The remarkable story of the bloody conflict that erupted in 1841 Rhode Island over allowing non-property owners to vote. The portly Rhode Island aristocrat was hardly the image of the people’s champion—but in 1841, Thomas Dorr became just that. At a time when only white male landowners could vote, the idealistic Dorr envisioned a more democratic state. In October of that year, the People’s Convention ratified a new constitution that extended voting rights to those without land, and Dorr was named governor. That act would spark a small civil war, and violence erupted as the people of the state stood sharply divided in a conflict that reached the president and United States Supreme Court. Author Rory Raven charts the tumultuous and ultimately tragic history of a man and a movement that were too far ahead of their time.

In 1840s Rhode Island, the state’s seventeenth-century colonial charter remained in force and restricted suffrage to property owners, effectively disenfranchising 60 percent of potential voters. Thomas Wilson Dorr’s failed attempt to rectify that situation through constitutional reform ultimately led to an armed insurrection that was quickly quashed—and to a stiff sentence for Dorr himself. Nevertheless, as Erik Chaput shows, the Dorr Rebellion stands as a critical moment of American history during the two decades of fractious sectional politics leading up to the Civil War. This uprising was the only revolutionary republican movement in the antebellum period that claimed the people’s sovereignty as the basis for the right to alter or abolish a form of government. Equally important, it influenced the outcomes of important elections throughout northern states in the early 1840s and foreshadowed the breakup of the national Democratic Party in 1860. Through his spellbinding and engaging narrative, Chaput sets the rebellion in the context of national affairs—especially the abolitionist movement. While Dorr supported the rights of African Americans, a majority of delegates to the “People’s Convention” favored a whites-only clause to ensure the proposed constitution’s passage, which brought abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Parker Pillsbury, and Abby Kelley to Rhode Island to protest. Meanwhile, Dorr’s ideology of the people’s sovereignty sparked profound fears among Southern politicians regarding its potential to trigger slave insurrections. Drawing upon years of extensive archival research, Chaput’s book provides the first scholarly biography of Dorr, as well as the most detailed account of the rebellion yet published. In it, Chaput tackles issues of race and gender and carries the story forward into the 1850s to examine the transformation of Dorr’s ideology into the more familiar refrain of popular sovereignty. Chaput demonstrates how the rebellion’s real aims and significance were far broader than have been supposed, encompassing seemingly conflicting issues including popular sovereignty, antislavery, land reform, and states’ rights. The People’s Martyr is a definitive look at a key event in our history that further defined the nature of American democracy and the form of constitutionalism we now hold as inviolable.

A brutal, bloody, and at times hopeful history of the vote; a primer on the opponents fighting to take it away; and a playbook for how we can save our democracy before it’s too late—from the former U.S. Attorney General on the front lines of this fight Voting is our most important right as Americans—“the right that protects all the others,” as Lyndon Johnson famously said when he signed the Voting Rights Act—but it’s also the one most violently contested throughout U.S. history. Since the gutting of the act in the landmark Shelby County v. Holder case in 2013, many states have passed laws restricting the vote. After the 2020 election, President Trump’s effort to overturn the vote has evolved into a slow-motion coup, with many Republicans launching an all-out assault on our democracy. The vote seems to be in unprecedented peril. But the peril is not at all unprecedented. America is a fragile democracy, Eric Holder argues, whose citizens have only had unfettered access to the ballot since the 1960s. He takes readers through three dramatic stories of how the vote was won: first by white men, through violence and insurrection; then by white women, through protests and mass imprisonments; and finally by African Americans, in the face of lynchings and terrorism. Next, he dives into how the vote has been stripped away since Shelby—a case in which Holder was one of the parties. He ends with visionary chapters on how we can reverse this tide of voter suppression and become a true democracy where every voice is heard and every vote is counted. Full of surprising history, intensive analysis, and actionable plans for the future, this is a powerful primer on our most urgent political struggle from one of the country's leading advocates.

Since Americans have long taken price in universal suffrage and the secret ballot as foundations of democracy, it is surprising that one of its growth and reform. Mr. Williamson, focusing on the period from the Revolution to the Civil War, provides a state-by-state analysis of the growth of suffrage in its relation to partisan politics, the intellectual currents of the time, and such crises as war and rumors of war. Originally published in 1960. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A lively portrait of Horace Greeley, one of the nineteenth century's most fascinating public figures. The founder and editor of the New-York Tribune, Horace Greeley was the most significant—and polarizing—American journalist of the nineteenth century. To the farmers and tradesmen of the rural North, the Tribune was akin to holy writ. To just about everyone else—Democrats, southerners, and a good many Whig and Republican political allies—Greeley was a shape-shifting menace: an abolitionist fanatic; a disappointing conservative; a terrible liar; a power-hungry megalomaniac. In Horace Greeley, James M. Lundberg revisits this long-misunderstood figure, known mostly for his wild inconsistencies and irrepressible political ambitions. Charting Greeley's rise and eventual fall, Lundberg mines an extensive newspaper archive to place Greeley and his Tribune at the center of the struggle to realize an elusive American national consensus in a tumultuous age. Emerging from the jangling culture and politics of Jacksonian America, Lundberg writes, Greeley sought to define a mode of journalism that could uplift the citizenry and unite the nation. But in the decades before the Civil War, he found slavery and the crisis of American expansion standing in the way of his vision. Speaking for the anti-slavery North and emerging Republican Party, Greeley rose to the height of his powers in the 1850s—but as a voice of sectional conflict, not national unity. By turns a war hawk and peace-seeker, champion of emancipation and sentimental reconciliationist, Greeley never quite had the measure of the world wrought by the Civil War. His 1872 run for president on a platform of reunion and amnesty toward the South made him a laughingstock—albeit one who ultimately laid the groundwork for national reconciliation and the betrayal of the Civil War's emancipatory promise. Lively and engaging, Lundberg reanimates this towering figure for modern readers. Tracing Greeley's twists and turns, this book tells a larger story about print, politics, and the failures of American nationalism in the nineteenth century.

Tells the story of one state in particular whose role in the slave trade was outsized: Rhode Island Historians have written expansively about the slave economy and its vital role in early American economic life. Like their northern neighbors, Rhode Islanders bought and sold slaves and supplies that sustained plantations throughout the Americas; however, nowhere else was this business so important. During the colonial period trade with West Indian planters provided Rhode Islanders with molasses, the key ingredient for their number one export: rum. More than 60 percent of all the slave ships that left North America left from Rhode Island. During the antebellum period Rhode Islanders were the leading producers of “negro cloth,” a coarse wool-cotton material made especially for enslaved blacks in the American South. Clark-Pujara draws on the documents of the state, the business, organizational, and personal records of their enslavers, and the few first-hand accounts left by enslaved and free black Rhode Islanders to reconstruct their lived experiences. The business of slavery encouraged slaveholding, slowed emancipation and led to circumscribed black freedom. Enslaved and free black people pushed back against their bondage and the restrictions placed on their freedom. It is convenient, especially for northerners, to think of slavery as southern institution. The erasure or marginalization of the northern black experience and the centrality of the business of slavery to the northern economy allows for a dangerous fiction—that North has no history of racism to overcome. But we cannot afford such a delusion if we are to truly reconcile with our past.

A chronicle of five centuries of outstanding women who left their mark on the Ocean State. Rhode Island proudly claims a long list of remarkable women throughout history, from pioneering education reformers and suffragettes to trailblazing athletes and authors. In the mid-1800s, Sarah Helen Whitman became a prominent female poet and nearly married Edgar Allan Poe. In 1922, Isabelle Ahearn O’Neil became the first woman to hold office in the Rhode Island legislature. In the 1940s, Wilma Briggs became the first woman in the state to play on a local high school boys’ baseball team and went on to join the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Join authors Frank L. Grzyb and Russell J. DeSimone in this captivating and insightful account that spans five centuries of women who made history in the smallest state in the nation.

The Other Civil War offers historian and activist Howard Zinn's view of the social and civil background of the American Civil War—a view that is rarely provided in standard historical texts. Drawn from his New York Times bestseller A People's History of the United States, this set of essays recounts the history of American labor, free and not free, in the years leading up to and during the Civil War. He offers an alternative yet necessary account of that terrible nation-defining epoch.