The other day in class we learned about what democracy is and how it rose in the early 1800s in the United states. We did this by looking at some documents and answering the two essential questions: How should we define democracy? and How democratic was the United States in the early 1800s? One document was a picture of people gathered to vote and it showed how different voting was then than it is now. There were also two graphs, one showed the property and tax paying requirements to be able to vote and how the number of states with property requirements went down while the number states in union went up over the years; the other graph showed the method of electing presidents and over the year the number of people able to vote instead of legislatures increased. We had two quotes that were both basically saying that democracy means that anyone has the right to vote but the people were not getting what they wanted and the state was not practicing democracy. Finally we had a document about the Dorr War, which was talking about Dorr and how he organized a convention to frame a new constitution and change the voting laws. He tried to capture the state arsenal and then was arrested. To appease popular resentment the governor pardoned Dorr, and Rhode Island adopted a new constitution.
This is the poster we made in class to show everything that we learned about the Rise of Democracy:
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