The 2026 Young Historians Conference
Young Historians 2026 winners: Lily Nelson, India Black-Mitchell and Leif Crockett
First Place: Leif Crockett (Riverdale High School)
"The Kraken Wakes: Myth, Science, and the Rise of a Maritime Sensation, from 1750-1900"
Second Place: India Black-Mitchell (St Mary's Academy)
"The Revolutionaries of Mt. Tabor: Religion, Radicalism, and Propaganda of The Taborites in Hussite Bohemia"
Third Place: Lily Nelson (Grant High School)
"Demonizing Sexuality: Dangerous Women in Folklore"
The conference brings together PSU’s history department and area high schools that participate in college level history classes, such as the PSU Challenge Program, other dual credit programs, or AP history. Courses include, but are not limited to, American History, Western Civilization, and World History. Courses must include a major assignment that is a history research paper. History instructors select the best of these for the student authors to submit for consideration. A history department lead faculty member works with a jury of history graduate students to assess the submissions and choose up to 30 papers for the presentation.
The conference is organized into concurrent sessions by themes determined by the Jury and lead faculty member. Each session has at least three presenters who have approximately 15 minutes to present their paper. The audience is made up of their classmates and a faculty moderator from the history department. At the end of the presentations, the faculty moderator leads a discussion.
Awards are given for the best papers. Authors of the top papers will be invited to submit their work to PDXScholar, PSU's online repository of scholarly works. To view information about PDXScholar's readership information and number of downloads, click here.
Guidelines for submissions:
- Papers are due by noon on Wednesday, April 1st.
- Paper format should be a google word doc with editing enabled for saholl2@pdx.edu. If students don't have a google account they can send it as a Word Document
- All submissions must include the research paper, abstract, and title page emailed to saholl2@pdx.edu as one document.
- Every paper should contain the student's name, paper title, high school, and history course on the first page of document
Papers from previous Young Historians Conferences can be viewed at PDXScholar. Instructions on how to submit papers can be read here.