Uncovering the Twenty-Sixth Amendment.

This dissertation explores the history of the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which lowered the minimum voting age in federal and state elections from twenty-one to eighteen. Drawing on a close reading of Congressional documents about the minimum voting age, I offer a typology of the various arguments that were offered for and against a lower voting age between 1942, when the issue first surfaced on the national agenda, and 1971, when the amendment was ratified. I maintain that the rationales behind eighteen-year-old voting were more varied and complicated than has been generally acknowledged. Commentators have tended to emphasize arguments about synchronizing the minimum draft and voting ages; while this lines of reasoning was undoubtedly a crucial part of the voting age debates, the rhetorical power of the soldier-voter link was limited in some important ways. Beyond the military service angle, advocates of eighteen-year-old voting also asserted, especially during the 1950s and early 1960s, that the voting age should be reduced because contemporary young people were far better educated and politically aware than previous generations had been. Later, during the late 1960s, the idea that eighteen-year-old voting would channel young people’s rising discontent and undermine campus demonstrations gained considerable momentum in the halls of Congress. Finally, advocates made both philosophical and legal arguments that the situation of eighteen- to twenty-year-olds was analogous to that of women and African-Americans in earlier eras. This work seeks not only to deepen our understanding of the history of the Twenty-sixth Amendment, but also to illuminate the nature of political debate. Eighteen-year-old voting might have been a narrow goal, but the issue nevertheless prompted a lengthy process of justification in which both sides struggled to respond to immediate political events and trends while also wrestling with the inevitable theoretical questions that surfaced in the course of debate. The voting age debates offer a window into this process of political deliberation, which lies at the heart of politics itself.Ph.D.Political ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/58431/1/jdiamond_1.pd

Precise Black Hole Masses From Megamaser Disks: Black Hole-Bulge Relations at Low Mass

The black hole (BH)-bulge correlations have greatly influenced the last decade of effort to understand galaxy evolution. Current knowledge of these correlations is limited predominantly to high BH masses (M_BH> 10^8 M_sun) that can be measured using direct stellar, gas, and maser kinematics. These objects, however, do not represent the demographics of more typical L< L* galaxies. This study transcends prior limitations to probe BHs that are an order of magnitude lower in mass, using BH mass measurements derived from the dynamics of H_2O megamasers in circumnuclear disks. The masers trace the Keplerian rotation of circumnuclear molecular disks starting at radii of a few tenths of a pc from the central BH. Modeling of the rotation curves, presented by Kuo et al. (2010), yields BH masses with exquisite precision. We present stellar velocity dispersion measurements for a sample of nine megamaser disk galaxies based on long-slit observations using the B&C spectrograph on the Dupont telescope and the DIS spectrograph on the 3.5m telescope at Apache Point. We also perform bulge-to-disk decomposition of a subset of five of these galaxies with SDSS imaging. The maser galaxies as a group fall below the M_BH-sigma* relation defined by elliptical galaxies. We show, now with very precise BH mass measurements, that the low-scatter power-law relation between M_BH and sigma* seen in elliptical galaxies is not universal. The elliptical galaxy M_BH-sigma* relation cannot be used to derive the BH mass function at low mass or the zeropoint for active BH masses. The processes (perhaps BH self-regulation or minor merging) that operate at higher mass have not effectively established an M_BH-sigma* relation in this low-mass regime.Comment: 21 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa