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Suggested National History Day Project Topics

General Topics

2010 Theme

Previous Years' Themes

These topics use resources available in the Special Collections Department at Iowa State University Library. Links are provided to online finding aids (where available) for collection descriptions and listings. For additional information about resources available for these and other topics, please contact the Special Collections Department.

Topics for 2010 NHD Theme: Innovation in History: Impact and Change

For a detailed list of topics related to materials in the Special Collections Department, please click here.

Some of the topics include:

• Ames Lab and Uranium Purification
• John Vincent Atanasoff inventor of the digital computer
• Bert Benjamin inventor of the Farmall tractor and power take-off system
• Norman Borlaug "father" of the Green Revolution
• Wesley Buchele inventor of the round hay baler
• Hog Cholera Eradication
• William Switzer inventor of the vaccines for atrophic rhinitis in pigs and kennel cough in dogs

General Topics

• Iowa State University
• Jack Trice (Iowa State's first African-American athlete; he died as a result of injuries sustained in his first varsity football game. See RS 21/7/23)
• George Washington Carver (First African-American student and faculty member at Iowa State; later joined the faculty at Tuskegee Institute. See RS 21/7/2 and online exhibit)
• Henry A. Wallace (Iowa State alumnus; served as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture (1933-1940) and Vice-President (1941-1945) under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. See RS 21/7/5)
• Carrie Chapman Catt (Iowa State alumna, woman suffrage leader, and disarmament activist. See RS 21/7/3)
• Roswell Garst (Iowa State alumnus; of particular interest are Garst & Company's trade ties to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's 1959 visit to the Garst farm in Coon Rapids, Iowa.  See RS 21/7/12 Roswell Garst Papers, MS 579 Garst Family Papers and Photographs, and related collections)
• Kate Shelley (In 1881, she traveled on foot through a storm, crawling across a railroad bridge over Des Moines River, to warn the railroad station that a bridge had collapsed and the express train should be stopped. See MS 684)
• Rural life and agriculture in Iowa (See subject guide for agricultural collections)
• Women in science and engineering (See website for the Archives of Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) in the Special Collections Department)
• Civil War (See subject guide for Civil War related collections)