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.

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.

National Election Studies

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Image for National Election Studies
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This wealth of data presents National Election Studies surveys of the American electorate conducted in presidential and congressional election years from 1948 to 2006. Large files of raw data can be downloaded. In addition, The ANES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior is available and is readily accessible.

Composed of more than 100 tables and graphs, the guide traces nine key variables in the makeup and opinions of the electorate. These include: social and religious characteristics; partisanship and evaluation of political parties; ideological self-identification; public opinion on public policy issues; support for the political system; political involvement and partisanship; evaluation of presidential candidates; evaluation of congressional candidates; and vote choice. This website also provides pilot studies on recent surveying issues, such as measuring exposure to television advertisements, and a 5,000-item bibliography.

Elections in the 20th Century

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Voter participation in presidential elections soared from just over 20 percent in 1824 to over 80 percent in 1840. It stayed near 80 percent until the early 1900s and then plummeted to between 50 and 60 percent for most of the 20th century. Compared to its peer nations, American voter turnout sits at the bottom of the list, with other nations consistently seeing voter participation at or over 80 percent. Professor Paul Martin of the University of Virginia explains why citizen involvement in electoral campaigns has changed so much in the United States over the past, why U.S. voter participation is so low compared to peer nations, and offers parting thoughts on why low citizen participation matters and why the 2008 presidential election might see an increase in voter involvement.