The 2025 Young Historians Conference

The 2025 Young Historians Conference

The 2025 Young Historians winners: Sid James, Weston Klein and June Baeck

First Place:  Sid James (St Mary's Academy)
"A Revolutionary Curtain Call: Yiddish Theatre, the Jewish Enlightenment, and the Russian Revolution"

Second Place:  June Baeck (Grant High School)
“Teaching From Past Example: Various Interpretations of Livy’s Rape of Lucretia”

Third  Place:  Weston Klein (Grant High School)
"Form Follows Function: An Analysis of De Architectura and its Influence”

Young Historians 2025 Schedule

The Young Historians Conference was be held at Portland State University on Monday, April 28th, 2025. 

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 10 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 2nd. 
• 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, school, and history course on the first page of document