Process Paper

Choosing Our Topic
    We chose the Miracle on Ice and the Cold War because we are both avid hockey fans, and we felt that this topic would relate well to the National History Day theme.   First and foremost, hockey was what intrigued us more than anything, and we really were interested in our topic after we discovered how big of a difference in society it made.   We knew a good deal about the Miracle On Ice hockey game, but we knew nothing about how it directly impacted the Cold War.  During our background research, we found several quality secondary source websites that were vital in providing us with knowledge about our topic.  Also, we read a few books regarding the Cold War in general.  We think that the Miracle on Ice and The Cold War will interest many people because very few people know how much the Cold War was affected by the Miracle on Ice hockey game.  Without the Miracle on Ice, the United States may have not brought down the USSR, and communism could still affect people today.

Conducting Research
    We followed several key steps that led to successful research.  After we gained some background knowledge about our topic, we narrowed our research to smaller subtopics.  Our subtopics focused specifically on time periods during the Cold War.  We used the Onalaska and La Crosse Public Libraries to acquire a great deal of knowledge, by using both primary and secondary sources.  We found a newspaper archive from February 23, 1980 that became a fantastic source of first-hand primary source information at the La Crosse Library.  Some difficulties we faced included finding an abundance of primary sources, and trying to tie all of our subtopic research together.  We organized all of our research by separating all of our subtopics, making it easy to find facts once we started to put our website together.  Overall, we felt like we used many good resources to conduct solid research.

Creating a Website
    Actually creating the website wasn't too difficult for us, as we had created an NHD website last year as well.  As required by National History Day, we used Weebly.com to create our website.  We felt like the best way to organize our website was to separate our subtopics into individual pages.  "The 1970's" and "1980's" pages are each suptopics, and the Miracle on Ice hockey game is also a suptopic.  We made sure to stay connected to our topic as we put it together, and not stray from the theme Debate and Diplomacy. 

Debate and Diplomacy: Relating To The NHD Theme
    Not only is our topic an excellent example of Debate and Diplomacy, it had a tremendous impact on societies all around the world.  The Cold War is an example of Diplomacy because many countries attempted to negotiate peace plans to stop the war of words between the Soviet Union, Germany, the United States, as well as other countries.  The Miracle on Ice impacted the world because if the Cold War was still ongoing, the nuclear weapons seriously threatened by both the Soviets and the Americans may have been used.  This sequence of events would cause a World War , and potentially the great tension betien the U.S. and the USSR may have never been resolved.  As you can see, our topic represents the NHD theme well because it greatly impacted the whole world.