Menu
Excerpts
Exhibits
Collections
Originals
Categories
Map
Search
Voting Rights: A Retrospective
Voting Rights: A Retrospective
Voting Rights: A Retrospective
This exhibit chronicles the ebb and flow of voting rights in America, from the Founding Era to the current day.
Explore Exhibit
Scroll to explore
Founding Era
View Connections
05
Reconstruction
View Connections
20
Voting Rights: A Retrospective
Reconstruction
Reconstruction
The Achievements, and Compromises, of Two Reconstruction-era Amendments
While they advanced African American rights, they had serious flaws, Eric Foner writes.
by
John Fabian Witt
Racist Litter
A review of Eric Foner's The Second Founding.
by
Randall Kennedy
Killing Reconstruction
During Reconstruction, elites used racist appeals to silence calls for redistribution and worker empowerment.
by
Heather Cox Richardson
partner
Why the Second American Revolution Deserves as Much Attention as the First
The first revolution articulated American ideals. The second enacted them.
by
Gregory P. Downs
How About Erecting Monuments to the Heroes of Reconstruction?
Americans should build this pivotal post–Civil War era into the new politics of historical memory.
by
Richard Valelly
The Freedmen's Bureau
“No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth: What shall be done with slaves?”
by
W.E.B. Du Bois
The Lost Promise of Reconstruction
Can we reanimate the dream of freedom that Congress tried to enact in the wake of the Civil War?
by
Eric Foner
The Killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson
How a post-Civil War massacre impacted racial justice in America.
by
Debo Adegbile
In 1868, Black Suffrage Was on the Ballot
At the height of the Reconstruction, the pressing issue of the election was Black male suffrage.
by
Jordan Grant
Our 250-Year Fight for Multiracial Democracy
We say we’re for it. We’ve never truly had it. These next few years will determine its fate.
by
Matt Ford
Though The Heavens Fall, Part 1
The Texan newspaperman who was born into slavery and helped shape the history of civil rights.
by
John Jeremiah Sullivan
,
Joel Finsel
The Failure of Reconstruction Is to Blame for the Weakness of American Democracy
A new book argues that the American right emerged out of a backlash to multiracial democracy following the Civil War.
by
Matthew E. Stanley
The Right to Vote Is Never Safe
We cannot be confident that our institutions are protected by some immutable law.
by
Jon Grinspan
Making the Constitution Safe for Democracy
The second section of the Fourteenth Amendment offers severe penalties for menacing the right to vote—if anyone can figure out how to enforce it.
by
Anthony Conwright
Today’s Voter Suppression Tactics Have A 150 Year History
Rebels in the post-Civil War South perfected the art of excluding voters, but it was yankees in the North who developed the script.
by
Gregory P. Downs
A Very Great Change
The 1868 presidential election through the eyes of a Southern white woman.
by
Stephanie McCurry
The Authoritarian Right’s 1877 Project
As the GOP undermines Black political rights in the present, some right-wing intellectuals are rationalizing Black disenfranchisement in the past.
by
Eric Levitz
The Political Cartoon That Explains the Battle Over Reconstruction
Take a deep dive into this drawing by famed illustrator Thomas Nast.
by
Lorraine Boissoneault
The Confederate General Whom All the Other Confederates Hated
James Longstreet became a champion of Reconstruction. Why?
by
Eric Foner
The Equality That Wasn’t Enough
The most radical Radical Republicans had a better idea of how to cast the 15th Amendment. We should have listened to them.
by
Jamelle Bouie
Women's Suffrage
View Connections
20
Civil Rights Movement
View Connections
20
Voting Rights Today
View Connections
20