by Simbrit Paskins, Student Programs Coordinator

The 2023 National History Day season has been a whirlwind of epic proportions! Folks from across the Commonwealth came together energized for our first fully in-person contest season since the onset of COVID, and they came back with a bang! 

With 4,000 NHD participants across the state this year, over 600 middle and high school students competed in the Regional and State contests hosted by the MHS. It was impressive to witness student work come to life over the course of this program year: Guided by over 90 dedicated educators, students presented almost 350 projects to over 90 judges, all history lovers who enthusiastically volunteered their time to carefully assess the students’ work. While judges reviewed rubrics for each project category and prepared to interview the students on their topics, teachers tirelessly supported student work and helped move students’ projects from concept to reality, making this year’s local contests a collective community achievement!

Navigating after-school clubs, extra-curriculars, and even holiday breaks, students showed up this year with their historian hats on to teach us all about a wide range of topics that speak to this year’s NHD theme, “Frontiers in History.” Students developed papers, websites, performances, exhibits and documentaries to share about people, places, things, and ideas that demonstrate a frontier being crossed in history. What a sight! And we, their very impressed pupils, listened in awe! Projects covered a wide range of subjects such as: women’s roles in war, frontiers through race and gender, LGBTQ representation in literature, advancements in technology such as music and video games, frontiers in fashion, American furniture, entertainment, and even space exploration! 

On Saturday, April 1, we hosted an exciting awards ceremony at Winchester High School where NHD Winners from Massachusetts were announced at the closing of a very rich state contest. Among the many special History Day guests was Sen. Paul Feeney, who spent the morning observing project presentations and interviews and meeting NHD constituents! This visit helped all of us shine an even brighter light on the incredible experience that is National History Day.

This year, 50 projects received gold, silver and honorable mention awards, and local institutions sponsored 30 special prizes, including: Best Project in: Massachusetts History, LGBTQ+ History, and African American History. Our 62 Gold and Silver medalists will be moving on to the National Contest this June at the University of Maryland.

When I first began working here at the MHS, I was told that “National History Day is more than just a day, it is an experience!”, and after my first year of coordinating this program, I can see that nothing is more true. NHD builds strong community ties between folks from all different walks of life, connecting us under one common goal of supporting young people in their exploration of and relationship to history and to themselves. Teacher mentors connect their youth with the program on an individual basis, as a whole class, and even as an after-school program, opening the door for students from all backgrounds to explore history with both a critical and curious lens! Parents & guardians help students glue the pieces of their exhibits together, practice performance lines when no one is watching, equip and encourage students to advocate for themselves when in need, & usher their young people to our local contests on early weekend mornings. 

Thank you again to all of the students, teachers, parents, schools, and judges who supported the 2023 contests. Thank you as well to all of our sponsors at the Mass Cultural Council and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, who help us grow the program and make it accessible to all students.

We invite members of the public to learn more about the NHD program and to contact us at nhd@masshist.org for more information. There are so many ways to engage with this program and support its growth! 

By Heather Rockwood, Communications Associate

What do a circus tent, a snowstorm, players from the 1967 Red Sox players, and a submarine have in common? They were all featured in some of our most popular social media posts of 2022. Let’s look back at these and other 2022 social media posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

On Twitter, our most popular post of the year was a video featuring Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman, MHS’s award winners for excellence in historical writing. The event is also available as a podcast.

Our second most popular post of the year on Twitter was an “On this day in history” post—#OTDH—about the 1776 Liberty Bell and the first reading of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.

The third most popular MHS Twitter post of the year was an image featuring a circus tent. A painting of a P.T. Barnum circus tent on the very spot where the MHS building now stands.

On Facebook, our most popular post of the year went viral, reaching 2 million people! It told of a snowstorm that day, along with a photograph from the MHS collection of a snowstorm in New York City in 1888. Many people reminisced in the comments about the famous Blizzard of 1978 that resembled the image, with its blanketing of snow. And they equated it to the Children’s Blizzard, which happened in 1888 in Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, and eastern Dakota Territory.

Facebook post featuring an image of a boy leaning against a dug-out wall of snow next to some buildings in New York City.

Our second most popular Facebook post from 2022 featured a blog post about a very sick John Quincy Adams traveling by coach, boat, and private carriage to give the keynote address at the opening of the Cincinnati Observatory in 1843.

The third most popular post on Facebook announced a new temporary exhibition at the MHS, “Impossible Dreamers: The Pennant-Winning 1967 Boston Red Sox.” It was on display August-September 2022.

On Instagram the most popular MHS post of the year was a video of a temporary exhibition of love letters between John and Abigail (Smith) Adams before their marriage. These letters featured John Adams’s famous “Miss Adorable” letter to Abigail.

The MHS’s second most popular Instagram post of the year was another “On this day in history” (#OTHD) featuring a 1789-1790 map of the Northwest Territory—part of present-day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—and related to Congress’s enacting the Northwest Ordinance, which allowed states to be formed free of enslavement in that designated area.

The last post we’ll share today—MHS’s third most popular Instagram post of 2022—is both an “On this day in history” (#OTDH) and a blog post. It features the story of the first submarine used for warfare during the American Revolution in 1776.

If you don’t already follow us on social media, now is a great time to sign up!

The MHS is pleased to announce the class of 2022-2023 research fellows. Director of Research Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai remarked, “We are excited to welcome this new class of MHS research fellows to our reading room. These projects represent the latest scholarship on a host of topics from poetry and literature to African American and disability history. These researchers and their projects showcase not just the strengths and versatility of the MHS collections but also the creative ways in which scholars can make use of different types of sources. They will all contribute to a better understanding of both American history and society.” Explore the list of recipients and their projects.

MHS-NEH Long-Term Fellows

• Nathan Braccio, Post-Doc, Utah State University, “Mapping New England: The Algonquian-English Cartographic Struggle, 1500-1700.” (4 months)
• Juliane Braun, Assistant Professor, Auburn University, “Translating the Pacific: Nature Writing, Print Culture and Transoceanic Empire.” (4 months)
• Kathryn Lasdow, Assistant Professor, Suffolk University, “Wharfed Out: Improvement and Inequity on the Early American Urban Waterfront.” (4 months)
• Christy Pottroff, Assistant Professor, Boston College, “Citizen Technologies: The U.S. Post Office and the Transformation of American Literature.” (4 months)

New England Regional Fellowship Consortium (NERFC)
Fellows Visiting the MHS

• Alexander David Clayton, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, “The Living Animal: Biopower and Empire in the Atlantic Menagerie, 1760-1890.”
• Katherine Fein, Ph.D. Candidate, Columbia University, “The Garb of Nature: Picturing Nudity, Race, and Ecology in the Nineteenth-Century United States.”
•  Emily Gates, Ph.D. Candidate, Georgia State University, “Melancholia in Colonial New England and Its Impact on the Early American Novel.”
• Barry Huff, Associate Professor, Principia College, “Slavery, Suffrage, and Science: Mary Baker Eddy and Biblical Interpretation in Nineteenth-Century New England.”
• Arthur George Kamya, Ph.D. Candidate, Boston University, “Stranger Unfreedom: Slavery, Slave Trading, and Servitude in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts.”
• Eva Landsberg, Graduate Student, Yale University, “The Politics of Sugar in the 18th-Century British Atlantic.”
• Frances O’Shaughnessy, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Washington, “Black Revolution on the Sea Islands: Property, Empire, and the Emancipation of Humanity.”
• Anne Powell, Ph.D. Candidate, College of William and Mary, “The Antinomian Crisis and the Pequot War, 1636-1638.”
• Jennifer Reiss, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Pennsylvania, “Undone Bodies: Women and Disability in Early America.”
• Lea Stephenson, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Delaware, “’Wonderful Things’: Egyptomania, Empire, and the Senses, 1870-1922.”
• Jeffrey Toney, Professor, Kean University, “From Blackface to Black Genius: Celebrating Cultural Inheritance with Students of Color.”

Fellows Not Visiting the MHS

• Sopanit Angsusingha, Ph.D. Candidate, Georgetown University, “The Gospel of Civility: Missionary Encounters, Education, and Gender in Iraq (1890s-1950s).”
• Isobel Ashby, Graduate Student, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Battling for Babies? The Changing Face of Pro-Life Activism in the 1990s Northeast and Midwest United States.”
• David Brown, Associate Professor, Ohio University, “A Chain Unbroken: Cultural Transmission in New England College Student Life, 1880-1925.”
• Thalia Ertman, Graduate Student, University of California-Los Angeles, “Socialist Feminism and Bodily Autonomy in the United States.”
• Roxanne Goldberg, Ph.D. Candidate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Selling and Salvaging ‘the Orient’: U.S. Circuits of Islamic Art, 1870–1940.”
• Karyna Hlyvynska, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Georgia, “Putting the Machine in Motion: How the U.S. Treasury Department Built a Fiscal-Military State.”
• Yiyun Huang, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, “Medicinal Tea: Global Cultural Transfer and A Vast Early America.”
• Dana Hughes, Ph.D. Candidate, University of California-Santa Barbara, “Tracking the Colonial Revival in Public Memory: Caroline Hazard and her Activism on Two Coasts in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.”
• Alexandra Macdonald, Ph.D. Candidate, College of William and Mary, “The Social Life of Time in the Anglo-Atlantic World, 1660-1830.”
• Lawrence “Trent” MacNamara, Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University, “Open Sky: Higher Places and Higher Meaning in the United States.”
• Aaron Moulton, Assistant Professor, Stephen F. Austin State University, “A Dominican Dictator in Washington: Rafael Trujillo and the Politics of U.S. Foreign Relations.”
• Joseph Nevins, Professor Emeritus, Vassar College, “Banana Capital: How the United Fruit Company and Greater Boston Made One Another.”
• Sarah Pearlman Shapiro, Ph.D. Candidate, Brown University, “Women’s Communities of Care in Revolutionary New England.”
• Christine Peralta, Assistant Professor, Amherst College, “Insurgent Care: Reimagining the Health Work of Filipina Women, 1870- 1948.”
• Trysh Travis, Associate Professor, University of Florida, “Feminists on Drugs: A History.”
• Kayleigh Whitman, Ph.D. Candidate, Vanderbilt University, “Faith in the World Community: Sue Bailey Thurman and Black Women’s World Reconstruction, 1920-1950.”
• Hekang Yang, Ph.D. Candidate, Columbia University, “The Making of Fiscal Empire: Frontier Questions and State Borrowing in China, circa 1876-1916.”

Suanne and Caleb Loring Fellowship on the Civil War, Its Origins, and Consequences

• Paul Polgar, Assistant Professor, University of Mississippi, “An Abolition Peace: Black Rights, the Union Cause, and the Rise of Radical Reconstruction.”

Short-Term Fellowships

• Aabid Allibhai, Ph.D. Candidate, Harvard University, “Belinda Sutton’s World: Slavery, Legal Activism, and Abolition in Revolutionary New England.” (Samuel Victor Constant Fellowship from the Society of Colonial Wars)
• Joshua Bartlett, Assistant Professor, Bilkent University, “Arboreal Poetics: The Language, Materiality, and Politics of Trees in American Poetry.” (Mary B. Wright Environmental History Fellowship)
• Richard Bell, Professor, University of Maryland, “The First Freedom Riders: Streetcars and Street Fights in Jim Crow New York.” (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship)
• Daniel Bottino, Ph.D. Candidate, Rutgers University, “‘By Turff and Twigg’: Oral and Literate Culture in Seventeenth-Century Maine.” (Samuel Victor Constant Fellowship from the Society of Colonial Wars)
• Armando Chavez-Rivera, Associate Professor, University of Houston, “Alexander Hill Everett, Richard Robert Madden, and U.S. Influences over Cuba in 1835-45.” (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship)
• Theodore Delwiche, Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University, “The Contested Classics: Education in North America, 1635-1800.” (Samuel Victor Constant Fellowship from the Society of Colonial Wars)
• Daniel Doherty, Ph.D. Candidate, Durham University, “‘Bleeding Massachusetts’: Anti-Abolitionist and anti-Black Violence in the Antebellum North, 1840-1849.” (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship)
• Andre Fleche, Professor, Castleton University, “The American Civil War and the Shaping of the Western Hemisphere, 1848-1877.” (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship)
• Stephanie Gorton, Independent Scholar, “The Icon and the Idealist: The Two Radical Women Who Brought Choice to America.” (Alyson R. Miller Fellowship)
• Mercedes Haigler, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Virginia, “Settled Out of Doors: Social Life, Everyday Spaces, and the Development of Partisanship in Philadelphia and Washington City (1790-1832).” (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship)
• Barry Huff, Associate Professor, Principia College, “Slavery, Suffrage, and Science: Mary Baker Eddy and Nineteenth-Century New England Sermons.” (C. Conrad & Elizabeth H. Wright Fellowship)
• Betsy Klimasmith, Professor, University of Massachusetts, Boston, “Staging Ephemerality: The Theatrics of Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie.” (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship)
• Can Mert Kökerer, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Chicago, “The Participatory Foundations of Democracy in Colonial New England: Institutional Innovation, Political Legitimation, and Popular Domination.” (Samuel Victor Constant Fellowship from the Society of Colonial Wars)
• Jeremy Land, Post-Doc, University of Helsinki, “Trans-Imperial Trade and the American Revolution.” (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship)
• Eva Landsburg, Graduate Student, Yale University, “The Politics of Sugar in the 18th-Century British Atlantic.” (Kenneth and Carol Hills Fellowship in Colonial History)
• Michael Larmann, Graduate Student, University of Montana, “Monuments and Moderation: Daniel Webster and the Commemoration of Compromise in the Age of Disunion, 1853-1865.” (Benjamin F. Stevens Fellowship)
• Jessica Leeper, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Oxford, “The Adams and Johnson Women at Court in Early American European Diplomacy, c.1780-1820.” (Marc Friedlaender Fellowship)
• Brigitte Lewis, Graduate Student, University of Chicago, “The Legend of Neptune: The Life of Nipton – A History of Slavery, Freedom, Land, and Community in Three Centuries of New England.” (African American Studies Fellowship)
• Leo Lovemore, Post-Doc, Historic New England, “‘Treasurers of God’s Bounty’: Money, Medicine, and Power in Boston, 1785-1865.” (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship)
• Karah Mitchell, Ph.D. Candidate, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “‘The Call of Kind’: Humanizing the Animal in American Literature, 1830-1918.” (Andrew Oliver Research Fellowship)
• Jennifer Reiss, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Pennsylvania, “Undone Bodies: Women and Disability in Early America.” (Ruth R. Miller Fellowship)
• Alison Russell, Graduate Student, University of Massachusetts Amherst, “‘On That Shield’: American Identity and the Constitution in the Early Republic.” (Malcolm and Mildred Freiberg Fellowship)
• Meredith Stukey, Ph.D. Candidate, Purdue University, “The Romanovs on a World Stage: Autocracy, Democracy, and Crisis, 1896-1918.” (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship)
• Rachel Trocchio, Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, “Thinking the Instant: A New Reading of the Great Awakening.” (Kenneth and Carol Hills Fellowship in Colonial History and W.B.H. Dowse Fellowship)
• Christopher Walton, Ph.D. Candidate, Southern Methodist University, “At Home in War: Religion in the Connecticut River Valley during the American Revolution.” (Military Historical Society of Massachusetts Fellowship)
• Weiao Xing, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Cambridge, “Puritan Narratives of Encounters in Early Eighteenth-Century New England.” (W.B.H. Dowse Fellowship)
• Tian Xu, Post-Doc, Historic New England, “Representing Minorities in the Civil War Era: Lawyers in Black and Chinese Legal Mobilization.” (Louis Leonard Tucker Alumni Fellowship)
• Serena Zabin, Professor, Carleton College, “Boston’s Black Refugees.” (Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati Fellowship)
• Jeanette Zaragoza, Assistant Professor, University of Puerto Rico, “Interpreting a Transatlantic Saga: How Interpreters and Translators Wove The Amistad.” (Louis Leonard Tucker Alumni Fellowship)

Deadline: Wednesday, 22 February 2022

It’s time again for National History Day in Massachusetts! Our students and teachers are hard at work on their “Debate and Diplomacy in History” themed exhibits, performances, documentaries, websites, and essays.

Want to support our students and learn a wide array of interesting histories? Volunteer from home as a judge for one of our Virtual Regional competitions! We need your help to provide quality judging and a great contest experience for the students. Not only will you support our NHD MA students, but you will have the opportunity to learn about a wide array of histories. No prior experience required, just a love of history!

Our 2022 Regional Competitions will be held virtually this year. Judging for our South Shore competition will take place on Saturday, 5 March, and our Greater Boston competition will take place on Sunday, 6 March. Judges will receive project materials a week in advance, and on their contest day will meet with other judges to review and provide feedback. After judging is completed, judges will then join students, teachers, and parents for a Reflection Roundtable as students discuss their research process and discoveries.

To learn more about judging and to register for one of our competitions, visit our Judges page! For more information about NHD in Massachusetts and to see examples of past projects, visit our website or e-mail us at nhd@masshist.org.

By Kate Melchior, Assistant Director of Education

Gov. Charlie Baker approved the FY22 Massachusetts state budget recently. We are thrilled to share the news that $25K is included in the budget to support National History Day in Massachusetts (NHD)!

This is really wonderful news, especially as we employ new ways to strengthen the NHD program this fall. External funding for NHD makes it possible to:

• Reduce or eliminate registration fees for students
• Offer high-quality professional development and curricular support for teachers
• Make inroads in our ultimate goal of making NHD accessible to all grades 6-12 students across the Commonwealth

This spring we held the first Virtual Advocacy Day for NHD in Massachusetts and it really made an impact. So many of you called, e-mailed, and Tweeted about the importance of NHD to you and to the students and teachers in your district. And your legislators listened. Please consider writing to your legislators to thank them, especially if you received a response to your advocacy back in April.

We are so grateful to the MHS community for your continued support of this important program. We are excited to celebrate NHD 2022 and this year’s theme of “Diplomacy and Debate in History” with all of you!