Athenian Democracy: The Birth of Democracy

Michael Xu Yvonne Phan Ben Liang Micah Baguinguito Senior Division Group Website Process Paper

History Day this year was an enjoyable, fulfilling, yet demanding experience for all of us. There have been countless numbers of hours put into writing, researching, rehearsing, and editing. Nevertheless, we loved every minute of it. This years theme, Rights and Responsibilities, fit in with us perfectly. We did not have a difficult time picking the topic. It all started in our A.P. U.S. class when the teacher put us all in the same group. During that time we were learning about how important democracy was and still is for our country. We knew then that we wanted to trace democracy back to its origins. From there we got to Athenian Democracy, which we were all interested in, and began our project. The way that we conducted our research was simple. We had, at first, three simple steps. Find information, read and learn about it, and record it in the annotations of our bibliography so that we could compile and condense it later onto our website. So we all went hunting for information, and cited the place where we found the information each and every time, which contributed to our massive bibliography that we have. After we deemed that we were well-educated enough on Athenian Democracy, we contacted local professors who were experts on our time period and talked with them about their passions and our interests to glean further knowledge. Knowing that we probably wouldnt remember the information and that the interview would provide good evidence, we recorded them so we could listen to it later. Our reason for making a website is a paradoxical one. Athenian Democracy is, by all standards, an ancient topic. If we compare that to the invention of the internet, the internet is a fairly new invention. So, being the competitive and thinking-outside-the-box people that we are, we wanted to combine the two, and modernize an ancient topic by re-interpreting it onto a website on the internet. This combination of the old and the new would give us more creative freedom and create something completely new because internet never existed in Athens. The theme of NHD this year is rights and responsibilities. Athenian democracy relates to the theme because rights were given to the common peoples of Athens, which gave them the responsibility of running the government. They had a direct democracy and could see their

decisions being taken into action right when they were decided. But in a larger sense, Athenian democracy had a responsibility to the world for creating the idea of democracy in the first place, being the ground level and starting point for many other democracies which followed, including our own American democracy. All in all, Athenian democracy gave rights to the people of Athens and had the responsibility to the future democracies that followed.