The theme for National History Day 2020 is Breaking Barriers in History. Below we have highlighted some extraordinary people and groups across the ages and have provided you with links to related primary sources and additional resources.
- Grace Abbott
- Jane Addams
- Susan B. Anthony
- Mary McLeod Bethune
- Carrie S. Burnham
- Rachel Carson
- Carrie Chapman Catt
- Shirley Chisholm
- Anna Dickinson
- Dorothea Dix
- Frederick Douglass
- W.E.B. Du Bois
- Betty Friedan
- Althea Gibson
- Emma Goldman
- Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla
- Lewis Hine
- Frank Kameny
- Little Rock Nine
- Belva Lockwood
- Elijah Lovejoy
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Lucretia Mott
- John Muir
- NAACP
- Carrie Nation
- Thomas Paine
- Emmeline Pankhurst
- Rosa Parks
- Alice Paul
- A. Philip Randolph
- Jacob Riis
- Chief John Ross
- Bayard Rustin
- Salvation Army
- Sitting Bull
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
- Mary Church Terrell
- Sojourner Truth
- Harriet Tubman
- Lilli Vincenz
- Ida B. Wells
- Frances Willard
- Sarah Winnemucca
- Alvin Ailey
- Marian Anderson
- John James Audubon
- James Baldwin
- Emile Berliner
- Leonard Bernstein
- Gwendolyn Brooks
- Esther Bubley
- John Burroughs
- Civil War Era African American Women Writers
- Aaron Copland
- Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
- Emily Dickinson
- Paul Laurence Dunbar
- Katherine Dunham
- Duke Ellington
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- James Reese Europe
- William Faulkner
- Ella Fitzgerald
- Daniel Chester French
- Dizzy Gillespie
- Dorothy and Lillian Gish
- Samuel H. Gottscho and William H. Schleisner
- Martha Graham
- W.C. Handy
- Joy Harjo
- Victor Herbert
- Billie Holiday
- Julia Ward Howe
- Langston Hughes
- Zora Neale Hurston
- Mahalia Jackson
- James Weldon Johnson
- Dorothea Lange
- Jenny Lind
- Gabriela Mistral
- Toni Morrison
- Jelly Roll Morton
- Pablo Neruda
- Gordon Parks
- Leontyne Price
- Bill “Bojangles” Robinson
- Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
- Patricia Smith
- Tracy K. Smith
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
- Gertrude Stein
- Arthur Szyk
- Henry David Thoreau
- Phillis Wheatley
- Laura Ingalls Wilder
- Frank Lloyd Wright
- Hannah Arendt
- Benjamin Banneker
- Clara Barton
- Alexander Graham Bell
- Black Women’s Clubs
- Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell
- Nellie Bly
- Ralph Bunche
- George Washington Carver
- Marie Curie
- Amelia Earhart
- Thomas A. Edison
- Albert Einstein
- Henry Ford
- Benjamin Franklin
- José Manuel Gallegos
- Althea Gibson
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- Gilbert Grosvenor
- Harlem Hellfighters
- Julia Archibald Holmes
- Harry Houdini
- Iditarod women
- Duke Kahanamoku
- Helen Keller
- Lawrence of Arabia
- Alan Lomax
- George Perkins Marsh
- Thurgood Marshall
- Samuel Morse
- Alfred Nobel
- Barack Obama
- Leroy Robert “Satchel” Paige
- Gifford Pinchot
- Harriet Quimby
- Jeannette Rankin
- Jackie Robinson
- John A. Roebling
- Eleanor Roosevelt
- Sonia Sotomayor
- Amos Alonzo Stagg
- Nikola Tesla
- Jim Thorpe
- Tuskegee Airmen
- Kathy Whitworth
- Women Photojournalists
- Wright Brothers
- Cy Young
Related resources
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