He Who Ruled By Fear

Junior Division
Group Website
Ayden Arnold and Elizabeth Park

Upon the announcement of this years National History Day theme, my partner and I wanted an
unconventional topic, but one that still fit the theme of leadership and legacy. We looked into things such
as American government, early American leaders, and many other things, but we finally decided that a
more peculiar topic would be interesting. After about a week of deliberation we decided to do an American
cult leader. Once we had determined that we had chosen this area of emphasis for our project we began to
specify who we were going to do the research on. Then we finally came upon Jim Jones and he
particularly stood out to us. We also couldnt think of a better person who represented a form of
leadership and left a quite extensive and interesting legacy.
When we finally found a topic we chose to split our topic up three ways and gather the
information that way. First we had Joness childhood or early years, then we had the Peoples Temple era,
and finally the significance. After we established this we started researching secondary sources which
were fairly effortless to find. Although there is a great deal of controversy on this topic and due to this fact
it made it challenging to find primary sources. However when we started to go deeper into the
descriptions that we looked up it became much more manageable. We found articles and interviews of the
survivors in addition to one of Joness adopted son, Jim Jones Jr., which provided some insight into the
Jonestown massacre.
In order to express our topic with enthusiasm we decided to do a website. We chose this
presentation category due to the fact that it was one of the newer categories and the judges have not seen
an abundance of websites as they have other categories. We also felt that it was a more unique way to
inform the audience about our topic. In addition to this we felt that this was the best way to convey the
information that is being presented. A website allowed us to mention all of the information we had
gathered and still allowed us to be individuals with the formatting and organization of the information.
Our topic of Jim Jones relates to the theme of leadership and legacy, because Jones was one of the
most influential leaders in religion and left us a legacy that will be near impossible to consign to oblivion.
He was able to manipulate over 1000 people to pursue a religious group that they were unfamiliar with
and abandon their lives with just his preachings. He left an unclear legacy of a man who wanted equality
and acceptance, however he became paranoid and discarded all of these values and committed murdersuicide and killed over 900 people. Although we picked a topic on the darker side of the theme it is still a
compelling topic.

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