The Blueprint of America's Democracy

For this unit, we have been learning about the rise of democracy. The essential questions for the unit were: how should we define democracy? How democratic was the United States in the early 1800s? In separate groups, we were assigned to make a project about the rise of democracy that answered the essential questions using primary and secondary sources. We could decide whether we wanted to make a poster, Common Craft video, or a skit video, and my group decided to make a poster, as shown below. We defined democracy as a government controlled by the whole population through elected representatives. We answered the second question by saying that although democracy was the prominent government system that was being used in the 1800s, main aspects of it hadn’t been fully developed and corrected yet. For example, women and African Americans still weren’t allowed to vote, and the process of voting was not yet perfected; when people voted, the system relied on people’s honesty to tell the truth about whether or not they had voted anywhere else before. Also, as seen in the Dorr War, some states still hadn’t changed their laws about only letting the richest landowners vote, and people weren’t happy about it. However, these events were leading to a developed system of democracy for the United States like we have today. These events helped bring about the ideas of democracy and, they were a big step in the right direction for America, which is why we titled our poster “The Blueprint of America’s Democracy”.