Process Paper
Since the very beginning of this year, I knew that I wanted to research the assassination of Abraham Lincoln for my history fair project. Ever since watching a documentary of the assassination on the History Channel, I have been fascinated with every aspect of the assassination, and as I began my research, I found that it did not connect to our theme of “Revolution, Reaction, Reform” in the ways I thought it did. I discovered that in order to link the assassination to our theme, I had to look beyond it into what happened after the assassination.
I began my research at the school library. I wanted to get a detailed account of what happened so that I would be able to relate to all future information I attained. After learning of the events that took place before, during, and after the killing, I realized that the assassination had the greatest effect on the Reconstruction process. I shifted my topic slightly to look into the struggles of the Reconstruction process between the President Johnson and the Radical Republicans, who were a major part of Congress at the time. As I looked at scholarly journals and books about how they fought and the plans they carried out, I realized that this was the Reaction part of my project. Conferencing with Mr. Sunderland helped me realize that the events that happened near the end of the process, including the impeachment of President Johnson, were a part of the Reform theme. The many books I checked out from the library were the most helpful for my research because they were broad, yet also specific. The authors pull information from many different sources to get the best information for their books, and I am then able to look at their bibliography to find even more sources I can explore. Websites, although helpful for looking for a very specific or very broad piece of information, do not always lead me to other sources, and thus I have found less helpful.
I chose to create the six required pages on my website as headers, and the three pages with the themes also have smaller pages within them. I chose to style it this way so that the reader can reread each segment of my thesis for each part of the theme and then look at the evidence I have gathered after it.
My research so far has helped me discover that the Lincoln assassination had an immense impact on American life in the mid-1860s. The event was revolutionary in that it eliminated the prime candidate for leading the Reconstruction process, leaving an unexperienced man in charge of something that had never been done before. The reaction was one of chaos as President Johnson and the Radical Republicans fought over how to reconstruct the nation and the South struggled to rebuild itself. The country was reformed throughout the process as Johnson was impeached, the Radical Republicans took over the Reconstruction process, and the country was at last stable again.
Since the very beginning of this year, I knew that I wanted to research the assassination of Abraham Lincoln for my history fair project. Ever since watching a documentary of the assassination on the History Channel, I have been fascinated with every aspect of the assassination, and as I began my research, I found that it did not connect to our theme of “Revolution, Reaction, Reform” in the ways I thought it did. I discovered that in order to link the assassination to our theme, I had to look beyond it into what happened after the assassination.
I began my research at the school library. I wanted to get a detailed account of what happened so that I would be able to relate to all future information I attained. After learning of the events that took place before, during, and after the killing, I realized that the assassination had the greatest effect on the Reconstruction process. I shifted my topic slightly to look into the struggles of the Reconstruction process between the President Johnson and the Radical Republicans, who were a major part of Congress at the time. As I looked at scholarly journals and books about how they fought and the plans they carried out, I realized that this was the Reaction part of my project. Conferencing with Mr. Sunderland helped me realize that the events that happened near the end of the process, including the impeachment of President Johnson, were a part of the Reform theme. The many books I checked out from the library were the most helpful for my research because they were broad, yet also specific. The authors pull information from many different sources to get the best information for their books, and I am then able to look at their bibliography to find even more sources I can explore. Websites, although helpful for looking for a very specific or very broad piece of information, do not always lead me to other sources, and thus I have found less helpful.
I chose to create the six required pages on my website as headers, and the three pages with the themes also have smaller pages within them. I chose to style it this way so that the reader can reread each segment of my thesis for each part of the theme and then look at the evidence I have gathered after it.
My research so far has helped me discover that the Lincoln assassination had an immense impact on American life in the mid-1860s. The event was revolutionary in that it eliminated the prime candidate for leading the Reconstruction process, leaving an unexperienced man in charge of something that had never been done before. The reaction was one of chaos as President Johnson and the Radical Republicans fought over how to reconstruct the nation and the South struggled to rebuild itself. The country was reformed throughout the process as Johnson was impeached, the Radical Republicans took over the Reconstruction process, and the country was at last stable again.
