During the 2009-2010 school year, National History Day invites students to research topics related to the theme: Innovation in History: Impact and Change. Students need to keep the entire theme in mind: “In History,” as well as “Innovation” as they begin their research. While the most obvious topics come from science like Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, or new discoveries like Isaac Newton’s laws of gravity, or new inventions like the automobile, the theme is really much broader than that.

The Chicago Freedom Movement: Bringing the Civil Rights Movement Northward
The Juvenile Protective Association
Creation of the Juvenile Court System
Pullman: A Model Town for Workers

History Fair Projects Put Student Historians in the Driver's Seat of their Education:
"How to Find Topic Ideas in Chicago History" is their "Rules of the Road."

Students need to start the research journey off right by finding a topic and developing a solid question that will hold their interest and focus and is historically significant. A successful History Fair experience for students begins with investing time in this initial step. No crystal ball, "Ouija" board, or lottery will help them: instead, they will need to wear their thinking caps and walking shoes for some footwork in libraries or historical societies, and have nimble fingers for computer work.

Help students define the issues that are really important to them: do they have questions about racism, economic justice, social justice, civil liberties-and why and how their world got to be this way? Are they excited about innovations or the cultural arts and the way they are used to change society? Is their family or neighborhood history really important to them? All of these "burning questions" can be found and studied in history. With guidance students can study the past to help understand today and think about the future.

Chicago Metro History Fair's list of 2010 theme-based topic ideas for the adventurous!

Basic Guidelines to Selecting a History Fair Topic
Approaches to Finding a Topic
Topic Essays in Chicago History
Evaluating Topic for History Fair Readiness

This essay on women's history and Chicago is reprinted, with permission, from Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary, edited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (2001). The introduction by Dr. Schultz pulls together essential themes and topics that emerged from the 423 biographies of Chicago women that appear in this book – History Fair students will find inspiration for research projects and a wealth of information about both known and unknown women who made a difference to our city, and often the nation.

Chicago gained fame as the city of "broad shoulders" in honor of the working people whose labor built it into a world-class industrial city. Today, although many of the steel mills, factories, stockyards and packing houses that employed them have since shut down, the city's motto is still "the city that works." The kinds of jobs most wage-earning men and women do have changed, but labor is still central to who we are and what keeps the city going. It is the chance to earn a better living that draws people from across the world to Chicago, from Europe in earlier years to Latin America, Africa, and Asia today.

"As long as I am firm and whole
And bright and clear and warm of soul
I think that I can reach my goal In shadows."

Gwendolyn Brooks "Shadows," Chicago Defender, May 11, 1935

Topic Questions:
I. Politics
II. Labor
III. Civil Rights
IV. The Law and the Illicit Economy
V. Culture and Leisure
VI. Housing, Neighborhoods and Communities
VII. Selective Bibliography

Over the past century, African Americans have emerged from the shadows to claim their place in Chicago's sun. Before World War I, blacks in Chicago lived in several neighborhoods and made up a small proportion of the city's residents. The Great Migration of the late 1910s and 1920s changed their inconspicuous presence as thousands of African Americans arrived from the south in search of new jobs and freedoms. At best, the white population reacted to these migrants with tolerance, but more often, with hostility as exemplified in the 1919 riot. Segregation and restrictive covenants hemmed middle-class blacks into circumscribed areas and the poor were forced to live in substandard housing where landlords took brownstones and cut them up into tiny kitchenette apartments. Despite this treatment, African Americans in Chicago made segregation into congregation (to borrow a phrase from the historian Earl Lewis) by creating their own businesses, commercial areas, art venues, and churches, social and political organizations. Then, in the Depression decade, working-class blacks helped found industrial unions and their collective actions made strikes, boycotts, and marches respectable means to demand first-class citizenship. All of this activity amounted to a feeling of proud industriousness among many blacks on the South Side of Chicago. Indeed, by the 1940s, social scientists Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake would call Chicago the "Black Metropolis."