Rebecca de Schweinitz – författare

How did young people and popular conceptions of children and youth help to shape the black freedom struggle? How did young people contribute to and set the tone for the civil rights movement? In the first book to connect young people and ideas about children and youth with America's struggle for racial equality, Rebecca de Schweinitz explains how historical constructions of childhood and youth, and young people themselves, influenced the long history of the civil rights movement. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, If We Could Change the World presents the voices and experiences of participants who are rarely heard and explores familiar events from the black freedom struggle in new ways. In de Schweinitz's work, young people--elementary age, adolescent, and young adult--take their place as significant historical and political actors in the civil rights movement. |Rebecca de Schweinitz offers a new perspective on the civil rights movement by bringing children and youth to the fore. In the first book to connect young people and shifting ideas about children and youth with the black freedom struggle, de Schweinitz explains how popular ideas about youth and young people themselves--both black and white--influenced the long history of the movement.

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.Proposed, passed, and ratified in 1971, the 26th Amendment gave the right to vote to 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds and prohibited discrimination in voting “on account of age.” Recognizing young Americans as first-class citizens with a political voice, it was the last time the United States extended voting rights to a new group. From the early 1940s to the early 1970s, Americans debated the merits of a younger voting age and built a movement across age, party, and regional differences for the 26th Amendment. The struggle for youth suffrage intersected with key events and developments during these years, such as World War II, the Vietnam War, the African American movement for civil and voting rights, the baby boom and youth activism. With historical images and excerpts from government documents, pamphlets, organizational and personal collections, mainstream and campus newspapers, and magazines, this book presents a rich portrait of the struggle for youth enfranchisement.Achieving the 26th Amendment: A History with Primary Sources is an ideal resource for students and professors in twentieth-century United States history, civics and government, and social movements and activism.