I’ve never done a research paper throughout high school so this task was definitely a “roadblock” for me. I started off looking for topics in my handy dandy history book; the Give Me Liberty!: An American History Seagull 4th edition by Eric Foner. What seemed to catch my eye was the Civil War Era. The Civil War has always been one of the most fascinating issue to me behind WWI and WWII since I was in middle school. I knew this is where I wanted to base off my essay. There is obviously a lot of events that happened in the Civil War, so I knew I had to be more specific on my topic. This was probably the most difficult part of this assignment so far. Some general topics in mind was the Thirteenth Amendment, Freedman’s Bureau, and Reconstruction. …show more content…
Reconstruction meant rebuilding of the shattered nation after the Civil War. I chose Reconstruction because it talked about the experiences of former slaves I knew this was still pretty unspecific so I kept reading the textbook. I then began reading the textbook to look for specific details and subjects during Reconstruction and nothing really seemed to catch my attention. One day I caught myself re-reading Chapter 15, “What is Freedom?: Reconstruction 1865-1877”, hoping to find something that interested me and something I can really go in detail about. I then started writing down certain goals of Reconstruction. After reading this section multiple times, I finally decided to branch out to other books I found in the library such as Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction also by Eric Foner and The Reconstruction Era by Donna L.