This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories.

And here to tell another great American story is the Jack Miller Center's

editorial officer and historian Elliot Drago. This is the story of what happened shortly after the

ratification of the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution, prohibiting a citizen's

right to vote on account of race, color, or previous

condition of servitude.

Let's take a listen.

Americans today understand the saying, every vote matters.

Whether affected by hanging chads, butterfly ballots, or razor-thin vote counts, every vote

matters because it allows

one to exercise citizenship.

But what did every vote matters, voting, and citizenship mean in the early history of the

United States?

Unlike today's federal laws, which are designed to protect voters and voting rights, in past times,

individual states determined who could vote, and, in a sense, determined who was a citizen.

During the early republic, many states legislated voting rights and citizenship as the purview

of white property-owning men. By the 1830s, however, as the United States expanded its territory

and witnessed the arrival of millions of immigrants and the creation of a new two-party system,

most states enfranchised all-white men. Women and Black Americans were generally written

out of state voting rights legislation, leading to a suffrage movement that galvanized many

of the nation's

...