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Eleanor Roosevelt

and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Kaylee Haug

Senior Division

Individual Website

Student Composed Words: 1135

Media: 2:20

Process Paper Word Count: 496

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Process Paper

How did I choose my topic?

While anticipating the impending NHD theme, Conflict and Compromise, I initiated

research on possible topic areas of history, however it wasn’t until I attended a two-week debate

camp that my deliberation began on Human Rights and when the movement for these rights

began to become a universal importance. I immediately began researching human rights and

discovered the guide for NHD 2018 which mentioned The Universal Declaration of Human

Rights and Eleanor Roosevelt. I pondered how the barbarous acts of the WWII conflict and

Holocaust correlated with the drafting and establishment of the UDHR in 1948. Then I began to

explore how countries within the United Nations had compromised to support the

implementation of this document to ensure the safety of these rights for people everywhere and

prevent an event such as Holocaust from repeating. After finding this topic, I quickly decided to

choose it as my research area for the NHD competition as it fit within the parameters of the

theme.

How did I conduct my research?

My research as well as my discovery of this topic began at debate camp, as I was

researching the concept of Critical pedagogy and began to think about human rights. Thinking

about NHD, I began researching online for my topic and discovered Eleanor Roosevelt’s

involvement in the movement for human rights and how WWII contributed to the creation of the

UDHR. First I downloaded a book to my Kindle, the autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt, and

began reading about her life and how she advocated for Human Rights and the implementation

of the UDHR to gain some background knowledge from Eleanor Roosevelts perspective on my
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topic. After finishing this book, I went to the library to discover more books that fell within my

topic and began completing my background information search on my topic, and my opinions

began to form. Finally, I began researching online and found a myriad of primary and secondary

sources on the topic and began to develop my website.

Why did I choose our category and how did I create my project?

I choose to create an individual website because I had experience with making a website

in the NHD 2015 Competition, and thought that I would be able to compete with myself and my

website I had made 2 years ago and strive to improve my technology skills in the process. I

began to create my project after researching human rights at debate camp and slowly completed

each page of my website as I researched it.

How does my topic relate to the theme?

Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a prime example of

this year’s theme, Conflict and Compromise. The WWII conflict and Holocaust lead to

barbarous actions against human rights that left the world with a dim future. However, the

compromise over the UDHR created the first step to protecting these rights universally to prevent

systematic genocide from happening again.