Getting the Vote

FAIN: TD-50416-11

Global Village Media (New York, NY 10025-3322)
Dominique Lasseur (Project Director: January 2011 to April 2014)

Development of a two-hour television documentary that will explore voting rights in America and how they grew from the privilege of a minority to become near universal by the end of the 20th century.

Global Village Media is requesting $80,000 for scripting of a two-hour documentary for PBS called GETTING THE VOTE. This documentary will explore voting rights in America and how they grew from the privilege of a minority to become near universal by the end of the 20th century. Why was the vote largely restricted to the propertied class before the American Revolution? How did those eligible for the franchise nearly triple in the first decades of the 19th century? Why and how was the vote restricted during the Jim Crow era? How did the great waves of immigration affect citizenship and therefore voting rights from 1850 to 1925? These are a few of the questions this documentary will explore using the new scholarship on the suffrage by such scholars as Joyce Appleby, Alex Keyssar, Alan Kraut, Gary Nash, Harry Watson and J. Morgan Kousser.