Do, Duffy 1

Christian Do and Michael Duffy

14 February 2020

National History Day

Senior Division

Process Paper

The topic we chose for the NHD theme, breaking barriers, was the Stonewall Riots. We

chose this topic because the fiftieth anniversary of this event recently occurred on June 29, 2019,

and we felt it was a great, relating topic to the theme. Seeing how society functions today, and

what the purpose of the Stonewall Riots was, we felt it broke a large barrier in the LGBT

community. We did originally have a different topic that we were going to use (The Maginot

Line) but after further working with this topic and researching it, we believed this topic would be

quite difficult to connect back to the theme. Also, primary sources for this topic proved difficult

to come across.

For the first step in our research process, we knew we needed good and solid primary

sources so that’s where we started. Photos were great primary sources and we chose the ones we

thought would illustrate the event the best as well as contribute to supporting our thesis. From

there, we found other sources such as several newspapers from the time of the event and

accounts/quotes by those that were there as well. Useful primary newspapers included those of

The New York Times and New York Daily News. Additional primary sources obtained included

video clips that contained people from the event. All of our sources were obtained through the

internet from various websites. An extremely useful website being the Digital Public Library of

America as it contained various types of documents that helped in supporting our thesis. As for
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our secondary sources, they consisted of general information websites, timelines, and

descriptions of the event. These were used to corroborate and enhance our other research.

The final product to bring all of our research together was a website. We thought the best

way to deliver the information gathered as well as present it easily and understandably was to

have three different sections. This could have been achieved through an exhibit but we believed a

website was more organized and comprehensible. The sections within the website were the home

page, which included the thesis and photos from our sources, the background and controls

section, and the sources section. The sources section would include our annotated bibliography

as well as the process paper. Pictures and visuals were also included throughout the website in all

sections to enhance ideas being explained.

The most important part of any research topic is the thesis, we would have to use research

to connect the Stonewall Riots to the theme of breaking barriers. Roughly fifty years ago, the

LGBT community fought a hard battle to try to gain the rights they didn’t have. We used the

modern-day position of the LGBT community to prove the Stonewall Riots broke barriers of

discrimination within their community. They now have many more rights and freedoms that they

did not have in 1969 and that is what was broken at Stonewall.