NHD Process Paper

Two out of three of our group members have taken two years of Latin, where we studied the history of the Roman Republic at length. This led to our growing interest in the topic of the Roman civilization. We also all took an AP World course, in which we furthered our knowledge about the Roman Civilization in context with other ancient societies. Through this new perspective, we became very interested in the Roman Republic because of how forward thinking they were in terms of rights for their citizens. We conducted our research by primarily gathering information and sources from the internet. From some of these sources we were directed to physical sources, documented online, (Books, Written Speeches etc.) created by classical era philosophers, thinkers, historians and politicians. By doing this we were able to simultaneously get secondary sources (Websites, videos etc.) and primary sources from various informational websites. We were not able to get our hands on any of the physical copies of primary sources we found as it was not readily available or difficult to obtain some of them considering their relative obscurity in history. The bulk of our information was gathered from these informational websites that contained links and directives to other more specific sources of information. A lot of our research that we conducted had a basis of familiarity with one or more members in the group and thus made gathering more specific information was henceforth easier than if our background knowledge of our topic was of lesser strength. Initially we considered choosing the poster board method of presenting, but due to a lack of materials and general inconvenience we settled on the website method. This allowed all three members of the group access to our project at all times, and allowed for much greater mobility. Our first step in creating the project was in collecting sources and conducting research on our topic. After this initial stage was taken care of we proceeded to format and lay the foundations of our website. After a framework was created we began to fill in the gaps with the necessary information and sources that we had previously gathered. We experimented with a variety of formats for our website, tweaking certain sections as we saw fit throughout the process. Finally, after a general agreement on the overall format and information used we finished up any remaining changes and finalized our website. Our topic relates to the theme in mainly one way. The rights of citizens in the Roman Republic is extremely related to the Rights in History part of this years theme. Our topic examines the rights held by Roman citizens in the Republic period and how they were highly developed considering the current political climate of that era. This development of rights being granted to citizens throughout a nation was an important development in history and is a truly significant milestone. (484 Words)