As the oldest political party in the United States, the Democratic Party has been one of the nation’s major political parties for over 150 years, and diverse men and ideas have fallen under its tent since the 19th century. Today the Democrats are generally viewed as proponents of a strong, centralized federal government, and yet the forerunner of the modern party was none other than Thomas Jefferson, the man most associated with states’ rights and limited government.

With its Jeffersonian background, the party championed farmers, and Andrew Jackson’s populist era made the Party home to urban workers and new immigrants. Eventually sectional splits weakened the Democrats, and when the fledgling Republican Party took power under Abraham Lincoln in 1861, it ushered in an era in which the Democrats only elected two presidents over a 70-year span. However, Reconstruction ensured that the Democrats maintained an almost unbreakable level of support in the old Confederate states, and they used the Solid South to wield power in Congress for decades.

One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, the Democratic Party’s current voting bloc (strongly reliant on minorities) and their base of power (the Northeast and Midwest) are completely different than the 19th century’s incarnation. Its platform has also been completely revamped. Both of those reversals are byproducts of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, which continue to be the pillars on which the Democrats’ current platform rests.

As the 20th century progressed, so did the Democratic Party, and by 1932, it had switched places with the Republicans and had become the party of liberal politics, beginning with the four term tenure of Franklin Roosevelt and continuing through the Great Society promulgated by Lyndon Johnson. And yet, it left many of the people who should have supported it dissatisfied, as could be seen in the rioting and unrest that surrounded both the 1968 and 1972 conventions. The party’s platform supported women’s rights in the 1970s and remains the only one to consistently support abortion rights. In 2008, it became the first party to put an African-American in the White House when Barack Obama was elected, and it is poised to become the first major party to nominate a woman, Hillary Clinton, as its presidential candidate, even as more progressive groups supported other candidates. It is certain that, at least in the near future, the Democratic Party will continue to be interesting to watch, if for no other reason than to see what direction it goes in next.

The Democratic National Convention: The History of the Democratic Party’s Presidential Candidates and Platforms examines one of the most important wars fought in the colonial era. You will learn about the Democratic conventions like never before.