Read the prize-winning essays, selected from more than one hundred and fifty students’ entries. These entries were reviewed by a panel of our master teachers, and the finalists were reviewed by a jury of historians.
1st Place ($10,000 + $500 to the school)
Charles Scheuermann, Regis High School, New York, NY, for “The Timber Wars: How an Owl Saved the Forests and Divided a Nation”
2nd Place ($5,000 + $500 to the school)
Sania Edlich, Trinity School, New York, NY, for “Making the Most of ‘the Grandest Opportunity’: The Impact of the 1893 Columbian Exposition on the Black Women’s Club Movement”
3rd Place (nine awards of $1,000 each, in alphabetical order)
- Sophie Baker, Rowland Hall, Salt Lake City, UT, for “Typewriters for Victory: Patriotic Sacrifice and the Feminization of the Workforce during World War II”
- Evan Epstein, Trinity School, New York, NY, for “How the Daisy Ad Transformed American Politics”
- Katherine Hsu, The Chapin School, New York, NY, for “From Art to Cultural Diplomacy: Martha Graham Uses Dance as a Communication Vehicle”
- Isaac Neumann, University School of Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, for “The Cherokee Phoenix Newspaper: Traversing Frontiers in Journalism and Shattering Stereotypes with Every Word Printed”
- Charlotte Peterson, Stuyvesant High School, New York, NY, for “Physics, Patriotism, and Propaganda: American Education’s Continuity and Changes after Sputnik”
- Victor Robila, Hunter College High School, New York, NY, for “Trust and Publicity: The Decrease in Soviet-US Tensions during Perestroika and Glasnost”
- Alyssa Tang, University High School, Irvine, CA, for “The 1964 Surgeon General’s Report: Communicating the Hazards of Smoking to the Public”
- Neo Yee, Hunter College High School, New York, NY, for “Quarantining Chinatown: How Isolationist Policy-Making Facilitated the Development of a Chinese-American Community in San Francisco”
- Jasmine Zheng, Charlotte Latin School, Charlotte, NC, for “Sinclair’s Socialism: Passion or Overenthusiasm”