Suggested Election Resources

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 in this area:
    http://www.ericfacility.net/databases/ERIC_Digests/ed453151.html

    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

    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
    © The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, 2004. All Rights Reserved.