I selected my National History Day topic by thinking of topics that were important to me or I was very interested in. I made a list and began narrowing the topics down. I landed on my topic of the women’s suffrage movement because it seemed like a very important movement and 2020 is the one hundred year aniversary of the 19th amendment being passed. I am also very interested in equal rights movements. 

I conducted my research by reading books, websites, articles, and documents about my topic. I also found that photos and political cartoons are great resources. I focused on finding documents, photos, and cartoons from the time period that showed how poeple at that time felt about the women’s suffrage movement. I also spent time researching the opposite side of the movement, which was difficult to do because it required me to think of opinions I did not agree with. In the end it provided a new perspective on my topic and I’m very glad I did it. 

    I created my website by coming up with a few categories that all of my information fit into. I used these categories as different pages and started working on them. I found that it was helpful to add my photos first, then right about topics that matched the photos. I struggled a bit with the navigation tools, but eventulaly I figured it out. I think my navigation bar is one of the best parts of my website. Something else I struggled with was choosing a background color and font for my website. Eventually I landed on purple for the background color because of it’s signifigance as one of the colors that represent the Womens Social and Political Union, which was an important suffrage group. 

My topic fits this years National History Day theme, breaking barriers, because the goal of the women’s suffrage movement was to give women the right to vote. Women at this time in history were considered weaker and incapable of parrticipating in politics. The suffragists worked very hard to break down laws preventing women from rights all people should have. Eventually they succeded and the 19th amendment was passed, giving women the right to vote, although techinicaly that it the only right garanteed to women by the constitution.