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The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States Paperback – Illustrated, June 30, 2009
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- Print length495 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBasic Books
- Publication dateJune 30, 2009
- Dimensions6 x 1.24 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100465005020
- ISBN-13978-0465005024
- Lexile measure1580L
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- Publisher : Basic Books; Revised edition (June 30, 2009)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 495 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0465005020
- ISBN-13 : 978-0465005024
- Lexile measure : 1580L
- Item Weight : 1.3 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.24 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #187,289 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #185 in Elections
- #258 in United States National Government
- #611 in History & Theory of Politics
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Much of this will not be new to historians, though never before has there been such detail and the twenty appendixes provided at the back will be invaluable for future reference. Sometimes Keyssar gives a qualititative estimate of how many Americans could vote (he suggests that perhaps 60% of white Americans could vote before 1776, a figure much lower than the 80-90% posited by more Panglossian historians). And there are many interesting details, such as the New York plan where registration was supposed to take place on Yom Kippur, conventiently leaving out many Jews. But otherwise the full results have been reserved for his upcoming work. This weakens his criticisms of American exceptionalism, since without a clear understanding of how much the vote declined in the North, we cannot see how fully the ponderous elitism of Parkman and Godkin were like the undemocratic aspects of German or Italian or even British liberalism. I am also do not agree with his description of slaves as a "peasantry." This implies that the majority of white farmers who were not slaveholders were a) not peasants and b) were otherwise indistinguishable on a class basis from the slaveholders. Recent southern agrarian history makes this assumption quite questionable. It is true that Americans were unenthusiatic as Europeans about the rise of the proletariat and rural subaltern classes, but it is insufficient to say that mass suffrage only occured because such classes were a small proportion of the population. They were also a small proportion of the population in France in 1848 and 1851 when universal male suffrage was declared, which did not prevent a greater degree of struggle over the question in that country. Enfranchising the majority of any population would raise serious issues of class domination and control regardless of the class structure. Nevertheless this is still a useful study, and reading the petty, racist, misogynist, self-serving and self-satisfied arguments against the suffrage will be a depressing experience. To think that such injustices could be continued for two centuries thanks to the endless cant of "state's rights" long after the republican content of that slogan had drained away will infuriate you.