the money part of it, we haven’t been this far before."

The City of Richmond will issue/back $170 million in general obligation bonds to fund the ballpark and the immediate infrastructure around it.

Richmond will issue the bonds to pay for the new $110 million stadium, and a newly formed Community Development Authority (CDA) will issue $40 million in bonds with the city's backing for infrastructure costs.

Critics of the plan said the public did not have enough input on a project that would leave city taxpayers on the hook to repay the bonds if the stadium project does not meet revenue expectations.

City officials said the Squirrels track record of attendance success and development of Scott's Addition limit the risk of failure.

To understand why the Diamond has maxed out its lifespan (some observers say years ago), you need to go back to 1934.

That was the year Parker Field was built for various uses, and eventually minor league baseball was played there for decades.

The footprint of Parker Field was almost exactly where the Diamond sits, and it was torn down in 1984 for construction of the Diamond, which was completed a few months later in 1985.

That has been the home of professional baseball in Richmond since the Reagan administration, but there have been efforts over the past twenty years to change that.

Famously, in late 2013, then Richmond Mayor Dwight Jones rolled out a new stadium plan in Shockoe Bottom.

By May 2014, Jones had pulled that plan after community push back and a clear signal from city council that it would fail.

Around that same time frame, the idea was floated of building a new ballpark south of the James River in Manchester, but similarly, those plans never materialized. There have been conversations about moving the ballpark outside the city limits too.

Casadonte said after the Shockoe Plan fell through, there were talks of building a new stadium at Richmond Raceway in Henrico as part of a larger sports complex, and he heard the idea floated of building a stadium near Route 288 and Broad Street in Goochland.

Although the new funding structure is agreed upon by city officials, the bonds to pay for the project have not yet been issued.

On Thursday, local attorney Paul Goldman filed a lawsuit challenging the funding plan in circuit court, as first reported by VPM .

The lawsuit alleges that Mayor Stoney and City Council violated Goldman's First Amendment rights, the Virginia Constitution, and the city charter by voting to issue the bonds to build a stadium for private use and not entertaining a bond referendum put to city voters.

In response, Richmond CAO Lincoln Saunders called the lawsuit "frivolous" and "meritless."

"Needless to say, the City will continue the work and move this game-changing project forward," Saunders said.

At Richmond City Council's Wednesday hearing approving the project, about a dozen people spoke in favor of building the new stadium, and one person spoke out publicly against it. You can read more about that exchange here.

For his part, Casadonte said a new stadium would be huge for baseball fans and the Flying Squirrels.

"You don’t know what you don’t have," he said. “Your never really have a new stadium your sitting there watching a game, so there’s still a long way to go. But this is a hurdle that has not been cleared in my time here.”

City leaders said they plan to issue the bonds in June and construction would begin shortly thereafter.

If the stadium project begins this summer, officials said the ballpark would be ready for the 2026 baseball season, meeting the extended deadline set by MLB for the Flying Squirrels' facilities to meet standards set by the league.

Depend on CBS 6 News and WTVR.com for in-depth coverage of this important local story. Anyone with more information can  email [email protected] to send a tip .

Sign up for the Headlines Newsletter and receive up to date information.

Now signed up to receive the headlines newsletter..

Entertainment

Watch 'The Jennifer Hudson Show' weekdays at 3 p.m. on CBS 6!

More From Forbes

Historical trail marks jewish history in the catskills.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

Road signs leading to some of the now gone Borscht Belt hotels

This summer, the Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project will add another chapter to its journey with the installation of five new markers at key locations in the Catskills.

Each town or village on the trail is associated with a celebrated era that holds a significant place in American Jewish history.

A Look Back at the Borscht Belt Heyday

From the 1920s to the 1970s, the Borscht Belt (named for the beloved Eastern European beet soup) thrived. Boasting an impressive 500 hotels and resorts, 50,000 bungalows, and countless rooming houses, the Catskills offered a welcoming haven for generations of predominantly Eastern European Jews.

With its delicious ethnic cuisine, top-notch entertainment, and convenient proximity to New York City, the Borscht Belt also offered a sense of belonging and acceptance, an antidote to the rampant anti-Semitism in the hospitality industry at that time.

Preserving Jewish Heritage

Marisa Scheinfeld leads this ambitious project, which is generously supported by the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation . This non-profit volunteer organization identifies and recognizes significant sites in American Jewish history.

Samsung Issues Critical Update For Millions Of Galaxy Users

How to watch real martha baby reindeer interview with piers morgan, drake kendrick lamar feud timeline attempted intruder arrested at drake s toronto home police say.

The project's initial four markers were installed in 2023, in Monticello, Mountain Dale, Swan Lake, and Fallsburg. This summer's expansion brings markers to South Fallsburg, Kiamesha, Hurleyville, Bethel, and Woodridge.

Each new installation will be accompanied by rich cultural programming, including exhibits, author talks, lectures, music, and film screenings.

The ultimate goal? A 20-marker trail by 2026, encompassing other potential installations in Loch Sheldrake, Woodbourn, Ellenville, Livingston Manor, and Parksville.

Dual-Sided Signage for a Deeper Understanding

Marker in Monticello

The markers themselves offer a two-sided experience. One side provides a general overview of the Borscht Belt, while the other delves into the specific history of the featured village or town.

Documenting the Past, Inspiring the Future

Photographer and author Marisa Scheinfeld played a pivotal role in capturing the essence of the Borscht Belt history and culture. Over five years, she meticulously documented the area's glory days, as well as the remnants left behind after the decline of hotels, resorts, and bungalows. Her work was featured in a Cornell University Press book titled " The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America's Jewish Vacationland " (2016).

Looking towards the future, Scheinfeld says the project hopes its impact will extend far beyond nostalgia alone.

"The response has been immense," she says. "Last year alone, over 500 people of all ages attended our dedications, sharing countless memories and stories." The project also aspires to ignite interest and educate younger generations about the Borscht Belt's legacy.

A Legacy of Entertainment, Community, and More

The Borscht Belt's influence has been immeasurable, says Scheinfeld. "From shaping entertainment, comedy, music, and even elements of design and branding."

She underscores the importance of accuracy and authenticity to solidify the Borscht Belt's legacy for years to come. This documentation, she adds, should not only honor the guests but also pay tribute to the workers and other individuals who helped this era flourish.

Hitting the Road To Explore the Past

Marker Project Logo

Summer provides the perfect opportunity for a historical road trip. Explore the Catskills' natural beauty and visit these villages and towns that share a special chapter in American Jewish history.

The Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project homepage offers a map showcasing the existing markers and the upcoming additions. In the future, the project hopes to secure funding to develop a self-guided audio driving tour to enhance the trail experience.

The project's origins lie in the need for tolerance and compassion, says Scheinfeld, highlighting the connection to the era's anti-Semitism. "Unfortunately, in this climate where antisemitism is soaring, this message feels more important than ever."

Note: The project website offers details on upcoming installations and events.

Previously on Forbes:

• Editorial Standards
• Reprints & Permissions

Join The Conversation

One Community. Many Voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts. 

Forbes Community Guidelines

Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.

In order to do so, please follow the posting rules in our site's  Terms of Service.   We've summarized some of those key rules below. Simply put, keep it civil.

Your post will be rejected if we notice that it seems to contain:

• False or intentionally out-of-context or misleading information
• Insults, profanity, incoherent, obscene or inflammatory language or threats of any kind
• Attacks on the identity of other commenters or the article's author
• Content that otherwise violates our site's  terms.

User accounts will be blocked if we notice or believe that users are engaged in:

• Continuous attempts to re-post comments that have been previously moderated/rejected
• Racist, sexist, homophobic or other discriminatory comments
• Attempts or tactics that put the site security at risk
• Actions that otherwise violate our site's  terms.

So, how can you be a power user?

• Stay on topic and share your insights
• Feel free to be clear and thoughtful to get your point across
• ‘Like’ or ‘Dislike’ to show your point of view.
• Protect your community.
• Use the report tool to alert us when someone breaks the rules.

Thanks for reading our community guidelines. Please read the full list of posting rules found in our site's  Terms of Service.

This Phoenix district isn't teaching controversial history. It's teaching kids to think

Opinion: balsz school district doesn't teach kids what to think about history, but rather how to think and share their ideas respectfully..

A tiny elementary school district covering a blue-collar, minority neighborhood behind Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport has found itself at the center of a national debate over race in education .

You wouldn’t know that by walking into the 500-student David Crockett Elementary School.

The Black, Hispanic and Native American students in kindergarten through fifth grade are busy trying to get up to standard in basic subjects, a task made difficult by the reality that more than 90% of them come from economically disadvantaged households.

Still, “the home of the Bears” has become a target of Tom Horne’s rampage against critical race theory .

“Students should be taught … that race, an accident of birth, is irrelevant to anything,” the state education superintendent has said. “I am open minded about almost all political issues, but this belief is in the marrow of my bones and not subject to the slightest compromise.”  

Balsz never adapted '1619 Project' for its classes

Horne has claimed that the Balsz Elementary School District has adopted CRT into its curriculum by adapting the controversial “1619 Project,” a sweeping work of journalism that traces U.S. history to the start of slavery, showing how racism in the past has affected policy, practice and people in the present.

Educators, however, say that never happened.

“As I see it, it comes down to some of how history is taught,” said Todd Schwarz, president of the Balsz district school board, sitting on a bench near the Crockett playground.

“We did consider, at one point, having someone come in and talk to teachers about ‘The 1619 Project,’ which was a very interesting historical study. It’s not a perfect history. No history is. … The idea was ‘How do we incorporate some of what we’re reading here into our lessons?’

“It turned out, after one professional development session, that it didn’t seem like it was going to work for an elementary school district.

“We stopped it; we dropped it. But there’s a ghost on the internet that keeps popping up when you Google the Balsz Elementary School District. ‘Oh, the 1619 Project.’ ”

Horne uses critical race theory to drive a wedge

The controversy starts with the very definition of CRT.

Horne has called the 5-year-old 1619 Project “the primary source” for teaching CRT, which “has distorted the meaning of the previously attractive word ‘equity.’ To proponents of critical race theory, it means distributing benefits by racial percentages, rather than by individual merit.”

That’s not what educators at Balsz say.

“From my perspective, critical race theory is something that was initiated decades ago as a theory that leans into the philosophies and understanding of giving a voice to those who don’t usually have a voice in research,” said George Barnes, superintendent of the Balsz district.

“I think over the last 10 years, there’s been some pretty hot conversation on what CRT is, and the misnomer that giving kids a space to learn more about themselves and more about our country is going to cause some sort of negative feelings in the community, overall.”

Horne uses critical race theory: To drag us backward

Schwarz, a politician, says it more plainly.

“What I see is conservatives using the term ‘critical race theory’ to just drive a wedge,” he said. “It’s a phrase that they use to drive a wedge between teachers and families, between schools and families, between white people and Black people, quite frankly.”

How the district teaches history on race

Educators in districts like Balsz say they can’t function without bond and override elections to pay competitive salaries and improve schools. But such measures won’t win support if administrators don’t have trust.

It feels like that’s the point for conservatives like Horne, so desperate to cling to power that they’ll distort history and ruin futures to pull it off.

To be sure, “The 1619 Project” is a massive collection of historical essays that are far over the head of most any fifth-grader.

Horne: Schools teach critical race theory under different names

But it didn’t come up in Skyler Atterbom’s class, where fifth-grade students were learning about Reconstruction, a period of advancements following the Civil War before the vicious snapback of Jim Crow.

Atterbom showed a short NBC News Learn video on YouTube about the Freedman’s Bureau, which legalized marriages, reunited families and brought Black literacy rates up from nothing (it was illegal to teach slaves to read or write) to about 30%, in part by establishing schools such as Howard University in Washington, D.C.  

By 1872, historically Black colleges and universities had granted about 1,000 degrees, but the programs that provided a vital bridge between slavery and citizenship were unpopular among white people. The bureau’s funding was cut drastically following Lincoln’s assassination, leading to its disbandment.

“I think the goal with that is to let the kids think for themselves and teach them how to tackle challenging topics in a respectful and thoughtful way. And that’s all I try to do,” Atterbom said.

Students are taught to share ideas with respect

For Atterbom, it’s not about teaching kids what to think, it’s about teaching them how to think and to share their ideas in a respectful and thoughtful way, starting with listening.

“If I’ve done my job right, they’ve learned to communicate and write more effectively,” he said. “And then also, more importantly to me, to communicate to each other more effectively.

“That’s why at the beginning of every class, I emphasize when we share ideas, I want you to repeat what the person in front of you said first. It’s a learning process … There’s adults who don’t know how to do that. So, if I can teach them that as an 11-year-old, I’ve done my job.”

For Horne, race is “irrelevant to anything.” History says otherwise. Either way, terms like “1619 Project” and “CRT” were absent from Atterbom’s class.

Still, students in the Balsz district, right behind the airport, are trying to fly under the radar and ignore the noise surrounding a national debate over race in education that has noting to do with students and everything to do with conservatives clinging to power.

Reach Moore at  [email protected]  or 602-444-2236. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter,  @SayingMoore .