Sam Abrams

In eighth grade, I did a report on Joseph Stalin, the former dictator of the USSR. While I
did not delve deeply into communism and how it worked at the time, I was curious about it. This
project, NHD, gave me a chance to look at the origins of Marxism, Karl Marx, and learn how he
was a leader and what inspired him. My partner and I settled on Marx after agreeing that he had
the qualities of a great leader, such as suffering for his cause, and the fact that he fought for the
people, a cause that we believed in.
We began our research on Karl Marx in online databases, looking for basic overviews of
his life, in order to get more detailed information on his life than what we already knew, which
was not much. After learning his life story and background data, we moved on to trying to prove
how he was a leader. This ended up being more difficult than expected, as in his time, he went
largely unrecognized and had few followers behind him. However, we ended up showing that he
was a leader because of his willingness to keep writing his beliefs and thoughts at the expense of
being exiled and punished. In other words, he was willing to suffer for his cause, a very leaderlike quality.
Our project was built to show the idea that Marx was a leader, and thus is an example of
the NHD theme. He created a system of government that was implemented (incorrectly), in two
of the largest countries in the world, evidence of a lasting legacy. Learning about Marx and his
struggles taught me about an era of history that I had never studied before, and forced me to use
my newly learned historical thinking skills to analyze whether what I learned was unbiased and
true. These skills, which will help me later in life (so my teacher says), proved to be
indispensable, and thus I believe that this project gave me a better understanding of the world
and its various political systems.