The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (Paperback, Revised)

The Right to Vote is the first comprehensive history of suffrage in the United States in more than eighty years. In this revised edition, Alexander Keyssar chronicles the surprisingly complex and slow evolution of the right to vote from the American Revolution to the present. Keyssar’s account highlights the gap between the hallowed image of the United States as the democratic nation and the reality that it took nearly two centuries for universal suffrage to be achieved. The Right to Vote is a sweeping reinterpretation on the meaning of democracy in contemporary American life.