The Rise of Democracy in America

In our small groups, we were able to analyze the documents that we were given, and use that information to show the rise of democracy as America developed.  It was very interesting because no matter in what way the information was relayed in the sources (graphic, image, quote, etc.), they all portrayed clearly in what way democracy was built upon or supported in the early U.S.

In our poster, we started off with the essential question, "How do we define democracy?  How democratic was the U.S. in the early 1800's?" to outline what the whole poster was going to be about, and what information was going to be included to prove that point and answer that question.  We also included the definition of democracy, because we wanted to make sure that the viewer of the poster would understand fully what we were referring to.  We then used many different sources in order to show what democracy looked like in the 1800's in the U.S.  We used a painting, "The County Election, 1852", to show that democracy in the U.S. was not a completely smooth system, and was slightly corrupted as they first began to want to use it in government.  In the painting, there are voters that are drunk, which would corrupt the votes because their votes that they cast may not have been what they truly wanted.  There's also an issue highlighted in the painting where the voter's vote may have not been cast the way they wanted it to be.  We also included two graphs/graphics which show the progression of men's voting gradually increasing over time.  Finally, we included a document about Dorr's War, in which an attorney named Thomas Dorr tried to change the unfair system in Rhode Island where not everyone had the chance to vote.  We felt it was important to include this detail to show that the idea of democracy was not just planted overnight in the U.S., but took time to really become the key part and ideal of our government.