History 211: History of US Elections

During the last couple of weeks, students in History 211, “US Elections,” have been studying some of the most dramatic protests for voting rights in American history.  They studied the story of parades and hunger strikes for woman’s suffrage.  They also learned about the complicated, lengthy struggle to make the Fifteenth Amendment a reality in twentieth-century America.  In 2012, CBS News offered a powerful segment recalling one of those moments of struggle –the violence which erupted on “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965 at the Edmund Pettus Bridge near Selma, Alabama.  After reading Chapters 7 and 8 of Alexander Keyssar’s Right to Vote (2009 ed.), students should be able to identify several elements of this video as being especially teachable for anyone who wants to recall how voting rights and civil rights converged in the mid-twentieth century.

Historian Alexander Keyssar does a good job of dissecting the complicated endgame of the woman’s suffrage movement (though note that Keyssar calls it the women’s suffrage movement –students should consider what the difference in usage implies).  This image of a suffrage parade in New York captures many of the issues raised by Keyssar’s narrative in his book, The Right to Vote (2009 ed.).  It also highlights many of the key insights of this course, which is why a detail from it appears on the banner image.  You can read more about it at the Dickinson Survey of American History.  Students interested in this subject might also appreciate two essays from previous iterations of the History 211 course, by Alex Poeton, on the role of women in the Election of 1912, and Ryan Sellinger, on female support for Herbert Hoover in 1928.

Suffrage Parade (1912)

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will debate three times in 2016, on September 26,

Kennedy v. Nixon (1960)

October 9, and and October 19.  This is shaping up to be a pivotal series of encounters and yet the story of formal presidential debates is a relatively new one in American political culture.  Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas competed against each other for president in 1860, but they didn’t debate, at least not that year.  Their famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates were part of the 1858 senatorial campaign in Illinois.  In the nineteenth century, presidential candidates barely ventured out int0 the open, let alone debate each other.  Douglas did travel and speak in 1860, but Lincoln stayed home in Springfield.

The first real series of presidential debates was in 1960, between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.  Their televised clash was so famously consequential (and so complicated by FCC rules), that presidential candidates did not debate again in the general election until 1976.  They have been debating almost ever since (except in 1980), however, and that is why we know that the Clinton-Trump debates will matter.  For the last forty years, these contests have been critical in shaping the decisions of swing voters.

Time magazine online has a good piece from 2015 that documents “10 Memorable Moments” from these debates, including some powerful video clips.  The Committee for Presidential Debates also has a helpful reference page outlining the history of American political debates.  Students in History 211 should consult these resources before watching the Clinton-Trump series.  Prof. Pinsker will be live-tweeting historical context from @House_Divided with the hashtag #hist211.  Feel free to join that conversation if you want.

Alexander Keyssar explains the fits and starts of expanding (and sometimes contracting) nineteenth-century American democracy in chapters 2 and 3 of his book, The Right to Vote (2009 ed.).  But how best to visualize this complicated story?

Madeleine Gardner offered one valuable approach by trying her hand at creating some infographics based on her notes from Keyssar.   All students would benefit from this type of model.  Almost every learning study concludes that visualizations help memory.  Associating images with facts is the best way to remember them –far better than underlining, cutting-and-pasting, or even rewriting them.

Even if you lack the time to generate charts, graphs, or maps, there’s usually great benefit in simply finding an image online to associate with some kind of textual insight.  Consider this famous painting from George Caleb Bingham.  It is called “Stump Speaking” (1854), from his trio of paintings on American elections.  You can find out more about this series here, but also look below how just combining a striking quotation from Keyssar’s book along with the image helps underscore the interpretation.

“If a man can think without property, he can vote without property.” Comment from a delegate to Louisiana constitutional convention, 1845 (Keyssar, p. 41)

This summer, Democrats met in Philadelphia to hold their national nominating convention.  In 1848, the Whigs did the same with Congressman Abraham Lincoln in attendance.  Despite a long career in partisan politics,  it was Lincoln’s first –and only– direct experience at a national party convention.  Yet the story of this moment in June 1848 offers a very teachable window into Lincoln’s own rise to power as well as some key aspects concerning the general evolution of American electoral politics.  For the full story, go the “Muster” blog at the Journal of the Civil War Era:

• A.Lincoln, Conventioneer (By Matthew Pinsker)