Indigenous Peoples’ Voting Rights
Indigenous Peoples’ Voting Rights

During Reconstruction in 1868, the 14th Amendment was passed granting citizenship rights to anyone born in the United States. Unfortunately, the interpretation of this law excluded indigenous people. The reason? Courts considered American Indians to be citizens of sovereign tribal nations--and therefore not entitled to the protections of the United States Constitution.

Read More
LynchburgMuseum Comment
Women’s Suffrage Blog, Part 5: Into a Progressive New Century
Women’s Suffrage Blog, Part 5: Into a Progressive New Century

The Industrial Revolution turned the world, as people knew it, upside down. Urbanization, mass migrations, cross-continental travel, new technologies, and heightened sensibilities about human rights comprise an incomplete list of the multiple foments in nineteenth-century America. If we were to get inside the minds of our great or great-great grandparents, there was a whole lot of shakin’ going on.

Read More
LynchburgMuseumComment
Women’s Suffrage Blog, Part 4: Post-Civil War America and the Turn of the Century
Women’s Suffrage Blog, Part 4: Post-Civil War America and the Turn of the Century

The principle of “one person, one vote” is such an axiom in modern American thinking and discourse, it is hard to grasp that this idea was hardly posited before the last half of the 19th Century. As we saw in Blog Post 2, our colonial forebears tied the voting franchise to property ownership (as evidence of responsibility and public virtue) and family headship—the husband-father being the representative voter for his own charges.

Read More
LynchburgMuseum Comment
Women’s Suffrage Blog, Part 3: The Industrial Revolution Opens the Door to Woman’s Suffrage in Pre-Civil War-Era America
Women’s Suffrage Blog, Part 3: The Industrial Revolution Opens the Door to Woman’s Suffrage in Pre-Civil War-Era America

Until the 1830s, America was primarily an agrarian society. Cities were becoming hubs of thriving commerce—as the steam engine, spinning jenny, and cotton gin were beginning to revolutionize and transform the world. But culturally and politically, it is safe to say that, most Americans before the “First Industrial Revolution”[i] of the early 1800s held to centuries-long views of the family and of civic duties.

Read More
LynchburgMuseumComment
Women’s Suffrage Blog, Part 1: A Collaboration with the Blue Ridge Chapter, National Society Daughters of the American Revolution
Women’s Suffrage Blog, Part 1: A Collaboration with the Blue Ridge Chapter, National Society Daughters of the American Revolution

2020 is a special year for many reasons: it is the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution which gave African American and all male citizens the right to vote; it is the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution which gave women the right to vote; and it is a presidential election year, which will be this country’s 59th. To gain these freedoms, the price paid was steep both to individuals and to society. It is work that continues to this day.

Read More
LynchburgMuseumComment