Process Paper

by Aidan Earnest
Per.4
When we started the NHD project and the main topic was that of Leadership and
Legacy, a topic that seemed to instantly spring to mind was the battle of Thermopylae, I had
done some previous reading on the battle but didn't know the full extent of it and wanted to
know more. I then decided that it would be the perfect way to show leadership and legacy, due
to the sacrifice and determination of the Spartans and the unnamed troops of the coalition force.
After doing some further research I discovered the it would be impossible to do Thermopylae
without doing the rest of the Greco-Persian war. I felt that doing every battle and event in the
war was too tedious so I decided upon focusing more upon the main battles,
Thermopylae,Salamis and Platea.
When I was researching the various topics, a normal search in Google was the first way
to find secondary sources from the time period. Then I went into other reports and essays on
the Greco-Persian war and found primary sources that the previous authors had used. A useful
bit in the research was there were around to well known historians who kept detail of the events,
Herodotus and Thucydides, they both had very clear and in depth retelling of the events as the
happened. Also another way that I found different sources was by finding other events and
people in the war and searching them to inadvertently find the topics that were closely related to
the war.
After I had acquired a sufficient amount of sources I went about at first, making a
documentary, but after some contemplation I decided that doing a website would be in my best
interest. A website allows you to have increase the amount of viewer interacts with the
information on the topic and it has the ability to display it in many different areas. I also wanted
the ability to add videos and different quotes to my project without having to say it outloud in a
documentary or any other category of that type.
My topic finds a connection to leadership and legacy in so many ways, due the great
leadership of Leonidas and Themistocles,who without, the events and battles would have gone
drastically different. Without Leonidas and Themistocles, the likelihood that the Greeks would
have been able to have victory over the Persians is small and due to their leadership they
showed that for once superiority in number was not always the greatest thing for any army to
have. Their leadership also allowed for Greece to become united under a single banner or
cause, and even though it was short lived it still showed that a united Greece could fend off the
largest empire in the world at that time.Their legacy has affected many things throughout our
society, a main area is our military and the honor and bravery we associate with our soldiers.
Today their legacy is in the obsession that the modern world has with Leonidas and
Themistocles