Read the eleven prize winners, selected from more than one hundred and fifty students’ entries. These entries were reviewed by a panel of our master teachers, with twenty finalists, then reviewed by a jury of historians.
The eleven prize winners, including links to their entries, are as follows:
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”
David McCullough at Trinity School in Manhattan, October 15, 2019
Winning Essays
2022 Contest Winners
Read the eleven prize winners, selected from more than seventy students’ entries.
2021 Winners
Read the twelve prize winners, selected from more than seventy students’ entries.