Jennifer Frost is Associate Professor of History at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and author of “An Interracial Movement of the Poor”: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s, Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservativism, and Producer of Controversy: Stanley Kramer, Hollywood Liberalism, and the Cold War.
Jennifer Frost’s thorough, valuable Let Us Vote! celebrates the amendment’s semicentennial by chronicling the long struggle to pass it—alongside considerations of the role of the youth vote in contemporary politics. * Foreword Reviews * Skillfully guides the reader to different places and moments where efforts to lower the voting age gained traction. Frost successfully integrates a broad array of voices and histories, especially through her attention to the efforts of organizations like the NAACP to attack disfranchisement more broadly. This is an original history and an engaging read that will appeal to an audience beyond historians of the United States. -- Kathryn Schumaker, author of Troublemakers: Students’ Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s Jennifer Frost has produced a major contribution to our understanding of the 1960s, the history of voting rights, and constitutional change. Her recognition that the movement for the 18-year-old vote must be seen from the top down and bottom up makes for a comprehensive and illuminating history of a strangely neglected topic. In pushing back against the long pattern of neglect of this history, this book is really important. -- Robert Cohen, author of Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s Frost explores the struggle for youth voting rights in the United States. Her comprehensive study of youth suffrage’s major players ... can be read as a case study of the laborious U.S. legislative process, set against the changing political landscape of the 1960s. Readers interested in U.S. politics will appreciate Frost’s research. * Library Journal * Frost is unsparing with historical detail…She argues persuasively that the campaign for youth enfranchisement was made possible by and entangled with the bottom-up and top-down campaigns for ensuring African Americans’ civil and voting rights. * Choice *