Voting Rights
General
Books that provide a good background for the history
of the expansion (and occasional contraction) of the
right to vote in America include:
Keyssar, Alexander. The Right to Vote: The Contested
History of Democracy in the United States (New
York: Basic Books, 2000).
Kornbluh, Mark Lawrence. Why America Stopped Voting:
The Decline of Participatory Democracy and the Emergence
of Modern American Politics (New York: New York
University Press, 2000).
Pole, J. R. (Jack Richon). Political Representation
in England and the Origins of the American Republic
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1966).
Rogers, Donald W., and Christine Scriabine, eds. Voting
and the Spirit of American Democracy: Essays on the
History of Voting and Voting Rights in America
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).
The Library of Congress's American Memory Website offers
three sections of special interest on voting rights:
Daniel A.P. Murray Collection of African-American Pamphlets:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aap/aaphome.html
National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)
collection:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/naw/nawshome.html
and its companion, a collection of NAWSA prints and
photographs:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vfwhtml/vfwhome.html
For accurate texts of constitutional amendments and
brief narratives describing their adoption, try "GPO
Access", a website of the U.S. Government Printing Office.
For example:
Fifteenth Amendment:
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/constitution/html/amdt15.html
Nineteenth Amendment:
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/constitution/html/amdt19.html
Twenty-fourth Amendment:
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/constitution/pdf/con035.pdf
The ERIC Digest presents a wide variety of outlines
and resources on voting rights:
http://www.ericdigests.org/1996-3/law.htm
The Library of Congress's online Prints and Photographs
catalogue offers rewarding results for searches under
"Dorr, Thomas," "African-American suffrage,"
"woman suffrage," and even "literacy test"
(a wonderful Bill Mauldin cartoon). You can search from
this page:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/mdbquery.html
Universal White Male Suffrage
The Gilder Lehrman Collection offers this document from
the early years of Thomas Dorr's campaign for suffrage
reform:
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/search/display_results.php?id=GLC4162
Voting Rights for African-Americans
Two websites provide excellent overall background on
the struggle of Americans of color to gain equal rights
from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries:
Library of Congress's online "African American Odyssey"
exhibition:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aoover.html
"The History of Jim Crow Website," the work of
the producers and sponsors of "The Rise and Fall of
Jim Crow" television series:
http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/home.htm
For additional material on relevant constitutional amendments
of the Reconstruction era, check:
The Thirteenth Amendment:
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/treasures6.html
Letter from Frederick Douglass to Robert Adams, December
4, 1888:
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/treasures7.html
An Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage, by Frederick
Douglass:
www.toptags.com/aama/voices/commentary/appeal.htm
For post-World War II activism, begin with the Martin
Luther King, Jr., Papers Project at Stanford University:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/
For a list of annotated King correspondence (through
1958) along with Dr. King's autobiography and volumes
of King's speeches and sermons, go to:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/about_the_project/
Also, see the "Selma March" exhibition mounted at Stanford
University:
http://shl.stanford.edu/Crowds/galleries/selma/index.htm
Women's Voting Rights
For a general range of sources, go to the website for
"Iron Jawed Angels," an HBO special that provides links
to educational resources for the nineteenth century
struggle for woman suffrage:
http://www.hbo.com/films/ironjawedangels/involved/
The National Park Service's facility at Seneca Falls
also provides useful suggestions:
http://www.nps.gov/wori
National Archives "Digital Classroom" provides these
lesson plans for study of woman suffrage and the Nineteenth
Amendment:
http://www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/lessons/
woman_suffrage/woman_suffrage.html
The Archives "Treasures of Congress" website provides
some useful additional materials on the amendment: http://www.archives.gov/exhibit_hall/
treasures_of_congress/page_18.html
The Gilder Lehrman Collection provides a high-resolution
image of a handwritten letter from Susan B. Anthony
to Senator Henry W. Blair, January 7, 1888:
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/treasures7.html
For the careers of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, go to the website for the Rutgers University
project dedicated to publishing their papers. There
you'll find a fascinating online "mini-edition" of records
for the period 1852-1862:
http://mep.cla.sc.edu/sa/sa-table.html
and a useful selection of other documents:
http://ecssba.rutgers.edu/docs.html
The project has already published two volumes of selected,
annotated material, both published under the direction
of Ann D. Gordon:
In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840 to 1866:
http://ecssba.rutgers.edu/pubs/curpubs.html#vol1des
and Against an Aristocracy of Sex, 1866 to 1873:
http://ecssba.rutgers.edu/pubs/curpubs.html#vol2des
