Lifestyle
A new mail-voting exhibition is a reminder that its use dates back to the Civil War
The “Voting by Mail” exhibition at the National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C., tracks the long history of mail-in voting in the United States with a selection of historical ballot envelopes, election mailers and photographs.
Zayrha Rodriguez/NPR
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Zayrha Rodriguez/NPR
Four years ago, millions more voters in the U.S. became familiar with voting by mail.
But a new exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum opens Saturday as a reminder that earlier generations of voters used the postal service to cast absentee ballots decades before the COVID-19 pandemic upended the 2020 election.
“It was sort of presented during the pandemic as a new concept for a lot of folks who may have never encountered it before,” says Carrie Villar, director of curatorial affairs at the Washington, D.C., museum that is open free to the public. “We thought with this presidential election coming up in 2024, there could be no better place than the National Postal Museum to have an exhibit where we talk about voting by mail and how it’s not a new thing. It’s been around for over 160 years in various forms.”
On a wall nestled within the museum’s stamp salon, Villar’s team of curators has assembled a small selection of mail-in ballot envelopes, election mailers, photographs and other artifacts to lay out a timeline that begins with the Civil War election of 1864, which is considered the start of large-scale use of voting by mail in the United States.
“That was the big moment that voting by mail stepped up to a national stage,” Villar says, noting that there were earlier examples at the state and local levels dating back to the 18th century.
The exhibition includes election mailers sent in Georgia’s Fulton County and California’s Orange County ahead of 2021 elections to encourage voters to cast their ballots by mail.
Zayrha Rodriguez/NPR
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Zayrha Rodriguez/NPR
Villar hopes the exhibition can be expanded one day with more artifacts to fill in gaps in its presentation of mail-in voting’s extensive history.
Visitors, for example, won’t find any items on display that represent the spread of baseless claims of widespread absentee ballot fraud during the 2020 election, or how those allegations have fueled distrust of the voting method among conservatives, although the exhibition does note that the pandemic “brought attention to concerns over election integrity that have existed since the beginning of voting at polling places and by mail.”
The museum is counting on the public, in part, to help more fully tell the story going forward with donations of historical objects and archival material.
“We’re actively collecting through this election and beyond because we want to continue the story,” Villar says. “There’s so much being printed and put out there that it gets thrown away. We would love to see some of that saved.”
Even with its limited look at voting by mail through the years, Villar adds she hopes visitors who are eligible to cast a ballot will leave “inspired to vote however they choose to do it and to know more that voting by mail has a long history of successfully being carried out.”
Here are some highlights from the exhibition “Voting by Mail: Civil War to Covid-19”:
An envelope used during the 1864 election to mail a sheet tallying the votes of Civil War soldiers from Ohio’s Highland County at a Union Army field hospital in Georgia
An envelope used during the 1864 election to mail a sheet tallying the votes of Civil War soldiers from Ohio’s Highland County at a Union Army field hospital in Georgia
Zayrha Rodriguez/NPR
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Zayrha Rodriguez/NPR
“Different states had different approaches, but they wanted to give a way for soldiers who are away, out of state at war to have a chance to vote in the election,” Villar says. “Voting by mail and absentee voting for our military has really been a key part that has moved voting by mail forward in the last 160 years. And when you think about it, these men and women are out there risking their lives for our country and disenfranchising them by not being able to vote in an election doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
A photo of Japanese American citizens waiting for their absentee ballots to be notarized in 1942 while they were wrongfully incarcerated at the Tule Lake prison camp in California during World War II
A photo of Japanese American citizens waiting for their absentee ballots to be notarized in 1942 while they were wrongfully incarcerated at the Tule Lake prison camp in California during World War II
Francis Leroy Stewart/National Archives
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Francis Leroy Stewart/National Archives
“It’s a really powerful story and one that really makes you think about what it means to be American and that right to vote that we may sometimes take for granted,” Villar explains. “The people who were incarcerated in these camps had to battle through a lack of knowing what their state requirements were for allowing them to vote. They were limited in the information they were getting from back home about who to vote for. These good citizens who were in these camps by their own government still took the time and effort to exercise that duty to vote.”
An unused federal war ballot issued in 1944 for absentee voters serving in World War II
An unused federal war ballot issued in 1944 for absentee voters serving in World War II
Zayrha Rodriguez/NPR
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Zayrha Rodriguez/NPR
“It’s a big undertaking to get all of this material out all around the world during war. And so they ended up printing these official ballots that didn’t have the candidate names in them yet,” Villar explains. “The voter would actually handwrite in who they were voting for. And then someone on the other end would have to read it. They had to sort of decipher out and make sure that the right candidate was getting a vote. It’s unusual to see a ballot without any names on it.”
An informational card the U.S. Postal Service sent in 2020 to help voters prepare to vote during the COVID-19 pandemic
An informational card the U.S. Postal Service sent in 2020 to help voters prepare to vote during the COVID-19 pandemic
Zayrha Rodriguez/NPR
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Zayrha Rodriguez/NPR
“The messaging around voting by mail is so challenging,” Villar says. “The Postal Service sent this out, trying to educate postal customers, and soon realized that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all direction for voting by mail and that every voter needs to check with their own state and local rules and regulations. There was some backlash to this postcard, and they ended up having to correct the information.”
For those who can’t stop by in person before the exhibition is set to close on Feb. 23, 2025, a virtual exhibition is available on the museum’s website in English and Spanish.
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
Visuals edited by Grace Widyatmadja
Karen McNenny is a certified divorce coach, certified co-parenting specialist and author of the book The Good Divorce: How to End Your Marriage Without Ending Your Family.
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Wiley/Jossey-Bass/NPR, Nicole Wickens/NPR
When Karen McNenny was facing divorce about 15 years ago, she was afraid of what it would mean for her future: despair, debt and a lifetime of resentment, she says.
At the same time, she was thinking of her two children, she says. She didn’t want their father to become her enemy.
So she and her former husband chose to approach divorce differently as a couple. “We’re going to renovate and transform this family. We’re not going to destroy it,” she says. “The marriage is ending, not your relationship.”
For McNenny, a mediator, certified divorce coach and certified co-parenting specialist, divorce is a tool, not a weapon. She expands on this concept in The Good Divorce: How to End Your Marriage Without Ending Your Family, which came out this spring. The book offers guidance on how to maintain compassionate and respectful ties with a former spouse while also healing and moving forward.
According to Pew Research Center, a third of Americans who have ever been married had a first marriage that ended in divorce. For that reason, McNenny hopes her book becomes a must-read for couples before they get married. “The best time to talk about divorce is before you need to talk about it,” she says.
She shared insights from her book in a conversation with Life Kit. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The book is called The Good Divorce. What does that mean?
[For those with kids,] the good divorce is about protecting the future of the family while we dissolve the marriage.
After the paperwork is done and the assets have been divided, can you and your co-parent sit on the same side of the bleachers during the basketball game? Can you still see yourselves as a partnership, with the ability to have thoughtful conversations about your kids?
For those who don’t have kids, [the good divorce is] about protecting your health — your mental health and your physical health. If we are doubling down with resentment and bitterness, all of that gets stored in the body and shows up in different ways. You deserve a pathway that’s less destructive.
Let me also be clear: There are times when an amicable, collaborative process is not possible and maybe even inappropriate. For instance, where there’s active addiction, abuse, domestic violence, coercion or unmanaged mental health issues.
How do you get to a place where you don’t feel triggered by your partner, so you both can work together toward a good divorce?
That, my dear, does not happen overnight. That is more like a dimmer switch going up and down and up and down, and the gift of time helps to get there.
It’s a complex emotional journey because we do feel relief in walking away from our spouse and the challenges. But with it, there is extraordinary grief that comes with divorce that I think is often underestimated and undersupported.
If my spouse had died, people would’ve been checking in with me regularly. I never would’ve spent a holiday alone in that first year. There probably would’ve been a meal train.
But he didn’t die. My marriage died, my family structure died, my identity as a wife and a partner died. There’s so much grief through these transformations that come with divorce that we don’t see.
So supporting friends in all those ways that you would as if there had been an actual death is doing a lot for your friends who are going through divorce.
How do you let your friends, family and community know that you’re getting a divorce and that you might need support?
Put a communication strategy together. It’s not just for how we tell the kids. It’s also a communication strategy for the grandparents; to the circle of support around the kids, like teachers, coaches and mentors; and our shared community.
It’s extraordinary when a couple can write that message together, not unlike a marriage announcement. [You might say:] We’ve made a really difficult decision. We wanted to let you know. We’re not going to court. Don’t expect a battle. Please don’t ask us why. Just ask us how we’re doing. We’re on the same side as the kids. You don’t need to pick sides.
In doing so, we’ve given everyone the same information at once. It’s a unified message that comes from the parent team, and it allows your community to know how best to support you. And it takes out all the gossip and wonder about what is going on.
If you have kids and they’re splitting time between two homes, what are some ways to make that change easier for them?
Our kids were 5 and 7 when we divorced, so it was three or four nights at a time in each home. By the time they got to be about 8 or 10, it made sense to go a week in each residence. After COVID, the kids came to us and said, “Can we just have two weeks in a house? We wanna be able to settle in more.” [So we said] OK.
A lot of parents are so rigid about the schedule. There’s no flexibility. That doesn’t serve anyone. So I recommend liberating yourselves from the calendar and letting it grow and bend with your kids appropriately.
Knowing what you know now about divorce, what questions do you think couples should ask themselves before they get married?
So often when people arrive at the threshold of divorce, couples are like, “We don’t know what we’re doing.” Get educated about the business part of it.
There is no harm in having a prenuptial agreement. Even if you decided not to file it, have the conversation about the implications. What does it mean if we buy this house together? What does it mean if one of us works more and one of us works less?
We also underestimate what it means to be roommates. What are your value systems around cooking and cleaning? How much alone time do you need? It’s easy to fall in love and not know if you’re compatible.
Do you think you’d get married again?
I absolutely hope that I get to say yes to a lifelong commitment with a partner, as I believe we often are given the opportunity to become a better version of ourself through partnership.
The story was edited by Meghan Keane. The visual editor is CJ Riculan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.
Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and sign up for our newsletter. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit.
In Alice and Steve, Jemaine Clement and Nicola Walker play long-time friends who turn on each other after he gets involved with her 26-year-old daughter.
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Lara Cornell/Disney+
I grew up watching episodic shows on network TV, nearly all of them formulaic but some indelibly great. Then, like everyone else, I moved into the days of what my colleague David Bianculli dubbed Platinum TV, where series like The Sopranos and The Wire and Fleabag aspired to something higher. What both these eras had in common was that their shows were carefully crafted — they had an internal logic, and a tone, that held them together.
In recent years, though, there’s been a proliferation of shows that, possibly obeying some algorithm, care less for coherence than sensation. They lurch among tones, from cuteness to sentimentality to meanness, stirring in random plot twists along the way. Bouncing all over the emotional map, these shows depend on compelling actors and a few memorable scenes to make us overlook their loose construction.
A great example is Alice and Steve, an entertaining but sometimes exasperating six-part British comedy on Hulu about two 50-something best friends who turn on each other after he gets involved with her 26-year-old daughter.
While the premise is juicy, it’s also a tad yucky, and I mainly tuned in because its title characters are played by performers Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords and Nicola Walker, whom I’ve raved up on this show more than once.
The series starts poorly with Steve and Alice going on a cutesy bender after a friend’s funeral. Now, I always hate drunk scenes, which are an invitation to overact. As Clement and Walker bray their lines, we learn that Steve’s a divorced celebrity hair stylist who can’t find a girlfriend while Alice is a clothes designer with a doting younger husband, nicely played by Joel Fry, a sweetie-pie of a teenage son — that’s Tyrese Eaton-Dyce — and, of course, that 26-year-old daughter, Izzy, who has inherited her mother’s willfulness. Played by Yali Topol Margalith, Izzy kickstarts the plot by flirting with Steve. Predictably, he succumbs.
Almost immediately, they think they’re in love. While the weak-willed Steve wants to hide their romance — he knows it’s inappropriate — Izzy just blurts out the facts to her mom. Alice flips. And from hereon out in this series where the women are as alpha as the men are hangdog, Alice drives the action. Betrayed and violently angry, she’ll do whatever it takes to break them up — no matter who gets hurt. Her antics unleash Steve’s own malice. We’re in Beef territory.
At its core, Alice and Steve hinges on the way that platonic friendships are often richer and more powerful than romantic ones. It’s a fascinating subject, which may be why I found the script by Sophie Goodhart so frustrating. I wanted her to dig deeper. While the show’s got some very funny bits — Alice’s sharp-tongued mother is a blast — it’s often annoyingly lax.
If Steve really does the hair of Charli XCX, how come he’s a clueless older guy whose pop culture references are Willie Nelson and Woody Allen? If Izzy truly adores her mother as she claims, why does she keep rubbing her relationship with Steve in her mom’s face? Halfway through, one character nukes the other’s career, but this life-shattering event has no real weight: It’s barely even mentioned for the rest of the series.
That said, Alice and Steve is worth seeing for scenes like the one in which Steve spinelessly sells Izzy out or the lacerating discussion between Alice and her husband when he fully grasps that he adores a woman who views him as a reliable but dull concierge, not a man she likes hanging with. Most touching of all may be the lovely sequence when Alice, wise for once, smooths a romantic crisis between her son and his would-be girlfriend, a pair who are the show’s emblem of hope. For once, we understand why people love her.
While most viewers will find Steve more likable than Alice — the show takes pains not to make him appear predatory or creepy — the role doesn’t give Clement a whole lot to do except play variations on shambolic dread and discomfort. The show gets its galvanizing zing from Walker, a beloved star in England with amazing, luminous eyes. Her Alice is the kind of complicated, volcanic heroine that you don’t see in movies and rarely see on TV, one who shows her apocalyptic rage freely and in many different forms.
At least once in every episode, something would lead me to say, “Man, is this show a mess.” But that wasn’t a deal breaker. I kept watching. After all, life is messy, too.
How to enter your Sporty Spice era.
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Getty Images/quantic69/Olga Kurbatova/Anastasiia Zvonary/Photo Illustration by NPR
Reality dating and professional sports are not as different as you’d think.
Brittany is in her Sporty Spice era – she watched the NBA playoffs, she’s following World Cup games, and she’s watching the New York Liberty play their WNBA season. These games are daily – and so is the reality dating show Love Island. And she noticed that the two formats are not very different at all. Defector.com staff writer and co-owner Kelsey McKinney came to the same conclusion – so the two of them discuss why these games of athleticism and love can bring us together… and why they get valued differently in our culture.
For more episodes on sports and reality TV, check out:
Get rich or die trying: how sports betting is changing our love of the game
Is this the end of reality TV?
The ugly truth of America’s expensive homes
Support Public Media. Join NPR Plus.
Follow Brittany on Instagram: @bmluse
This episode was produced by Liam McBain. It was edited by Neena Pathak. Our Supervising Producer is Cher Vincent. Our Executive Producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni.
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