Local students place nationally in prestigious history competition
Local area schools were well represented among the national winners of the prestigious National History Day competition on June 13.
Marking its 50th anniversary, National History Day is an annual history competition in which middle and high school students from across the country research and present a history topic on a given open-ended theme through any one of five formats — documentary, exhibit, paper, performance or website.
Ila Lu, a rising freshman at Eastlake High School, placed first nationally in the Junior Individual division of the competition’s website category. Manya Nagrath and Simren Bajwa, both rising freshman at Eastlake, placed in the top 10 nationally, winning the state-level competition for the Junior Group division in the exhibit category. All three competed in National History Day during their eighth grade year at Evergreen Middle School.
In the competition, Lu researched and built a website called Pocket Books: Turning the Page for American Readers. Her website chronicled the publication of affordable, pocket-sized books in the 1930s and their impact on American readership and literature.
“I did my project on Pocket Books which was a 1939 company with the aim to make books more accessible to people,” Lu said. “As I’m an avid reader…I really liked this topic.”
Nagrath and Bajwa’s project, Aftermath of the “Unsinkable” Sinking: A Turning Point in Maritime Laws, explored the sinking of the Titanic and the enforcement of maritime safety rules at the time. The duo built an exhibit that told the historical account with the use of photographs, diagrams, posters, their own writing and thesis, quotations and a boat model, all organized by key subtopics.
All three discovered this competition through their history teachers and schoolwork at Evergreen.
The National History Day competition has three levels — regional, state and national. For Nagrath, progressing through these stages motivated her to keep going.
“I participated and I first passed the regional contest and state contest, and I think the more I began to excel in this competition, the more dedicated I felt towards it,” Nagrath said. “I think that’s why I managed to get as far as I did.”
State winners receive a special medal. First place winners at the national receive $1,000. As the competition progresses, contestants integrate comments from the judges for the next level of the competition. For instance, based on the judges’ feedback, Lu updated the formatting of her website, while Nagrath edited the long-term impacts of maritime laws on her exhibit to be more realistic.
For Nagrath, she took away something else from seeing other peoples’ projects. “I learned a lot about history…and it was a very big learning experience for me,” Nagrath said.
Ila Lu is currently a reporter at the Sammamish Independent.
