Californias Golden Age:

Junior Division Website

Anthony Bogdan

Dawson Brande

For this years National History Day, my partner and I decided we wanted to conduct a project that would be challenging. We thought it was amazing how thousands of people all around the world traveled to California on the shred of hope that they would get rich. After discussing the options for a topic, my partner and I decided that the most fun topic to write about would be the California Gold Rush. Most of our research was done by searching different issues on our topic and getting information from various websites. My partner and I sent two letters out to professionals asking them multiple questions about the rush. One of the letters was to a professor at the University of Austin, Texas named Henry Williams Brands. The other letter was to the leader of a gold panning group in Happy Camp, California named Dave McCracken. Both men sent back letters answering our questions plus packets of information from a website called Wise Geek. Our final source of information was a book Dave McCracken sent to us by Tom Ito called The California Gold Rush. The presentation category that we chose for our project is the website because we thought you could be more creative with a website than any other option. With a website, the ways to arrange and design your project are endless. We realized that with a website, you can make your project in a way that is different than every other project and has never been seen before. My partner and I created our website with different pages for the events leading up to the gold rush, the cause of the rush, all of the groups of people involved in the event, and all of the ways the rush affected the world. We set up all of our pages with a picture at the top related to the page and paragraphs below the picture giving information on each topic.

My group thought that our topic, the California Gold Rush relates perfectly to the National History Day theme for this year: Turning Points in History, People, Ideas and Events. The gold rush helped the economy of California blossom because of the flocks of people going there. This event also made California very well known to citizens all over. The rush had many influences on modern day things including the increased population of California since 1848 and of course the San Francisco 49ers football team. Another amazing fact about the gold rush is that it created several boomtowns that are major cities today like San Francisco. The California Gold Rush is an extremely interesting and fun topic to research and do a project on. Our topic fits the theme perfectly and is exciting to learn about.