Skip Maine state header navigation

Agencies | Online Services | Help

Skip First Level Navigation | Skip All Navigation

Home > Teachers and Students > History Day > Entries

  • New Rule for the 2013 Contest: Only 3 entries will be allowed per category from each school

    Rationale: While we greatly appreciate and encourage the idea of classroom-wide participation from schools, we feel the purpose of the state-level contest is to promote a level of excellence, allowing us to select from entries which are ready to advance to Nationals. Instead of the Maine National History Day Contest being the classroom project, we feel it should be the apex, rewarding exceptional entries and bestowing on students an appreciative and respectful atmosphere where they are made to feel they have earned a place by their dedication and research on the project and topic they have selected.

    NOTE: Potentially, a junior high school or senior high school could still have 27 entries (per division) but if 10 students choose to do an individual exhibit (for an example), the school would have to select the top 3 to attend the state contest.

How to Create Entries for National History Day

Understand the Rules and Theme

Before you begin work on an entry for competition, you, your teacher, and your parents should carefully read the contest rules and know what the requirements are for all categories and for each individual category.

National History Day Contest Rule Book (pdf file, 987kb)

Accepted Styles for Citations and Bibliographies (pdf file, 21 kb)

The themes are chosen to be broad enough to encourage investigation of topics ranging from local history to world history, and from ancient time to the recent past. To understand the historical importance of your topic you need to ask questions about time, place and context; cause and effect; change over time; and impact and significance. You must consider not only when and where events happened, but also why they occurred and what factors contributed to their development.

2013 Theme Sheet (pdf, 364kb)

2013 Theme Book (pdf, 7.31mb)

2013 Sample Topics (pdf, 906kb)

Choose a Topic

Think about a time in history or individuals or events that are interesting to you. Start a list. Read books, newspapers or other sources of information and add to your list. Talk with relatives, neighbors, or people you know who have lived through a particular time in history that interests you and add more ideas. Keep thinking, reading and talking to people until you have many ideas that are interesting. Now go back through the list and circle the ideas that connect with the theme. From the ideas that you circled, select one to begin your research. Keep your list because you might need it again.

Visit the NHD website for more information.

NHD Categories