Voting Rights

While books and government documents are important agents of information related to the Voting Rights Act, articles provide convenient access to current materials. This is especially relevant to our subject matter as voting rights in the United States are under constant scrutiny and are frequently revised. Articles can be a great way to supplement your research and find thorough analysis of issues concerning the evolving nature of the Voting Rights Act. 

President Lyndon B. Johnson shaking hands with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. just after signing the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965.

Source: Wikimedia Commons Images

To find articles on the Voting Rights Act, perform a search in one of the databases listed below. A comprehensive list of available journals, periodicals, and databases can be accessed by going to Indexes and Databases offered by Rutgers Libraries.

America: History & Life is a comprehensive database for scholarly articles related to North American history. It covers all historical periods and indexes articles appearing in over 1,700 journals.

Business Source Premier includes articles on economics and public administration from a wide range of professional publications, academic journals, and trade magazines. 

Congress.gov is the official website for U.S. federal legislative information. It includes bills and resolutions, committee reports from the House and Senate, the Congressional Record, Presidential nominations, treaties, and other related information including summary and status of legislation.

ERIC is the world's largest education database, and is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education. It is publicly accessible at http://eric.ed.gov/.

Fastcase is a legal research database containing case law, statutes, regulations, court rules, constitutions, law review articles, and other types of legal content. Its focus is state and federal primary source materials.

Govinfo provides free access to official publications from all three branches of the U.S. Federal Government. It includes the official versions of legislative, executive, and judicial content published in digital form or gathered from federal government websites. It is updated daily with the most recent Federal Government publications. It also includes historical documents scanned and digitized from previously printed publications.

HeinOnline is a legal research collection of laws and regulations, case law, treaties and agreements, scholarly legal and criminal justice journals, government publications, classical legal volumes, and related materials. The collection includes both current legal information and historic law documents, and it is regularly updated with the latest legal publications. 

JSTOR provides electronic access to more than 2,000 scholarly journals that cover such subjects as African American Studies, Law, Political Science, and Sociology. 

PAIS International provides a collection of articles on the topics of government, human rights, social conditions, and the Civil rights movement. 

ProQuest Political Science covers the subject areas of comparative politics, the political economy, and international relations and affords full-text access to more than 500 political science journals.

ProQuest Social Sciences Premium Collection indexes over 10,000 titles including journals, books, and government publications. It contains a thorough selection of materials related to the social sciences, including full-text access to over 1,800 journals. 

African American Newspapers in the South this collection consists of newspapers originally published by and for African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the Southern United States. It is a great resource for historical issues facing Black voters that provide a framework for the lead up to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The full text of each newspaper is searchable and viewable, including all articles, advertisements, works of fiction, poetry, and all other writings published within the newspaper. Each newspaper has been fully digitized, and one can view full-page images of each newspaper page.