National History Unites a Community

In 1974, David Van Tassel, a professor at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), became worried about increasing reports that students were learning less and less history and its related skills. Proposing that giving students opportunities to actively do research and interpret historical knowledge would increase their excitement about the subject, he organized the first National History Day (NHD) contest in Cleveland, Ohio, and invited local teachers to participate by asking their students to complete history research projects. What began as a small local event soon went statewide across Ohio, then national and international. According to the National History Day office, more than half a million students in grades 6–12 now present their research in exhibits, papers, performances, digital documentaries, and websites annually.

The contest that Van Tassel started is now the Region 3 Ohio History Day contest. Though it has changed substantially in its 48 years, it continues to draw hundreds of students to the Cleveland History Center of the Western Reserve Historical Society (WRHS) and CWRU each year. Region 3 is the largest of Ohio’s 10 regional contests, with an infrastructure built by Van Tassel himself, subsequent coordinator John Vacha, and WRHS staff. Van Tassel’s original motivation—broadening and deepening the history that students learn—remains relevant in 2022, when information literacy and historical thinking skills remain central to our civic needs.

NHD encourages contests to seek community connections that support their students, and Region 3’s long history gives us a robust support system. The five counties that Region 3 encompasses have a vibrant community of historical societies, libraries, monuments, and other local history organizations across the greater Cleveland and greater Akron areas that connect regularly through state and local professional groups. Partnering with this community has been crucial to sustaining our vast, supportive infrastructure, and in turn, the contest provides a centerpiece that brings history lovers of all ages together at least once a year to serve as judges, mentors, and prize sponsors. As many as 13 of these organizations offer additional special prizes to the students participating in the contest that celebrate the depth of their engagement with particular subjects or themes, including local history. These partnerships help ensure that our contest meets its goals: to give students a meaningful sense of heritage and place, to foster an understanding of what careers in the history field look like, and to provide an opportunity for students to feel included in intellectual debates about history and how it is produced.

To engage partners even further, our region heartily encourages students to pursue topics that relate to both NHD’s theme (in 2022, Debate & Diplomacy in History: Successes, Failures, Consequences) and the complicated, often perplexing history of greater Cleveland. In one sense, this is admittedly selfish—we can encourage students and teachers to make use of the WRHS Library, a research facility with over 250,000 books and 10,000 linear feet of processed manuscript collections among its holdings related to the history of Northeast Ohio. We invite and train students to handle these precious primary sources in the hope that they will learn something of the work of researching and preserving history. For our staff, largely composed of people with graduate research experience, demystifying the research process is something that we hold dear. Students in Region 3 come to understand research libraries and public libraries with special collections as meaningful, yet accessible, repositories of knowledge rather than institutions reserved for the trained elite