From the National History Day theme guide:

"A turning point is an idea, event, or action that directly, or sometimes indirectly, causes change. The National History Day^® (NHD) 2024 contest theme invites you to consider questions of time and place, cause and effect, change over time, and impact and significance."

Access all the NHD resources about Debate and Diplomacy from the NHD website: https://nhd.org/en/. 

Dr. Edith Irby Jones receives her M.D. from the University of Arkansas for medical Sciences. 

The materials available in archives and special collections, whether small institutions or major research libraries, can add the personal or detailed perspectives available in primary sources to the study of broad themes, even those with national and international connections. These stories us better understand where we have come from and our role in the United States and the world.

From the 2024 theme sheet, there are several ideas and suggestions that relate to Arkansas or touch on the same historical forces that have shaped the state. Here are topics addressing the theme of Debate and Diplomacy in History that can be investigated using resources available through the University of Arkansas Libraries and other Arkansas research institutions:

• Integration in High Education
• Evolution or Intelligent Design? Arkansas's Long Debate between Science and Faith
• Preservation or Land Use: Negotiating the Environment in the Natural State
• Silas Hunt, Edith Irby Jones, and African American Access to Professional Education in the Segregated South.
• The Elaine Massacre and the Struggle for Equal Justice: Scipio Jones and Defending Accused African Americans after the Elaine Massacre of 1919  
• Native Ground, Forced Migration, and the Search for a New Homeland: Arkansas and the Treatment of Native Americans in the American Empire
• Senator J. William Fulbright Against Senator McCarthy
• Cold War as Compromise: Diplomacy and Arms Race to Avoid Mutually Assured Destruction
• Battles Won and Lost in the Natural State: Environmentalism and Emergence of Modern Arkansas
• Arkansas Suffragists: Arkansas Women help lead the Nation toward Equal Voting Rights
• Standing Up for Women: Hillary Clinton and the Establishing Arkansas’s Women’s Crisis Centers  
• Landless Farmers Unite: the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and Sharecroppers on Strike in Arkansas
• Embracing Integration: Hoxie, Charleston, and Fayetteville, Arkansas, Standing with the Supreme Court