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The State and Practice of American Political History at the Millennium: The Nineteenth Century as a Test Case1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Joel H. Silbey
Joel H. Silbey
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Extract

These are very hard times for students of American political history. Not so long ago they were a peppy and optimistic bunch and believed that they had every reason to be. For those scholars who focused their attention on nineteenth-century politics in particular, the avalanche of revisionist work from the quantitatively and behaviorally oriented “new” political historians, beginning in the late 1950s, as well as the constant outpouring of more traditional work in the genre, had expanded the reach, and deepened the understanding, of American political life after 1800. Much the same was true for politics in other chronological eras as well. The energy and example displayed by the generation of political historians active into the 1980s underscored their major, even dominant role in the study of American history. And there were few signs that anything would check the impressive growth and increasing sophistication of their contributions to historical knowledge.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , January 1999 , pp. 1 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1999

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References

Notes

2. See, for example, the essays in Kammen, Michael, ed., The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980)Google Scholar, particularly Allan Bogue's contribution, “The New Political History in the 1970s,” 231-51. Even then, the editor noted the beginning of a decline in the place of political history in the total firmament. See the introductory remarks at ix.

3. As Paul Goodman noted, “in its recent assessment of the prospects and achievements of American history, [the important journal] Reviews in American History published no essay on the field of political history, an omission that probably escaped the notice of many readers, or if it did not, went unlamented.” Goodman, , “Putting Some Class Back into Political History: The Transformation of Political Culture and the Crisis in American Political History,” Reviews in American History 12 (03 1984): 80Google Scholar. For quite useful discussions of this situation, see Leuchtenberg, William, “The Pertinence of Political History: Reflections on the Significance of the State in America,” Journal of American History 73 (12 1986): 585–600Google Scholar; and Leff, Mark, “Revisioning U.S. Political History,” American Historical Review 100 (06 1995): 829–53Google Scholar.

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7. This is based on conversations and letters exchanged with the scholars involved.

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9. Neeley, Mark, “The Presidents Politics Made,” Journal of Policy History 8.2 (1996): 227CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is implicit in the essays of Leuchtenberg and Leff cited above, among others, and is confirmed by the discourse among political historians themselves.

10. Organized by Steven Gillon, these meetings have become a regular feature at the annual conventions of the Organization of American Historians.

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47. I have tried to do this for the Civil War era Democrats in A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1861-1868 (New York, 1978)Google Scholar.

48. The best introduction to this is Gienapp, William, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York, 1987)Google Scholar.

49. This is one of the main themes of my American Political Nation. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party appears to agree with the point as well.

50. Formisano, Ronald P., The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s (New York, 1983)Google Scholar; Altschuler, Glenn C. and Blumin, Stuart M., “Limits of Political Engagement in Antebellum America: A New Look at the Golden Age of Participatory Democracy,” Journal of American History 84 (December 1997): 855–85Google Scholar.

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54. Silbey, Joel H., “Beyond Realignment and Realignment Theory: American Political Eras, 1789-1989,”Google Scholar in Shafer, , End of Realignment? 3–23Google Scholar.

55. This is the argument of a as-yet-unpublished essay by Formisano, Ronald P., “The ‘Party Period’ Revisited.”Google Scholar

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57. Gendzel, , “Political Culture.”Google Scholar

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