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The Bloody South Carolina Election Of 1876
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Book Synopsis The Bloody South Carolina Election of 1876 by : Jerry L. West
Download or read book The Bloody South Carolina Election of 1876 written by Jerry L. West and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than 10 years after the close of the Civil War, South Carolina experienced unrest, disenfranchisement and military occupation under Republican Party rule. This book examines the gubernatorial election of 1876, in which the state's most celebrated Civil War general created a united front in the Democratic Party and wrested control of politics from the Republicans. Of particular note are the ways in which the race, with its disqualified ballots, delays and wrangling, prefigured the 2000 election. For four months, the state endured two warring Houses of Representatives and teetered on the brink of civil war until Washington intervened.
Book Synopsis Fraud of the Century by : Roy Jr. Morris
Download or read book Fraud of the Century written by Roy Jr. Morris and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this major work of popular history and scholarship, acclaimed historian and biographer Roy Morris, Jr., tells the extraordinary story of how, in America's centennial year, the presidency was stolen, the Civil War was almost reignited, and black Americans were consigned to nearly ninety years of legalized segregation in the South. The bitter 1876 contest between Ohio Republican governor Rutherford B. Hayes and New York Democratic governor Samuel J. Tilden is the most sensational, ethically sordid, and legally questionable presidential election in American history. The first since Lincoln's in 1860 in which the Democrats had a real chance of recapturing the White House, the election was in some ways the last battle of the Civil War, as the two parties fought to preserve or overturn what had been decided by armies just eleven years earlier. Riding a wave of popular revulsion at the numerous scandals of the Grant administration and a sluggish economy, Tilden received some 260,000 more votes than his opponent. But contested returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina ultimately led to Hayes's being declared the winner by a specially created, Republican-dominated Electoral Commission after four tense months of political intrigue and threats of violence. President Grant took the threats seriously: he ordered armed federal troops into the streets of Washington to keep the peace. Morris brings to life all the colorful personalities and high drama of this most remarkable -- and largely forgotten -- election. He presents vivid portraits of the bachelor lawyer Tilden, a wealthy New York sophisticate whose passion for clean government propelled him to the very brink of the presidency, and of Hayes, a family man whose midwestern simplicity masked a cunning political mind. We travel to Philadelphia, where the Centennial Exhibition celebrated America's industrial might and democratic ideals, and to the nation's heartland, where Republicans waged a cynical but effective "bloody shirt" campaign to tar the Demo-crats, once again, as the party of disunion and rebellion. Morris dramatically recreates the suspenseful events of election night, when both candidates went to bed believing Tilden had won, and a one-legged former Union army general, "Devil Dan" Sickles, stumped into Republican headquarters and hastily improvised a devious plan to subvert the election in the three disputed southern states. We watch Hayes outmaneuver the curiously passive Tilden and his supporters in the days following the election, and witness the late-night backroom maneuvering of party leaders in the nation's capital, where democracy itself was ultimately subverted and the will of the people thwarted. Fraud of the Century presents compelling evidence that fraud by Republican vote-counters in the three southern states, and especially in Louisiana, robbed Tilden of the presidency. It is at once a masterful example of political reporting and an absorbing read.
Book Synopsis The Hayes-Tilden Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 by : Paul Leland Haworth
Download or read book The Hayes-Tilden Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 written by Paul Leland Haworth and published by . This book was released on 1906 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Democratic Party and the Gubernatorial Election of 1876 in South Carolina by : Betsy Ginsberg
Download or read book The Democratic Party and the Gubernatorial Election of 1876 in South Carolina written by Betsy Ginsberg and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Hayes-Tilden Disputed Presidential Election Of 1876 by : Paul Leland Haworth
Download or read book The Hayes-Tilden Disputed Presidential Election Of 1876 written by Paul Leland Haworth and published by Theclassics.Us. This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XIV LEGAL ASPECTS AND THE EQUITIES Well-nigh thirty years have passed since the beginning of the electoral controversy which it has been the purpose of this volume to describe. All the chief candidates, most of the party managers, all but two of the members of the Commission, are dead. The vast majority of living Americans have no personal remembrance of the great dispute. The rights and wrongs of the controversy no longer play a part in politics. It would seem, therefore, that the time has come when the investigator may hope to frame a judgment on the whole matter that will be free from prejudice. As regards the election proper, it is manifest to any candid mind that many regrettable things were done by both parties. In the states of South Carolina and Louisiana, for example, the white people had by a long period of terrible misgovernment been brought to such a pitch of desperation that they felt inclined to use any means which would put their governments once more into the hands of the intelligent and the reputable. Having been forced to accept negro suffrage sorely against their will, they naturally had little compunction in attempting to eliminate as much of the black vote as possible. In general this work was accomplished by methods which, considering the exasperation of the whites, were comparatively mild, but which in exceptional instances resulted in outrages horrible almost beyond belief. In Florida, also, while the amount of corruption in the government had not been great, the whites were almost equally eager to carry the election. In Louisiana, and perhaps in Florida, by methods which have been described in detail in previous chapters, the Democrats succeeded in their attempts to get a majority of votes into the...
Download or read book Wade Hampton written by Rod Andrew Jr. and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-11-30 with total page 635 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the South's most illustrious military leaders, Wade Hampton III was for a time the commander of all Lee's cavalry and at the end of the war was the highest-ranking Confederate cavalry officer. Yet for all Hampton's military victories, he also suffered devastating losses in his family and personal life. Rod Andrew's critical biography sheds light on his central role during Reconstruction as a conservative white leader, governor, U.S. senator, and Redeemer; his heroic image in the minds of white southerners; and his positions and apparent contradictions on race and the role of African Americans in the New South. Andrew also shows that Hampton's tragic past explains how he emerged in his own day as a larger-than-life symbol--of national reconciliation as well as southern defiance.
Book Synopsis Race and the Law in South Carolina by : John Wertheimer
Download or read book Race and the Law in South Carolina written by John Wertheimer and published by Amherst College Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race and the Law in South Carolina carefully reconstructs the social history behind six legal disputes heard in the South Carolina courts between the 1840s and the 1940s. The book uses these case studies to probe the complex relationship between race and the law in the American South during a century that included slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Throughout most of the period covered in the book, the South Carolina legal system obsessively drew racial lines, always to the detriment of nonwhite people. Occasionally, however, the legal system also provided a public forum--perhaps the region's best--within which racism could openly be challenged. The book emphasizes how dramatically the degree of legal oppressiveness experienced by Black South Carolinians varied during the century under study, based largely on the degree of Black access to political and legal power. During the era of slavery, both enslaved and nominally "free" Black South Carolinians suffered extreme legal disenfranchisement. They had no political voice and precious little access to legal redress. They could not vote, serve in public office, sit on juries, or testify in court against whites. There were no Black lawyers. Black South Carolinians had essentially no claims-making ability, resulting, unsurprisingly, in a deeply oppressive, thoroughly racialized system. Most of these antebellum legal disenfranchisements were overturned during the post-Civil War era of Reconstruction. In the wake of abolition, Reconstruction-era reformers in South Carolina erased one racial distinction after another from state law. For a time, Black men voted and Black jurors sat in rough proportion to their share of the state's population. The state's first Black lawyers and officeholders appeared. Among them was an attorney from Pennsylvania named Jonathan Jasper Wright, who ascended to the South Carolina Supreme Court in 1870, becoming the nation's first Black appellate justice. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, an explicitly white supremacist movement had rolled back many of the egalitarian gains of the Reconstruction era and reimposed a legalized racial hierarchy in South Carolina. The book explores three prominent features of the resulting Jim Crow system (segregated schools, racially skewed juries, and lynching) and documents the commitment of both elite and non-elite whites to using legal and quasi-legal tools to establish hierarchical racial distinctions. It also shows how Black lawyers and others used the law to combat some of Jim Crow's worst excesses. In this sense the book demonstrates the persistence of many Reconstruction-era reforms, including emancipation, Black education, the legal language of equal protection, Black lawyers, and Black access to the courts.
Book Synopsis The Election of 1876 by : Charles River Editors
Download or read book The Election of 1876 written by Charles River Editors and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes contemporary accounts describing the candidates, the conventions, and the election *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further readers *Includes a table of contents "It is impossible, at so early a time, to obtain the result." - Rutherford B. Hayes after the election It seems that every time a presidential election rolls around in America, voters are told that the nation is at a critical fork in its history, and that the decisions reached and the candidates elected will change the course of history. While this is always true to some extent, there are times when it is true to a critical extent. Such was the case in 1876, when the country, weary of four years of Civil War and more than a decade of Reconstruction, was once again on the brink of splitting. While the Northern states celebrated the centennial of American Independence, the South found itself chaffing under the weight of federal occupation. At the same time, the entire nation was shocked and horrified at the direction the Indian Wars in the West were going, culminating just weeks before the election with George Custer's shocking defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Many assumed that President Ulysses S. Grant, the popular Civil War general who was still a relatively young man at the end of his second term in office, would surely run for a third, but many Americans knew nothing of the scandals and corruption that had surrounded Grant's administration, and he wanted to keep it that way, preferring to be remembered as a successful general rather than a failed president. Thus, after extensive consultations with his advisors, he decided to retire from political life, leaving the Republican nomination wide open. At the same time, Southern politicians were beginning to make a comeback and the Democratic Party was gaining strength, especially in the former Confederate states. The South hoped that if it could once again win the White House, it could finally resume its position as an equal part of the nation, rather than a section being punished for its past. All of this set the stage for one of the strangest interludes in American history. As the nation's two major parties each put forth a large slate of candidates for nomination, two candidates had to come to the fore, and each party selected both a presidential and vice-presidential candidate. These four men ran a bitterly contested race just to reach the general election, and that general election became the most controversial in American history. By the time results rolled in, Democrat Samuel Tilden had won the popular vote and was up by 19 electoral votes, but 20 electoral votes were disputed, and despite claims of fraud, the two sides eventually forged the Compromise of 1877, which gave the presidency to the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the removal of federal troops from the South. The Compromise effectively ended the Reconstruction era, and while it helped bring about the sectional reconciliation of the country, it also allowed the Solid South to emerge, which included the implementation of Jim Crow across the region. In effect, the election ensured another major battle over the civil rights of minorities would ensue decades later. The Election of 1876: The History of the Controversial Election that Ended Reconstruction looks at one of America's most controversial aspects of the 19th century. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Missouri Compromise like never before.
Book Synopsis Presidential Upsets by : Douglas J. Clouatre
Download or read book Presidential Upsets written by Douglas J. Clouatre and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-01-09 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique book examines election upsets in American presidential campaigns, offers in-depth analysis of several surprising election results, and explains why the front-running candidate lost. Controversial and unexpected presidential election results have occurred throughout American history. Presidential Upsets: Dark Horses, Underdogs, and Corrupt Bargains carefully examines eleven presidential upsets spread across two centuries of American history, ranking these election upsets by order of magnitude and allowing readers to compare the issues and processes of American elections. After an introductory chapter that establishes the factors that contribute to a presidential upset, such as the comparative advantages of candidates, the issues facing the candidates and electorate, and the political environment during the election, the book offers in-depth analysis of notable surprise election results and explains why the front-running candidate lost. Each major period of American history—such as the Jacksonian period, the Antebellum era, Reconstruction, World War I, the Cold War era, and the post-Cold War era—is covered. The author utilizes primary and secondary sources of material to provide contemporary and historical analysis of these elections, and bases his analysis upon criteria used by political scientists to predict presidential election results.
Book Synopsis The Hayes-Tilden Election of 1876 by : Harold Cecil Vaughan
Download or read book The Hayes-Tilden Election of 1876 written by Harold Cecil Vaughan and published by Franklin Watts. This book was released on 1972 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the political climate and the campaign and election events that made the 1876 Presidential election one of the most highly disputed in the Nation's history.
Download or read book No Surrender written by Keith D. Dickson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A modern and current examination of Reconstruction that explains how the South in the aftermath of defeat in a total war, was still able to exhaust the will of the powerful North using asymmetric warfare. The end of the Civil War may have marked the end of the official fighting, but the Congressional strategy to remake the South during Reconstruction led to a new period of warfare—asymmetric warfare in which the defeated Confederacy became the Southern resistance. Despite all the power at its disposal, the North failed to change the South after nearly 11 years of effort and instead accepted a political-social equilibrium dictated by the South. This book presents Reconstruction through an unconventional lens to explain the process of transition from war to warfare, and finally to equilibrium represented by the emergence of the New South. Author Keith D. Dickson explains how Reconstruction created a false equilibrium in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and was reversed by Congressional action that imposed a new social and political order. By resistance of these actions through asymmetric warfare, the white South was able to establish a new equilibrium—one dictated by the South that opened the path to the New South. Providing insights from an author who is both a respected academic military historian as well as a former practitioner of unconventional warfare as a Special Forces officer, the book covers the historical period 1865–1877, casting the Reconstruction period as an example of protracted asymmetric warfare. This asymmetric warfare was conducted in phases against the Republican state governments. As both the U.S. Congress and the Grant administration abandoned the lofty goals for Reconstruction, a bitterly contested presidential election provided the opportunity to establish conditions favorable to the white South that would in turn lead to a political-social equilibrium that allowed reconciliation to begin.
Download or read book By One Vote written by Michael F. Holt and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2008-10-15 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With electoral votes disputed in three states, a Democrat winning the popular vote, and the Supreme Court stepping in to overrule Florida court decisions, the presidential election of 1876 was an eerie precursor to that of 2000. Rutherford Hayes's defeat of Samuel Tilden has been dubbed the "fraud of the century"; now one of America's preeminent political historians digs deeper to unravel its real significance. This election saw the highest voter turnout of any in U.S. history-a whopping 82 percent-and also the narrowest margin of victory, as a single electoral vote decided the outcome. Michael Holt offers a fresh interpretation of this disputed election, not merely to rehash claims of fraud but to explain why it was so close. Examining the post-Civil War political environment, he particularly focuses on its most curious feature: that Republicans were the only party in history to retain the presidency in the middle of a severe depression after decisively losing the preceding off-year congressional elections. Holt begins with the election of 1872 to demonstrate how competition for Liberal Republicans shaped the campaign strategies of both parties. He stresses the critical but little-noted importance of Colorado statehood in August-which changed the size of the electoral-vote majority needed to win-and provides a new answer to the vexing question of why a Democratic-controlled Congress had admitted Colorado in time to participate in the presidential election, when without its votes Tilden would have won. And he argues that the high voter turnout was attributable both to Republicans exploiting fears of ex-Confederates recapturing control of the government and to long-apathetic southern Democrats reacting to war memories and Reconstruction realities. By One Vote shows how this election triggered a Republican revival and established the GOP as the Democrats' major competitor. Holt's compelling analysis of the dispute over electoral votes also explains why charges of Republican fraud are questionable-and how Democrats were just as guilty of corruption. A masterly retelling of this controversial episode, Holt's study captures the mood of the country and testifies to the power that hatreds and fears aroused by the Civil War still exercised over the American people.
Book Synopsis The Bloody Shirt by : Stephen Budiansky
Download or read book The Bloody Shirt written by Stephen Budiansky and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A narrative account of Reconstruction-era violence documents vigilante attacks on African Americans and their white allies, in a fast-paced analysis that traces the period as reflected by the careers of two Union officers, a Confederate general, a northern entrepreneur, and a former slave.
Book Synopsis Wade Hampton by : Walter Brian Cisco
Download or read book Wade Hampton written by Walter Brian Cisco and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2004 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the eve of the American Civil War, Wade Hampton, one of the wealthiest men in the South and indeed the United States, remained loyal to his native South Carolina as it seceded from the Union. Raising his namesake Hampton Legion of soldiers, he eventually became a lieutenant general of Confederate cavalry after the death of the legendary J. E. B. Stuart. Hampton's highly capable, but largely unheralded, military leadership has long needed a modern treatment. After the war, Hampton returned to South Carolina, where chaos and violence reigned as Northern carpetbaggers, newly freed slaves, and disenfranchised white Southerners battled for political control of the devastated economy. As Reconstruction collapsed, Hampton was elected governor in the contested election of 1876 in which both the governorship of South Carolina and the American presidency hung in the balance. While aspects of Hampton's rise to power remain controversial, under his leadership stability returned to state government and rampant corruption was brought under control. Hampton then served in the U.S. Senate from 1879 to 1891, eventually losing his seat to a henchman of notorious South Carolina governor "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, whose blatantly segregationist grassroots politics would supplant Hampton's genteel paternalism. In Wade Hampton, Walter Brian Cisco provides a comprehensively researched, highly readable, and long-overdue treatment of a man whose military and political careers had a significant impact upon not only South Carolina, but America. Focusing on all aspects of Hampton's life, Cisco has written the definitive military-political overview of this fascinating man.
Author :Charles River Charles River Editors Publisher :Createspace Independent Publishing Platform ISBN 13 :9781537336015 Total Pages :112 pages Book Rating :4.3/5 (36 download)
Book Synopsis The Election of 1800 and the Election of 1876 by : Charles River Charles River Editors
Download or read book The Election of 1800 and the Election of 1876 written by Charles River Charles River Editors and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-08-28 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes contemporary descriptions of the campaigns, elections, and results *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents In 1800, Thomas Jefferson beat sitting President John Adams, albeit narrowly, and denied Adams the second term he coveted. Adams escaped to Massachusetts and left a curt note about the state of the White House stables behind. No congratulations were exchanged, and the two men did not speak to one another for over a decade afterwards. Jefferson's election to the Presidency also left an important electoral legacy. By 1800, the Alien and Sedition Acts had made Adams an unpopular President, especially in the South. Without formal parties to effectively nominate candidates in a President-Vice President ticket, the Democratic-Republicans had two nominees: Thomas Jefferson and New York's Aaron Burr, who had been tabbed to serve as Jefferson's Vice President. Once the Electoral College cast its ballots, Jefferson and Burr had the same number of electoral votes with 73, while Adams came in third with 65. This was, however, a mix-up. The Democratic-Republican electors were supposed to have one elector abstain from voting for Burr, which would make Jefferson President and Burr Vice-President. In the 1800 election, states selected their electors from April until October. The last state to select its electors, South Carolina, selected Democratic-Republicans but neglected to have one voter abstain. The final vote was thus a tie. As the Constitution prescribed, the election was determined in the House of Representatives. This proved problematic as well. The Federalists controlled the House that decided who would be President. With Jefferson as their arch-nemesis, they were hardly happy to support him, and many initially voted for Burr. The first 35 ballots were always a tie between Burr and Jefferson. Not until mid-February of 1801, when Alexander Hamilton, another of Jefferson's nemeses, came out to endorse the Vice President, did Jefferson come out ahead. Hamilton's disdain for Burr was so strong that he virtually handed the presidency to Jefferson, who had been his ideological opponent for the better part of a decade. Hamilton's decision created personal animus between Hamilton and Burr that stewed for years and famously culminated with the duel that ended Hamilton's life in 1804. Many assumed that President Ulysses S. Grant, the popular Civil War general who was still a relatively young man at the end of his second term in office, would surely run for a third, but many Americans knew nothing of the scandals and corruption that had surrounded Grant's administration, and he wanted to keep it that way All of this set the stage for one of the strangest interludes in American history. As the nation's two major parties each put forth a large slate of candidates for nomination in 1876, two candidates had to come to the fore, and each party selected both a presidential and vice-presidential candidate. These four men ran a bitterly contested race just to reach the general election, and that general election became the most controversial in American history. By the time results rolled in, Democrat Samuel Tilden had won the popular vote and was up by 19 electoral votes, but 20 electoral votes were disputed, and despite claims of fraud, the two sides eventually forged the Compromise of 1877, which gave the presidency to the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the removal of federal troops from the South. The Compromise effectively ended the Reconstruction era, and while it helped bring about the sectional reconciliation of the country, it also allowed the Solid South to emerge, which included the implementation of Jim Crow across the region. In effect, the election ensured another major battle over the civil rights of minorities would ensue decades later.
Book Synopsis Reconstruction: A Very Short Introduction by : Allen C. Guelzo
Download or read book Reconstruction: A Very Short Introduction written by Allen C. Guelzo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-11 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The era known as Reconstruction is one of the unhappiest times in American history. It succeeded in reuniting the nation politically after the Civil War but in little else. Among its chief failures was the inability to chart a progressive course for race relations after the abolition of slavery and rise of Jim Crow. Reconstruction also struggled to successfully manage the Southern resistance towards a Northern, free-labor pattern. But the failures cannot obscure a number of notable accomplishments, with decisive long-term consequences for American life: the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, the election of the first African American representatives to the US Congress, and the avoidance of any renewed outbreak of civil war. Reconstruction suffered from poor leadership and uncertainty of direction, but it also laid the groundwork for renewed struggles for racial equality during the Civil Rights Movement. This Very Short Introduction delves into the constitutional, political, and social issues behind Reconstruction to provide a lucid and original account of a historical moment that left an indelible mark on American social fabric. Award-winning historian Allen C. Guelzo depicts Reconstruction as a "bourgeois revolution" -- as the attempted extension of the free-labor ideology embodied by Lincoln and the Republican Party to what was perceived as a Southern region gone astray from the Founders' intention in the pursuit of Romantic aristocracy. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book Give Us the Ballot written by Ari Berman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book of 2015 A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2015 A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015 A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2015 An NPR Best Book of 2015 Countless books have been written about the civil rights movement, but far less attention has been paid to what happened after the dramatic passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 and the turbulent forces it unleashed. Give Us the Ballot tells this story for the first time. In this groundbreaking narrative history, Ari Berman charts both the transformation of American democracy under the VRA and the counterrevolution that has sought to limit voting rights, from 1965 to the present day. The act enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. And yet, fifty years later, we are still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power, with lawmakers devising new strategies to keep minorities out of the voting booth and with the Supreme Court declaring a key part of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. Berman brings the struggle over voting rights to life through meticulous archival research, in-depth interviews with major figures in the debate, and incisive on-the-ground reporting. In vivid prose, he takes the reader from the demonstrations of the civil rights era to the halls of Congress to the chambers of the Supreme Court. At this important moment in history, Give Us the Ballot provides new insight into one of the most vital political and civil rights issues of our time.
