SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – Ten South Tahoe High School students have spent the school year as part of the first National History Day Club at the school, spending many hours outside of the school day researching and creating historical projects on a wide variety of topics. Under the direction of history teacher Daniel Tirre, the students prepared for the National History Day competition held at Sacramento State University last weekend.
“These projects were very high quality and gave our students a chance to show off their academic abilities,” said Tirre.
The theme this year was “Frontiers in History.” The students had to pick a topic that was a “frontier.” This could have been a cultural frontier, technological frontier, military, political, etc.
Some of the research topics the STHS students completed were Stonewall and LGBTQ Rights, South Korean Democracy, Women’s Role in WWII, The Manhattan Project, the Space Race, The Fall of Tenochtitlan, the California Gold Rush, and WWII Propaganda Cartoons.
National History Day is a non-profit organization that operates annual history project contests at the county, state, and national levels.
Seven STHS students made the trip to Sacramento and competed against more than 1,300 students from 244 schools across 24 counties in California. While they are not going onto the national competition level, Sadie Beall, Abby Sandorff, and Makara Steeves from STHS were finalists in the Exhibit category. Their project was “The Space Race: A Technological Frontier,”
“All students worked extremely hard and persevered, and I am very proud of all of them,” said Tirre.
In the photo above – back row from left to right: Sadie Laster, Makara Steves, Abby Sandorff, Daniel Tirre, Eva Moyer-Pirie. Front row from left to right: Emily Banks, Neo Harness, Owen Ures.
In addition to the students pictured, the following students were also part of the club, but they did not attend the competition: Sadie Beall, Madison Cisneros, and Maia Edmonds.
“All of these students spent the entire year working on their projects, and had to collect evidence from primary and secondary sources,” said Tirre. “Their research was college level, and they had to come up with their own topic, their own thesis, and complete their own independent research.”
The National History Club will be continuing next school year. Any students who might be interested should check them out and talk to Mr. Tirre. They can be found on Instagram at @sths_nhd.