National History Day Research Paper

I got my first car the summer between my sophomore and junior year. It was a 2007 Ford Focus SES with a manual transmission. Learning how to drive a stick shift car was not as easy as I had expected it to be. I practiced a few times a week with my dad for the first couple months but could still rarely ever start from a stopped position without the engine dying at least once and the tires spinning a few times. It was very frustrating but one day a few weeks after my I had last practiced I decided to practice on my own by driving around the block while my dad was at work. I practiced starting and stopping more times than I could keep track of but I found myself to be improving much faster than I did when my dad was in the car. Later that day when he got home, I was excited to show him how much I had improved in just one day so we went for a drive around Alki beach. Although the engine still died once in a while, I now felt confident that I could drive pretty much on any types of roads with minimal troubles. Through this experience I realized that

During the first semester of junior year, all juniors are required to write a National History Day paper. Although history is not my favorite subject, I approached this project with an open mind and a willingness to learn something new about the history of the United States. I chose the Dawes Act of 1887 which divided Native American reservations and allotted a certain amount of land to each Indian. The more I researched this topic, the more interested I became in it and wanted to learn more about it. Since I didn’t have to worry about what my teachers thought about my research at this point, I felt more freedom to read about other laws that had oppressed them in history and how they reacted to them. This led me to write a better final paper because I had more perspective on the challenges that Native Americans had faced