Achieving the 26th Amendment: A History with Primary Sources [Paperback]

This book is a collection of primary source documents and analysis that illustrates the forgotten history of the fight to lower the voting age to eighteen in the twentieth-century United States.

Rebecca de Schweinitz is an Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University, USA. The author of If We Could Change the World: Young People and Americas Long Struggle for Racial Equality (2009), her research focuses on young people, and ideas about them, in American politics and culture.

Jennifer Frost is a historian of 20th century United States society, politics, and culture at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is the author, among other books, of Let Us Vote!: Youth Voting Rights and the 26th Amendment (2021).

Achieving the 26^th Amendment offers a vital resource for the study of youth, democracy, and social change.  Bringing together a thought-provoking collection of primary documents with insightful introductory essays, this volume enables readers to think for themselves about the coalition building, political arguments, and well-organized opposition that shaped the last major expansion of the US electorate: the enfranchisement of eighteen- to twenty-one-year-old citizens in 1971.  Perfect for use in college or high school classrooms, this book opens a window for students to consider the past and future of the youth vote.

Corinne Field, University of Virginia

The story of lowering the voting age to 18 usually goes untold, but Achieving the 26^th Amendment gives voice to this human, political, and cultural struggle for young peoples participation. Drawing from diverse sources, unexpected alliances, anló>