State Voting Laws In America Historical Statutes And Their Modern Implications

State Voting Laws in America documents changing views on voting rights, emphasizing court rulings which shaped our understanding of what constitutes a legitimate right to vote.

Voter Fraud or Fraudulent Voters will document the changing view of voting rights, from the foundation of voting to the present day.

Since 2003, several US states have passed new laws that complicate the process of voter registration and voting. Framed as controls on voter fraud, the laws have spawned controversy in both the courts and public opinion, the latter falling along a sharp partisan divide. Much Sound and Fury, or the New Jim Crow? offers a scholarly analysis, not of the intent but rather the impact of these laws. Beginning with a historical overview of the expanding and contracting right to vote, particularly regarding its impact on African Americans, subsequent chapters use quantitative analysis to analyze the impact of identification requirement laws, proof-of-citizenship requirements, felony disenfranchisement, and gerrymandering. Before 2020, the impact of the laws leaned slightly negative but was mixed. More recent developments, however, point to a far more alarming implication—widespread belief in factually-baseless allegations of fraud, which undermines Americans' trust and faith in our constitutional democracy; these allegations reached a crescendo in 2021 as a violent mob seized the US Capitol. The book concludes with an afterword on the 2020 elections and their aftermath.

On cover, the word "right" has an x drawn over the letter "r" with the letter "f" above it.

The American Civil Rights Movement 1865–1950 is a history of the African American struggle for freedom and equality from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. It synthesizes the disparate black movements, explaining consistent themes and controversies during those years. The main focus is on the black activists who led the movement and the white people who supported them. The principal theme is that African American agency propelled the progress and that whites often helped. Even whites who were not sympathetic to black demands were useful, often because it was to their advantage to act as black allies. Even white opponents could be coerced into cooperation or, at least, non-opposition. White people of good will with shallow understanding were frustrating, but they were sometimes useful. Even if they did not work for black rights, they did not work against them, and sometimes helped because they had no better options. Until now, the history of the African American movement from 1865 to 1950 has not been covered as one coherent story. There have been many histories of African Americans that have treated the subject in one chapter or part of a chapter, and several excellent books have concentrated on a specific time period, such as Reconstruction or World War II. Other books have focused on one aspect of the time, such as lynching or the nature of Jim Crow. This is the first book to synthesize the history of the movement in a coherent whole.

The greatest threat to American democracy is the voting public. Candidates for political office, organized interests, and political parties are often blamed for the ills of American democracy, but this book places the focus on the core issue in American politics: a disengaged, demanding, and often contradictory voting public. Structural reforms such as the direct primary, term limits, and campaign finance regime reforms make the problems worse rather than better because these structural reforms fail to address core issues that disengage the voting public from republican politics.