Katherine Chapman, History Day 2024 intern, reflects on her contribution to the 10th anniversary event. History Day is organised by Senate House Library and the Institute of Historical Research, and Katherine held one of three IHR paid internships.
And just like that, History Day 2024 and my internship are over. Last week saw the end of my three-month-long internship helping to plan and publicise History Day 2024. Leaving Senate House on Tuesday, I felt the happy exhaustion that comes with a busy and successful day. As we said goodbye to the representatives of the archives, museums, and other collections that joined us on 5 November, most stopped to express their thanks and to tell us how much they enjoyed the event … in summary, History Day 2024 was a great success!
My History Day role
My role as History Day intern started in mid-August and since then I’ve been working with Kate Wilcox and Argula Rublack, co-organisers of the event. My internship was just a small part in putting on the event and the planning was expertly led by Kate and Argula. We also couldn’t have had such a great in-person and online event without the hard work of Gemma Dormer, Roy Oostwouder, library graduate trainees Sarah Admans and Lara Short, and the wonderful on-the-day media support of Natalia Alyukova and Sophie Harrop. Many more people working behind the scenes at the University of London also contributed and we couldn’t have done it without them.
This role meant that I had the chance to help with most aspects of planning for and promoting History Day as putting together an event like this takes a lot of moving parts. My internship remained engaging throughout, as every day I was doing something slightly different, as we pulled all these different pieces together. Over our months of planning, these were just a few of the things I helped to organise:
- Inviting and communicating with participating organisations
- Event logistics
- Designing a new home page for the History Day website
- Designing promotional material (posters, signage, postcards)
- Creating the communications plan
- Creating content for social media (graphics and video edits)
- Developing on-the-day activities (for both online and in-person attendees), including a Scavenger Hunt, History Day Bingo, a digital spinner, and a padlet for on-the-day feedback
‘Behind the scenes’ in the lead-up to History Day
Two of my main responsibilities were creating and running a social media marketing plan for the event and coming up with our on-the-day activities to mark History Day’s tenth anniversary and get participants talking to new organisations. One of our activity winners told us “the scavenger hunt was great as I really did talk to people that I might not have done otherwise”. Hearing this and getting to see people enjoying the activities I’d planned gave me a real sense of satisfaction as we followed my ideas from suggestions in meetings to real, tangible activities.
Working with the organisations to put these activities together and seeing their contributions to our digital collection also highlighted to me the great diversity found in this sector. The wonderful collections around the UK hold an incredible range of sources for historians of all kinds to use. That’s what History Day is all about: creating the opportunity to come together with other like-minded history enthusiasts to discuss research interests, learn more about what sources are out there, and meet the experts behind some of the UK’s best collections.
Attendees enjoying History Day
On the day of the event
Over 400 people pre-registered for the event this year, and we estimate that about 370 came on the day, including some walk-in attendees. The anticipation and excitement was clear as soon as I got to Senate House. I spent most of the morning helping at the welcome desk and live-posting to the IHR instagram account. Knowing it was going to be a busy day, I’d already prepared most of the content to be released on the day, including questions for vox pop interviews. This gave me time to greet our attendees, meet some more members of the IHR staff, and take a sneak peek at the wonderful table displays!
History Day hopefully seemed like a swan on a lake, seamless on top and very busy underneath! The nature of the day meant we all moved from one role to another but that only added to the overall “buzz” of the day (“buzz” being the word most people used to describe the atmosphere in Senate House). As well as setting off the vox pops, I took photos of our attendees and organisation reps enjoying the day, and independently filmed the two speeches kindly given by our speakers Lucy Evans, Head of Collections at Senate House Library, and Claire Langhamer, Director of the IHR.
In the afternoon things had settled a bit and I finally had some time to explore the fair. Our tagline for this year was “What will you discover?” and I was eager to do just that! There were some brilliant displays at History Day this year but what I really enjoyed was diving in as an attendee myself. I had some really inspiring conversations with organisations and got to learn more about collections I knew little about. It really reinvigorated me to get stuck in again to my own research! I wish I’d had all day to walk around and chat to each of our in-person organisations … looking back at the pictures there were definitely some fascinating people that I missed!
Some of my favourite table displays
One of the most rewarding parts of the day was hearing everyone’s enthusiasm as they left. We were told how people had “been to History Day before, but this was by far the best one yet!”, that they’d “had the best time” and “would absolutely be back next year” but mostly, people thanked us for all our hard work in making History Day happen. In the madness of the day, it was this that really hit home that History Day 2024 was over and all our hard work had paid off. I felt a lot of pride in all of the work myself, Kate, and Argula (and all our other helpers) had done so was really happy to hear how much the event had been enjoyed by everyone.
I hope this blog post has been able to illustrate how much preparation goes into making History Day happen and how beneficial I’ve found my placement to be. I’ve learnt a lot about how much goes into putting on events like this and how beneficial they are to the history community, from students and independent researchers to archivists, librarians, and collection specialists. Kate and Argula’s trust in me to take the lead in parts of our planning and in meetings, and their support and confidence in my design and content decisions has given me new confidence in my abilities which will really help me with my next steps.
I want to take a moment to particularly thank them again, and everyone at the IHR and Senate House, for all their support over the last three months and to highlight how grateful I am that the IHR were able to run this internship programme this year. All that’s left to say from me is thank you again to everyone who joined us for History Day this year, and that I hope you’ll be able to make it to next year’s events.
You can browse more content from History Day 2024 on the History Day website.