Americans' Right to Vote

Challenging History

 

Welcome to Challenging History—a distance learning program to help you teach challenging topics in your history, social studies, government, and civics classrooms, and challenge your students to think critically about the past.

The format is designed to allow you to pick and choose from a variety of videos, activities, and primary sources developed by national park service staff.

Our Fall 2020 theme is Voting Rights—the rights and responsibilities, how voting rights have expanded over time, the challenges various groups have faced in gaining (and keeping) suffrage, and how the process of voting has changed since our nation’s founding.

The Old Courthouse is famous, in part, for an important case related to women’s right to vote. In 1872, Virginia Minor came to this building to register to vote in the 1872 presidential election. When Missouri’s 6^th District Registrar refused to register her on the grounds that she was female, she and her husband filed a civil suit against him that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Finally, if you want to schedule a virtual visit with a park ranger, please call our reservation line at 1-877-982-1410.

We look forward to a time when educators and students can return to in-person field trips to the parks. In the meantime, we hope these virtual lessons are beneficial. Please share your feedback on these programs and let us know what other challenging topics related to our parks’ themes you’d like us to address in the future.

Happy Learning!

 

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  Should 16-Year-Olds Be Allowed to Vote?

  Rangers Matt and Frank take opposite sides as they answer the question: should 16-year-olds be able to vote in the U.S.

  Duration:

  4 minutes, 24 seconds

 

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  Voting in St. Louis in the Mid-1800's

  Ranger Doug of Gateway Arch National Park leads a group of dedicated volunteers in a re-enactment of a St. Louis polling place in the mid-1800's.

  Duration:

  8 minutes, 48 seconds

 

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  Virginia Minor, Forgotten Suffragist

  Virginia Minor was an American woman who lived in St. Louis from the mid-1840s and strongly supported the Union cause when the U.S. Civil War was fought. She became a member of the Ladies Union Aid Society (LUAS) which provided help for sick or wounded soldiers, jobs for their wives or widows, and aid for refugees who fled to St. Louis to escape the war. When the war ended, these women felt that they deserved being granted the right to vote. Unfortunately, it became a struggle that lasted into the twentieth century and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment before that dream came true.

  Duration:

  8 minutes, 15 seconds

 

Video of storyteller Queen Nur reciting “Ours to Carry”, a poem about the Her Flag project, a nationwide art and travel project to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. This video was commissioned by the St. Louis Storytelling Festival, a University of Missouri Extension Program, and the Gateway Arch National Park. It premiered during the St. Louis Storytelling Festival’s MINI DECEMBER FEST (Dec. 10-13, 2020).

 

Teaching Engaged Citizenship Activities