T EACHING WITH P RIMARY S OURCES —MTSU
N EWSLETTER : O CTOBER 2016
V OLUME 8, I SSUE 10
WELCOME!
Teaching with Primary Sources—Middle Tennessee State University, administered by the
Center for Historic Preservation, engages learners of all ages in using primary sources to
explore major issues and questions in many different disciplines.
U PCOMING E VENTS :

October 13 (Murfreesboro)
- "Expanding the Vote"
Workshop at the Heritage
Center of Murfreesboro and
Rutherford County from 9
a.m. to 3 p.m. To register,
email Kira Duke.

October 21 (Knoxville) "Immigration: The Creation
of the American Melting
Pot" Workshop at the East
Tennessee History Center
from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. ET.
To register, email Lisa Oakley.

November 2 (Brownsville)
- “Examining Tennessee’s
Story: Resources and Strategies for Social Studies”
Workshop at the West Tennessee Delta Heritage Center
from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. To
register, email Kira Duke.

November 3 (Memphis)
"Yellow Fever in Memphis:
Teaching How Disease Impacted the City" Workshop
at the Pink Palace Museum
from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. To
register, click here.

November 4
(Murfreesboro) "Developing Research Skills:
Small-Scale Activities with
Primary Sources" Workshop
at the Heritage Center of
Murfreesboro and Rutherford County from 9 a.m. to
3 p.m. To register, email
Kira Duke.
Contact: Stacey Graham or Kira Duke at (615) 898-2947 or www.mtsu.edu/tps
N EWS

We have two new items for your use: Colonial America Primary Source Set which is
great for those teaching early U.S. history and a 5th Grade Resource List for Social
Studies. This resource list is not complete but will be completed to cover the full
scope of the 5th grade standards. A big THANK YOU to Suzanne Costner from Blount
County for her work on the elementary resource lists!

After many requests for materials focused on the Trail of Tears, we now have a lesson
plan exploring Cherokee removal and the Trail of Tears. This lesson plan includes a
PowerPoint and additional background readings for teachers. A special thanks goes out
to the Center’s Trail of Tears Project Historian and former TPS-MTSU GRA Amy
Kostine for her contributions to this lesson plan.
“A WESOME ” S OURCE
OF THE MONTH :
T HEME : V OTING R IGHTS
The expansion of voting rights to more and
more people in the United States reflects the
growth and evolution of democracy, as well
as a broadening of the concept of who the
“we” is in “we the people.” When those
words were penned in 1787, “we” referred
only to white, male landowners. Today, 240
years later, “we” includes all male and female citizens, regardless of race or economic
status.
Republican [National] Convention,
[Chicago, Illinois,] 1920. [1920, detail]
With the 19th Amendment still a few states
shy of ratification, what message were these
suffragists trying to send to the party in
control of the White House?
Read more about this development in our
special guest article, “Forming a More
Perfect Union Requires That We Vote,” on
p. 2, courtesy of Dr. Mary Evins of the
American Democracy Project. You will also
learn more about attitudes towards extending the vote to African Americans, women,
and American Indians in the lesson ideas on
p. 3.
Content created and featured in partnership with the TPS program does
not indicate an endorsement by the Library of Congress.
N EWSLETTER : O CTOBER 2016
F EATURED A RTICLE – “F ORMING A M ORE P ERFECT
U NION R EQUIRES T HAT W E V OTE ” BY D R . M ARY E VINS ,
R ESEARCH A SSOCIATE P ROFESSOR , A MERICAN D EMOCRACY P ROJECT
Who and what constitute American citizenship is at the core of our national identity. The clearest
manifestation of national identity, consciousness, and purpose is whom we legally codify as eligible
to be doing the electing of the president and other officials. Expansion of access to the ballot
throughout the course of U.S. history marks a bending of the moral universe toward justice. With,
however, some significant setbacks.
P AGE 2
Important Links:
 Legacy of the 14th
Amendment (Primary
Source Set)

Women’s Suffrage
Across America
(Primary Source Set)

Voting Rights in the
Reconstruction Era
(Lesson Plan)
It’s axiomatic that landowning white male elites, the ones who wrote the U.S. Constitution, were
primarily the only ones allowed to vote in Early Republic America, as they had during colonial days.
But beginning as soon as 1792, the requirement of landownership as a prerequisite for the franchise 
began to be lifted, state by state, initially in New Hampshire, and then completely by 1856 when
North Carolina became the final state to remove property ownership as a qualification for voting.
At the founding of the country, in several northern states, free black men could vote, but the privilege, along with citizenship once held, was undermined by law across regional jurisdictions. The
1790 Naturalization Act passed by Congress defined citizenship as available only to free whites. If
there was no citizenship, there was no vote. More than sixty years later, the 1857 Dred Scott ruling
hammered home that principle, stating explicitly that a free black man was not a U.S. citizen and
therefore had no rights. Justice Benjamin Curtis’s lengthy dissenting opinion, in which he cited the
Articles of Confederation, asserted that free people of color had been citizens before the Constitution, under the Constitution itself, and in all the years thereafter.
Civil Disobedience
and the National
Woman’s Party
(Lesson Plan)

A More Perfect
Union: Women’s
Suffrage and the
Constitution (Lesson
Plan)

Women’s Suffrage
Links Guide
Elections...The
American Way
Following Dred Scott, in 1860, a number of New England states permitted black men to vote. The

1866 Civil Rights Act granted citizenship and rights to all male persons without distinction of race,
color, or previous condition of servitude. The 1868 Fourteenth Amendment added African American citizenship permanently to the Constitution, while the 1870 Fifteenth Amendment stated une-  What was the 1964
Freedom Summer
quivocally the right of citizens to vote would not be abridged in the U.S. on account of race.
Project?
Citizenship and voting for Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, and so many
other ethnic groups were controlled and stingily doled out piecemeal in local, state, and federal
actions across time. Native American citizenship was not fully guaranteed under after World War I in the 1924 Indian Citizenship
Act. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo broadly promised citizenship to Mexicans when the Southwest was absorbed into the
United States, but racist restrictions kept the vote away from most Hispanics for over a hundred years. The Chinese Exclusion
Act pointedly forbade Chinese American citizenship in 1882, but because they were the “good” Asians at the time of World War
II, Chinese could be naturalized when the exclusion acts were repealed in 1943.
Our state’s historic role as the 36th legislature to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment put Tennessee in the national limelight when
our General Assembly passed the amendment on August 18, 1920, fulfilling Article V of the Constitution and guaranteeing women’s vote across the country. That southern states had been a tough sell for voting rights for women—only Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, and West Virginia had ratified in the South prior to Tennessee—is not especially unanticipated. More surprising were the
progressive northern states of Connecticut, Vermont, and Delaware that had not already ratified by summer 1920.
Forming a more perfect union has meant that many sectors of our society have had to struggle mightily to be recognized as part of
“we the people” to vote. Eighteen-year-olds were brought into the electorate in 1971 with the Twenty-sixth Amendment. Obstacles that have had to be breached include eliminating poll taxes, in the Twenty-fourth Amendment (1964); establishing electors
for Washington, D.C., residents to be able to participate in presidential elections, in the Twenty-third Amendment (1961); literacy testing banned in the Voting Rights Act of 1965; correcting barriers to access for individuals with physical limitations mandated in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. And so many more assaults on citizens’ voting rights have had to be challenged.
The fight to vote is dependent on the voters—to vote, to access their right and privilege, and to use their vote build a society of
liberty and justice for all of us. The fight to vote is equally dependent on the voters to proactively protect the franchise for their
fellow citizens under threat. Citizenship is so much more than voting, but voting is the very cornerstone of citizenship. In Tennessee, registration to vote on November 8th ends October 11th. If you are not yet registered, do it now. Early voting starts October 19th. See you at the polls.
N EWSLETTER : O CTOBER 2016
P AGE 3
L ESSON I DEA – V OTING R IGHTS , A CCORDING
TO
A LEXANDER G RAHAM B ELL
Alexander Graham Bell is best known for inventing the telephone, but he also developed
methods to teach the deaf, worked towards the development of mechanical flight, dabbled in eugenics, improved Edison’s phonograph for the consumer market, and tried to
extract the fatal bullet from President Garfield’s body. Curious about everything, he also
had plenty to say about the situation of voting rights at the turn of the 20th century. He
discusses his views on women’s suffrage and African American suffrage in a letter to his
wife, Mabel Hubbard Bell, in 1901. Mabel—who was extremely intelligent, well educated, and deaf from the age of five—was her husband’s most trusted confidante, as the
abundant collection of letters between the two attests.
Print out student copies of a letter from “Alec” to Mabel, dated March 28, 1901, and
have students read the letter in pairs. (If you are pressed for time, have them read just to
the middle of page 5.) What does Alexander think about women’s right to vote? What
about African Americans’ right to vote? What is the role of education in determining voting rights? What about democracy? What does he mean when he compares the right to
vote to the right to own a gun? After discussing the letter in pairs, students should complete this worksheet that exercises their ability to detect evidence-supported arguments.
Discuss student answers together as a class. What can you deduce about Mabel’s thoughts Alexander Graham Bell with his wife
Mabel and daughters Elsie (left) and
on suffrage from her husband’s response? Which of them seems more in favor of womMarian (Daisy) [ca. 1885]
en’s right to vote? Do their views surprise you? In what ways are they representative of
sentiment in 1901? In what ways are their views progressive?
This lesson idea meets state standards for high school U.S. History & Geography (US.6 & 18) and English Language Arts
(Informational Text: Craft & Structure).
L ESSON I DEA – C ITIZENSHIP F OR A MERICAN I NDIANS
The ability to vote has long been associated with citizenship, resulting in
intense debates over who is a citizen. American Indians were one such
group who found themselves on the periphery of American citizenship, unable to vote because they were not considered citizens of the United States.
It would not be until June 2, 1924, that American Indians gained the right
to vote. Even after gaining the right to vote, however, American Indians
continued to be the objects of discrimination.
This is a great chance to use the Socratic seminar method, in which your
students drive the conversation while you act as moderator. Have your students gather around in one big circle or smaller circles, depending on preference and size of the classroom. Select sources from the list below. Pair
these sources with the analysis sheet for a grade. Develop guiding questions "Move on!" Has the Native American no rights
about the sources and about voting rights/citizenship. Make sure that your that the naturalized American is bound to requestions scaffold learning and are not close-ended. You can use the follow- spect? / / Th. Nast. [1871]
ing questions as examples: How do you define citizenship? What are the
requirements for being an American citizen? Why were American Indians not considered citizens before 1924? In what ways do
voting rights include/exclude people in the democratic process? How does one determine who should be allowed to vote, and
who gets to decide? Why is voting linked so closely to citizenship?
This lesson idea meets state standards for high school U.S. History & Geography (U.S. 39) and English Language Arts
(Informational Text: Key Ideas and Details).
“Move On”
The reconstruction policy
68th Congress (p. 253)
Henry Mitchell
The daily chieftain
N EWSLETTER : O CTOBER 2016
P AGE 4
P ENNSYLVANIA C ONSTITUTION
L OWERING THE V OTING A GE
Independent Chronicle and the Universal Advertiser(Boston), November 7, 1776 [with reprint of Pennsylvania Constitution
from the Pennsylvania Journal, October 9, 1776]. [detail]
As the Declaration of Independence was being written, Benjamin Franklin and others were also working to write a state
constitution. Pennsylvania opted to make tax payment and
residency a requirement for voting eligibility rather than
property ownership, as many other states did during this
period. Why might this be an important distinction? What
other key words can students identify in this passage that
limit voting rights? Have your students research to find what
other states opted for similar requirements.
Young soldiers who have just been drafted stand in rows front
of a man on a platform at Fort Jackson, Columbia, South Carolina; sign behind him reads "Initial recieving point, U.S. Army
Reception Station" [1967]
The text of the 26th Amendment says, “The right of citizens of
the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to
vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by
any State on account of age.” Ratified in 1971 during the Vietnam War, the amendment reflects public concern over the
drafting of 18-year-olds to fight, and die, overseas.
“W ALLS
CAME TUMBLING DOWN ”
Jericho, U.S.A. [1956]
This cartoon by Herb Block depicts a crowd carrying an equal
rights banner marching around a fortress called “Voting Discrimination.” How does the imagery in this cartoon mirror
actions taken by civil rights activists? The 2016 Educator in
Residence, Brandi Love, developed a great activity to analyze
cartoons such as this one, which you can view here.
END OF POLL TAXES
Associate Justice William O. Douglas (1898−1980). Motion
to Proceed in Helen Butts v. Albertis Harrison, Governor
(1966). [detail]
Poll taxes were widely adopted in the late 1800s as a way to
counteract the 15th Amendment. Beyond limiting the right
to vote for African American men and later women, they
also hindered all poor people from exercising their right to
vote. The poll tax was declared unconstitutional in federal
elections in 1964 by the 24th Amendment. By 1966, the
Supreme Court had extended this to cover state elections,
ruling that the poll tax violated the 14th Amendment. Ask
your students to consider how this compares to the debate
over voter ID laws today.