While the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution extended voting rights to African American males, the question of women’s suffrage remained unresolved. This 1866 speech by African American speaker Frances Ellen Watkins Harper illustrates the complex intersection of race, gender, and politics in the Reconstruction era.
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Tag Archives: New York
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 undid the Missouri Compromise of decades earlier and–potentially–opened the entire west (some said the entire nation) to slavery. The newspaper editorial below illustrates one particularly strong view about the controversial law.
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Women’s Rights: The Seneca Falls Declaration
The Seneca Falls Conference of 1848, held in New York, is often considered the launching point for the women’s movement in the United States. Women–despite legal and economic restrictions and oppression–were a driving force in many of the social reform movements of the time such as the abolition and temperance movements. Their drive for greater political, legal, and economic freedom, including the right to vote has been arduous.
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Life on the Michigan Frontier
The Erie Canal, new roads, and increased governmental organization allowed and encouraged migration westward beginning in the first decades of the 1800s.
The New Constitution: For and Against
The 1787 convention in Philadelphia created a document (the Constitution) which would radically reshape the United States. Establishing a “federal” system in which the central government held a great deal more authority than under the Articles of Confederation. Divided into executive (embodied in the President), legislative (Congress), and judicial (the federal courts), the new system gave what its authors asserted were clearly defined and limited powers to the federal government.