Why Can't Women Vote?

So far this week in Honors History 10, we have been learning about the Rise of Democracy in the United States during the 1800s. Our essential question is: How should we define democracy? How democratic was the United States in the early 1800s? We defined democracy as a system of government in which the whole population participates. In order to decide how democratic the U.S. was in the early 1800s, we analyzed sources. One source was a painting by George Caleb Bingham. It depicted a scene which showed an election during the 1800s which people didn't seem to be taking very seriously. There were also two charts which held data about the early U.S. One had information about the property requirement for voting, and the other had information about how states elected officials throughout the 1800s. In addition to these sources, we looked at an annotation and letter from Thomas W. Dorr who fought to give the poor the same voting rights as the rich in Rhode Island during the 1800s. Lastly, we looked at two quotes, one by Benjamin Franklin, and the other by Norton Townshend. Both believed that all men should be given the chance to vote. Overall, the early United States wasn't very democratic, but it improved as time went on. We created a project to prove why the United States wasn't democratic. We used a website called Glogster to create our digital poster.