“The negro vote was not at all committed to Kennedy, but it went there because Mr. Nixon did not do anything to win it.  I understand his view but felt he was making a mistake …”

The famous retired baseball star – at that time an NAACP fundraiser and vice president of Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee – campaigned hard for Richard Nixon in 1960. Here, in the aftermath of defeat, he offers suggestions as to how the party of Lincoln might attract more future African-American voters in his (and Nixon’s) native California.

A landmark issue of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin celebrating the imminent achievement of statehood for Hawaii after sixty years of territorial status. The huge banner headline reads “STATEHOOD!”, with related pictures and reports. The caption, “First Class Citizens Now,” is written above several images of common Hawaiians, neatly encapsulating the arguments against continued territorial status, which left Hawaiians significantly disenfranchised. Hawaii would officially become the 50^th state in the Union in August 1959.

Massachusetts Congressman John F. Kennedy makes a powerful statement about the place of religion, specifically his own Catholicism, in politics. Here he criticizes a priest in western Massachusetts for using religion as a political wedge in a local school election, reminding Catholics, who tended to vote Democratic, of the difficulties faced by Al Smith, a Catholic, in his presidential campaign in 1928. “I think that the priest up there should be reprimanded by the Bishop for attempting to make a religious war out of a school election. And then they complain about Al Smith’s treatment.”

“This is no time for fear, for reaction or for timidity … ours must be a party of liberal thought, of planned action, of enlightened international outlook, and of the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens…”

A “Roosevelt Bull Moose” veteran proposes himself for President. From “Baird for Republican President.”

Key political circular from the first-year Republican President written to influence off-year elections in New Mexico and other places. Harding justifies, and praises, the rapid postwar dismantling of America’s military by Congress, while backhandedly criticizing the inattention of his predecessor – Woodrow Wilson – to the peacetime transition. “Vast expenditure without proper consideration for results, is the inevitable fruit of war.”

“I am mighty pleased that you liked the article, and what I said about Wilson’s proposal…”

Roosevelt collaborates with a fellow critic to attack Woodrow Wilson’s failed proposal to mediate peace between Germany and the Allies in December 1916. He reveals an uncharacteristic frustration with the American people here, two months after Wilson’s close reelection victory over Charles Evans Hughes, in which Wilson campaigned on the promise to “keep us out of war.”

“It is extraordinary how impossible it seems to be to make men learn the lessons of history. Apparently you … have absolutely forgotten how things were done in the early days of the Republican party. There was no attempt made to insist upon uniformity of action in every state…. Of course, I am no more to be compared to Lincoln than the present crisis is to be compared to the Civil War; but the principles are the same in the two cases…”

The 1876 presidential election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden came down to a dispute over Florida’s electoral votes. This archive of 12 pamphlets, broadsides, and documents includes official signed copies of key Florida court and executive decisions. From the papers of Edward Louden Parris, an attorney for Tilden, who ended up losing the election by way of the “Compromise of 1877.”

The 1876 presidential election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden came down to a dispute over Florida’s electoral votes. This archive of 21 pamphlets, broadsides, and documents includes official signed copies of key Florida court and executive decisions. From the papers of Edward Louden Parris, an attorney for Tilden, who ended up losing the election by way of the “Compromise of 1877.”

The 1876 presidential election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden came down to a dispute over Florida’s electoral votes. This archive of 5 pamphlets and documents includes official signed copies of key Florida court and executive decisions. From the papers of Edward Louden Parris, an attorney for Tilden, who ended up losing the election by way of the “Compromise of 1877.”