Further Reading On The Fight To Vote

March 1867, Harper's Weekly political cartoon by American cartoonist Thomas Nast, depicting an African-American man casting his ballot into a ballot box during the Georgetown election as Andrew Jackson and others loo... March 1867, Harper's Weekly political cartoon by American cartoonist Thomas Nast, depicting an African-American man casting his ballot into a ballot box during the Georgetown election as Andrew Jackson and others look on angrily (Photo by Getty Images/Getty Images) MORE LESS
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Philip Loring Allen, “The Multifarious Australian Ballot,” North American Review, May 1910.

Sven Beckert, “Democracy and Its Discontents: Contesting Suffrage Rights in Gilded Age New York,” Past and Present (February 2002): 116-157.

Justin Behrend, Reconstructing Democracy: Grassroots Black Politics in the Deep South after the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017).

Rabia Belt, “Ballots for Bullets? Disabled Veterans and the Right to Vote,” Stanford Law Review (February 2017): 435-490.

Richard Franklin Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Charles Chesnutt, “Disfranchisement of the Negro,” in Booker T. Washington, ed., The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of To-Day (New York: James Pott & Company, 1903).

Eldon Cobb Evans, A History of the Australian Ballot System in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917).

Wayne Flint, “Alabama’s Shame: The Historical Origins of the 1901 Constitution,” Alabama Law Review 2001): 67-76.

L. E. Fredman, Australian Ballot: The Story of an American Reform (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1968).

Henry George, “Money in Elections,” North American Review (March 1883): 201-211.

Julian Go, “Empire, Democracy, and Discipline: The Transimperial History of the Secret Ballot,” in Kristin Lee Hoganson and Jay Sexton, eds., Powering Up the Global: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).

Elisha W. Green, Life of the Rev. Elisha W. Green, One of the Founders of the Kentucky Normal and Theological Institute–Now the State University at Louisville; Eleven Years Moderator of the Mt. Zion Baptist Association; Five Years Moderator of the Consolidated Baptist Educational Association and Over Thirty Years Pastor of the Colored Baptist Churches of Maysville and Paris. Written by Himself. (Maysville, Ky.: Republican Printing Office, 1888), available at http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/greenew/greenew.html

Jon Grinspan, The Virgin Vote: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics Personal, and Voting Popular in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, “‘Expressly Recognized by Our Election Laws’: Certificates of Freedom and the Multiple Fates of Black Citizenship in the Early Republic,” William & Mary Quarterly 75:3 (July 2018): 465-506.

Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Joseph P. Harris, Registration of Voters in the United States (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1929).

Ron Hayduk, Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2006).

William H. Heard, From Slavery to the Bishopric in the A.M.E. Church: An Autobiography (Philadelphia: A.M.E. Book Concern, 1928), available at http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/heard/heard.html

Jac C. Heckelman, “The Effect of the Secret Ballot on Voter Turnout Rates,” Public Choice (1995): 107-124.

Pippa Holloway, Living in Infamy: Felon Disfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).

Philip Lampi, “A New Nation Votes,” https://elections.lib.tufts.edu/.

Jill LePore, “Rock, Paper Scissors: How We Used to Vote,” New Yorker, October 13, 2008.

Francis Parkman, “The Failure of Universal Suffrage,” North American Review July-August 1878.

Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

Donald Ratcliffe, “The Right to Vote and the Rise of Democracy, 1787-1828,” Journal of the Early Republic (Summer 2013): 219-254.

Volney Riser, Defying Disfranchisement: Black Voting Rights Activism in the Jim Crow South, 1890-1908 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013).

Andrew W. Robertson, “Reconceptualizing Jacksonian Democracy,” Journal of the Early American Republic (Summer 2013): 317-334.

Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press reprint, 2000.) 

Daniel P. Tokaji, “Voter Registration and Electoral Reform,” William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal (2008): 354-506.

Michael Waldman, The Fight to Vote (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017)

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  1. Very helpful and enlightening. I was a little puzzled as to how the Australian ballot was harmful to voting rights, but the author’s first Further Reading entry, “The Multifarious Australian Ballot,” filled me in. Interesting how many ways there are to design a ballot, and how sneaky some of them can be.

  2. Somehow I was not surprised to find that, even then (1910), Florida was the bad boy of ballot design.

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