I’m going to be giving a keynote address at the fall conference of the Minnesota State College Student Association this weekend, and one of the things I’ll be talking about is the effect of voting rights on the history of American student activism.

Until the passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment in 1971, the voting age in the US was 21, which means that throughout the huge waves of campus activism of the 1930s and 1960s, the vast majority of American college students were denied the vote on the basis of their age.

The effect of this disfranchisement on the course of student activism has received little attention in most histories of American student protest, and the effect of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment on the course of later activism still less. It’s a topic I devote a bit of attention to in my dissertation, and one I’m looking forward to discussing with the folks in Minneapolis.