Teaching about Presidential Elections

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A wealth of historical material exists on the web to support teaching about presidential elections.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) uncovers the mysteries of the Electoral College through text, documents, interactives, and links to K–12 curricular resources.

HarpWeek's Explore History offers political cartoons and prints from presidential elections between 1860 to 1912. Other materials include an up-close look at the controversies surrounding the Hayes vs. Tilden election of 1876 with explanatory essays and primary source materials drawn from Harper's Weekly.

HistoryCentral.com supplies statistics on all U.S. presidential elections. For each election year, the site presents graphs showing popular and electoral votes, maps of states won by each candidate, vote count, and voter turnout statistics.

America Votes at the Duke University Special Collections Library compiles presidential election memorabilia with brief background information on critical issues in selected campaigns. The materials illustrate that political spin and negative campaigning are not new inventions.

Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials, 1952-2008

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Still, from 2008 Democrat campaign commercial "Steel."
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This website presents more than 250 commercials that appeared on American television sets beginning in 1952 to sell presidential candidates to the public. Advertisements from each election, including the 2008 campaigns, are accessible by year as well as by common themes and strategies used over time, such as Commander in Chief, Fear, Children, and Real People. Advertisements are also browsable by issue, such as civil rights, corruption, war, taxes, and welfare.

This collection includes well-known ads such as the Daisy Ad and well-known public figures, such as Harry Belafonte's advertisement in support of Kennedy, as well as many others that may be less familiar in the 21st century. Essays focus on analyzing advertising strategies of major party candidates and a program guide presents a history of the usage of television commercials in campaigns.

1896: The Presidential Campaign

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freesilvercartoon
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The election of 1896 was one of the most contentious in U.S. history. When Republican William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryan on November 3rd, there were no fewer than six candidates on the ballot and the country was in the throes of an economic depression. This website provides close to 100 political cartoons surrounding the election campaigns.

The website acts like a virtual web of knowledge, with linked words in almost every sentence leading to helpful chunks of information on key themes, political parties and their leaders, print culture, and popular culture. Together, this information sheds light not only on the political situation in the 1890s, but also on the social, economic, and cultural contexts of the era. Special sections are devoted to, among many other topics, the bicycle craze, antisemitism, popular amusements, the Supreme Court, and women's suffrage. An extensive bibliography and a section devoted to teaching suggestions are also included.

Election Statistics

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Photo, Introductory graphic, Office of the Clerk
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Provides vote counts for nominees in all federal elections from 1920 to 2000. These counts were compiled from official sources in states and territories and published by the Clerk of the House of Representatives. The statistics for elections prior to 1992 are available as scanned images of published documents in PDF format; results from elections held in 1992 and after are offered in HTML in addition to PDF format. Valuable for those studying 20th-century U.S. political history.

American Leaders Speak: Recordings from World War I and the 1920 Election

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Photo, detail from "James W. Gerard. . . ," 1915, American Leaders Speak
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These 59 sound recordings document speeches by American leaders produced from 1918 to 1920 on the Nation's Forum record label. The speeches—by such prominent public figures as Warren G. Harding, James M. Cox, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel Gompers, Henry Cabot Lodge, John J. Pershing, Will H. Hays, A. Mitchell Palmer, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise—deal for the most part with issues and events related to World War I and the 1920 presidential election. Additional topics include social unrest, Americanism, bolshevism, taxes, and business practices.

Speeches range from one to five minutes in length. A special presentation, "From War to Normalcy," introduces the collection with representative recordings, including Harding's famous pronouncement that Americans need "not nostrums but normalcy." This site includes photographs of speakers and of the actual recording disk labels, as well as text versions of the speeches.

FDR's First 100 Days

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Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter and Columbia University Provost Alan Brinkley discuss the first 100 days of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, the subject of Alter's recent book, The Defining Moment: FDR’s First Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope. The book contends that the first 100 days were not only the beginning of the New Deal, but also "the climax to a piece of political theater," which had begun years earlier when Roosevelt overcame polio and public perceptions of him as an elitist lightweight.

Tilden or Blood

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On the eve of the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin describes the controversy surrounding the 1876 contest between Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden.