Quick Summary
The National History Day annual theme for 2026-2027 is "Innovation in History." Explore project topics with a new guide from the Minnesota Digital Library.
National History Day (NHD) is a program that builds opportunities for students to research historical topics around a particular theme. Each year a new theme is chosen that applies to world, national, or state and local history. The 2026-2027 theme is "Innovation in History: Impact, Influence, Change."
The Minnesota Digital Library (MDL) encourages local middle school and high school students to select an NHD topic from Minnesota's history. Local history topics can help your project stand out, and you might just discover unique and little-known stories. Examining how a nationally-significant innovation impacted your own community is a great way to make your research more relevant and exciting.
To help students and their teachers come up with a topic and conduct research for their NHD projects, MDL has developed a History Day resource guide on our website. We recently added a new page explaining this year's theme. The guide includes many examples of innovations in technology, methods, and ideas that affected people here in Minnesota. MDL also highlights several of our Primary Source Sets that relate to this year's theme, which provide reliable starting points for research and topic selection.
Explore the guide and start brainstorming some topics today!
Image credit: People posing with new farm machinery, Olmsted County, 1900-1920. Olmsted County Historical Society, https://collection.mndigital.org/catalog/olms:675
