A shelf
The Franchise
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
An age was busy declaring the rights of man. Wollstonecraft asked the obvious next question and was decades ahead of anyone willing to hear it. Reason...
The Declaration of Sentiments
At Seneca Falls, Stanton took the cadence of the Declaration of Independence and turned it to a new purpose: we hold these truths to be self-evident,...
The Speeches of Susan B. Anthony
Is it a crime for a citizen of the United States to vote? Anthony asked the question after she was arrested for doing exactly that, and...
Considerations on Representative Government
How representative democracy is supposed to work, and the ways it fails, set out by a man who thought hard about both. Mill defends self-government as...
Give Us the Ballot
The modern history of the fight over the vote, from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through the long effort to expand it and the longer...
One Person, No Vote
Voter suppression documented as deliberate policy rather than accident. Anderson traces the mechanisms, the purges, the closures, the requirements, that subtract eligible voters from the rolls,...
The Years of Lyndon Johnson
The greatest study of American political power ever written, four volumes deep and not yet finished. Caro follows Johnson from the Texas hill country to the...
The New Jim Crow
The book that recast the national argument over criminal justice by naming what it does. Alexander argues that mass incarceration functions as a system of racial...
On Democracy
The clearest short account of what democracy actually requires, stripped of slogan, by the theorist who spent a career on the question. Dahl sets out the...
Tyranny of the Minority
The institutional sequel to How Democracies Die. Levitsky and Ziblatt turn from the behavior of leaders to the rules of the game, and argue that features...