Students will be able to identify and explain aspects of the election regulation debate, including its potential impact on voter turnout, election transparency, and voting equity.
Voting Rights in America Timeline
Supplement your students’ understanding of voting rights in the United States with this free downloadable timeline. This visual guide breaks down the history of voting rights across identities, and gives context to efforts to expand and limit voting access over time, through the lenses of our three branches of government and our federal system.
Why Did Women Want the Right to Vote?
Students will compare and contrast four petitions in favor of woman suffrage to identify reasons why women wanted the right to vote.
Extending Suffrage to Women
In this activity, students will analyze documents pertaining to the woman suffrage movement as it intensified following passage of the 15th Amendment that guaranteed the right to vote for African American males. Documents were chosen to call attention to the struggle’s length, the movement’s techniques, and the variety of arguments for and against giving women the vote.
Evaluating the New Departure Strategy in the Fight for Women’s Suffrage
In this activity, students will evaluate the New Departure strategy of the women’s suffrage movement – the idea that the Constitution already guaranteed the right to vote for women, they just had to test it by voting – that was championed by the National Woman Suffrage Association. Students will analyze documents from Susan B. Anthony’s arrest and trial for voting in the 1872 election. They will answer questions as they work through the documents and evaluate the claim that the Fourteenth Amendment enfranchised women.
Women & the American Story: Modernizing America, 1889-1920
This free curriculum unit from the New-York Historical Society examines how women used various forms of activism to fight for social change during the Progressive Era. Materials consider how women advocated for their rights and the role of women’s suffrage in this advocacy.
Academy for American Democracy Educational Videos
This video playlist is part of the New-York Historical Society’s Academy for American Democracy, an educational initiative focusing on history and civics education for sixth grade students. Videos explore the ideals of democracy, civic participation, the evolution of Ancient Athenian and American democracy, and the power of the people within democracies.
Who Elects Our Senators
United States senators have been elected directly by voters since 1913. Prior to that time, state legislatures chose the state’s senators. In the mid-1850s, however, the state legislature selection process began to fail due to political infighting and corruption. Often Senate seats were left vacant for long periods of time while state legislatures debated who to send to the Senate.
Popularity Contest
A game demonstrating the ways that an Electoral vs. Popular Vote would affect a campaign strategy.
The 19th Amendment: Part 2 Podcast
The Nineteenth Amendment was first introduced to Congress in 1878. It took over four decades of pleas, protests, petitions and speeches to finally get it ratified. We’re told that the Nineteenth granted all women the right to vote in America — but this was not the case in practice. How did the divides in the suffrage movement define the fight for women’s enfranchisement? And how did that amendment finally get passed? With a stern note from someone’s mom.
Our guests are once again historians Martha Jones of John Hopkins University, Laura Free of Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Lisa Tetrault of Carnegie Mellon University.
This short episode includes a one-page Graphic Organizer for students to take notes on while listening, as well as discussion questions on the back side.