This website is a work in progress with a history of its own. For years, American Studies students had been conducting oral history interviews as part of the curriculum. Then, in 2009, the District 113 Foundation funded a grant supporting the DHS 50th Anniversary Education Committee's plan to capitalize on the unique opportunity to gather oral histories during the school's 50th anniversary celebrations. We also partnered with the Deerfield Public Library on a local oral history project accompanying its "One Book, One Zip Code" selection Listening Is An Act of Love (a book by StoryCorps chronicling American life through oral histories). As the 50th anniversary of DHS approached, we revisited Theodor Repsholdt's The History of Deerfield High School 1960-1989, and began adding and updating information for the years since 1989. We created a rough chronology on a webpage for the 50th anniversary, layered with images and oral histories collected prior to that event.
This website was initially populated in the last few weeks of the 2017-18 school year by students in the A.P. U.S. History (APUSH) class with Ms. Antonakos. It has and will be enhanced annually by succeeding classes of students in both the American Studies and APUSH courses. Please check back periodically for updates, and if you have suggestions for content or contributions you would like to make, please email nantonakos@dist113.org.
We have created two sections: one focused on Deerfield (village) history and the other on DHS (school) history.