Rethinking periodization? APD and the macro-history of the United States

Polity

Volumn 37, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 513-522

  Kersh, Rogan ^a  

^a SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

1960s; American political development; American revolution; New Deal; Periodization; Progressive era; Reconstruction; U.S. history

Indexed keywords

EID: 27144452655     PISSN: 00323497     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300030     Document Type: Review

References (36)

1. John Cotton, God's Promise to His Plantations (London: William Jones, 1630);
2. John Davenport, A Discourse About Civil Government (Cambridge, MA.: Samuel Green, 1663).
3. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, In Search of American Political Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 121.
4. Quoted in Albert Bushnell Hart, ed., Era of Colonization, 1492-1689 (New York: MacMillan, 1876), 114;
5. Urian Oakes, "Elegie Upon the Death of the Reverend Mr. Thomas Shepard," in Eligies and Epitaphs (Boston: Club of Odd Volumes, 1896), 44. (Spelling in this and other period quotations has been modernized.)
6. Pauline Maier, "Disjunctions in Early American History: Rejoinder," Historically Speaking 6:4 (2005): 32;
7. Adams letter to John Penn, in Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), IV: 203.
8. Compare Perry Miller: "The Puritan scholar studied all history, heathen or Christian, as an exhibition of divine wisdom, and found in the temporal unfolding of the divine plan that the entire past had been but a sort of prologue to the enactment of the New England commonwealths." The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 463.
9. David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 194.
10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men (New York: Modern Library, 2004 [1850]).
11. James Schouler, History of the United States (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1913), I: 12.
12. Jason Scott Smith, "The Strange History of the Decade," Journal of Social History 32:2 (1998): 266;
13. Albert Bushnell Hart, ed., American History Leaflets No. 3 (New York: Lovell, 1894), 3.
14. Henry Adams, History of the United States of America (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1891), VI: 123-24;
15. Arthur M. Schlesinger, New Viewpoints in American History (New York: Macmillan, 1922);
16. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Cycles of American History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 27.
17. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Paths to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 77-92.
18. Compare, for example, Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950 and 1962 eds.);
19. Richard Hofstadter, William Miller, and David Aaron, The American Republic (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1959);
20. Arthur S. Link, The Growth of American Democracy: An Interpretative History (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1968).
21. See the essays in William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). Their five principal systems generally fit into Table 1's breakpoints: starting dates are 1789, 1828, 1863, 1894, and 1932.
22. A good overview appears in the essays in Daniel Vickers, ed., A Companion to Colonial America (New York: Blackwell, 2003).
23. Cited in Martin Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 37.
24. Sklar elsewhere portrays the Progressive years in economic terms, as epitomizing the "corporate reconstruction" of American society: The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
25. Peter N. Stearns, "Social History Present and Future," Social History 37:1 (Fall 2003): 9.
26. For a list, and further details, see Rogan Kersh, "The State of American Political Development: A View from the Classroom," Perspectives on Politics 3:2 (2005).
27. Orren and Skowronek, Search for American Political Development, 16.
28. A footnote on Orren and Skowronek's ideas of order and time: well before the late-20th-century advent of APD, at least some American thinkers were attuned to these basic building blocks of periodization. In one of the spate of pieces wrestling with the shock of Darwin's evolutionary theory, a Scribner's contributor identified in 1871 "three great features" associated with the development of modern human societies, mirroring that of God's creation: "Time, order, growth, the latter including the idea of birth; they are there unmistakably" Tayler Lewis, "The One Human Race," Scribner's Monthly 3:6 (1871), 733 [emphasis in original].
29. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), esp. 264-67.
30. Sklar, United States as a Developing Country, 2.
31. Stephen Skowronek, "The Presidency and American Political Development: A Third Look," Presidential Studies Quarterly 32:4 (2002): 748.
32. John Gerring, "APD from a Methodological Point of View;" Studies in American Political Development 17:1 (2003), 101.
33. See also Orren and Skowronek, Search for American Political Development, which concludes by proposing "a matrix to array political elements of different origin in relation to one another" as an improved "way of telling time politically." (196;
34. also see 21, 185-96).
35. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), 14, 308.
36. For an overview of these and related concepts as applied in APD studies, see Orren and Skowronek, In Search of American Political Development, 87-118.